PHRED: G’day and welcome back to Harry’s World. I’m Phred.
MAXINE: And I’m Maxine.
PHRED: Right. So — we’ve been at this a little while now, Maxine. And I have to say, the more of Harry’s stuff I read, the more I reckon I’m learning how his head works. Not just what he thinks, but how he thinks. The way he circles around something, picks it up, puts it down, comes back to it from another angle.
MAXINE: Yes. It’s becoming familiar. The qualified assertions, the “my best guess” and “I assume.” The way he’ll tell you a fact and then immediately undermine it with an honest admission that it might just be a story he was told.
PHRED: That’s exactly it. And today’s piece — this is Chapter Two of his memoir, written back in May 2020 when he was eighty — it might be the purest example of that I’ve seen. It’s called “Early Years.” And it’s Harry trying to reconstruct himself from birth in Tampa, 1939, through to the summer of 1950, when his family left for England.
MAXINE: Which we’ve already visited, of course. Episode seven.
PHRED: Right. We know what happens next. The ship, the Spies girls, Purley. But this is the before. This is Harry at zero.
MAXINE: Let’s start with what he’s doing structurally. The piece is organised geographically — Tampa, then Camp Blanding during the war, then Abingdon in Virginia, then the Washington D.C. area, and finally the ship. But the real organising principle isn’t place. It’s presence and absence. His father is the gravitational centre of this essay, even when he’s not there.
PHRED: Especially when he’s not there. Harry was seventeen months old when Pearl Harbor happened. His father was a lieutenant colonel in the Florida National Guard, thirty-four years old. Called up, gone. Harry writes: “My best guess is that my father suddenly disappearing from our lives at this tender age had a strong effect on me and my sister.”
MAXINE: “My best guess.” Even about his own childhood trauma. He won’t claim certainty about something that fundamental.
PHRED: That’s the thing, isn’t it? He’s writing as a man in his eighties trying to piece together a self who existed before memory really starts. He has these shards. Nearly drowning at Camp Blanding — walking off a dock at age two or three. Someone jumped in and pulled him out.
MAXINE: Phred.
PHRED: Just a bit of atmosphere. You were saying?
MAXINE: I was about to say that the near-drowning is one of his earliest clear memories. And notice what he pairs it with: his father driving a half-track through the woods, running over small trees like a tank. “I thought it was great.” The danger and the thrill are right next to each other.
PHRED: And then the bullet. This is my favourite story in the whole piece. He’s four years old, at a motel in Orlando where his father’s back from the Pacific for training. Harry and the other kids find a bullet and try to set it off with a hammer and nail. Luckily they fail. And when his father finds them, he doesn’t shout. He doesn’t punish them. He shows them the bullet can be taken apart. He pours out the powder and lights it with a match.
MAXINE: The father as teacher rather than disciplinarian. It’s a lovely detail, and it tells us something about the kind of man George Emery Baya was. Calm. Methodical. Patient.
PHRED: “Very bright, probably considerably smarter than me. He also had a well organized mind, and life. I did not.” That’s Harry near the end of the piece, summing up the whole father-son thing in one paragraph. And it’s devastating, Maxine. Just quietly devastating.
MAXINE: It is. Because he’s not being self-pitying. He’s being accurate. He loved his father. His father loved him. But “I don’t think he ever felt he really understood me. I was very different from him in many ways.” That sentence has the weight of a whole lifetime in it.
PHRED: And you can feel Harry still working that out. At eighty. Still circling back to it.
MAXINE: Can we talk about the mother for a moment? Because we’ve met her before — episode fifteen, the chapter Harry wrote about Madge White Baya. And the very first story in this piece is the birth story. Father driving her to the hospital, mother moaning in the back seat, father says “Lie down Madge!” and she replies —
PHRED: “Lie down hell!, That’s what got me into this condition in the first place.”
MAXINE: And then Harry adds: “True or not the fact that she told this story tells something about my mother.”
PHRED: It’s the same woman we met in episode fifteen. Stubborn, funny, completely herself. Even in labour, even in the back seat of a car, she’s not taking orders. And Harry’s right — the fact that she told that story, that it became family lore, tells you everything about the household he grew up in.
MAXINE: There’s a warmth in how he writes about her here that I find moving. Even the small details — Granddaddy White putting sugar in his coffee and letting young Harry eat the remaining sugar at breakfast. “Carpet Hill” in Abingdon. It’s affectionate without being sentimental.
PHRED: Unlike the “Ahh the good old days” line.
MAXINE: Tell me.
PHRED: Right — he’s four years old at his Aunt Rosalie’s wedding reception in Tampa, July 1944. His parents told him that at that wedding he had to be told to stop hitting women on the bottom. And Harry writes: “Ahh the good old days.” With that exact irony. You can hear his eighty-year-old voice in that line, looking back at the four-year-old hooligan he was.
MAXINE: It’s a very specific tonal move. He’s not apologising, not excusing, not really laughing either. He’s just observing. “This happened. It was a different time. Here is my dry comment on it.”
PHRED: That’s Harry’s humour in a nutshell, isn’t it? He doesn’t do punchlines. He does deadpan observation and lets the absurdity do the work.
MAXINE: Let’s go to the hardest scene. The father returning from the Pacific. December 1945. Harry’s nearly six. He’s woken up at night, brought downstairs to a room full of adults, and introduced to a man he doesn’t recognise.
[SFX: samurai-sword-unsheathing]
MAXINE: Phred. What is that.
PHRED: Samurai sword unsheathing. Because that’s what his father gave him — a Japanese officer’s sword. Harry had it until about fifteen years ago. Doesn’t know what happened to it.
MAXINE: You couldn’t just say that.
PHRED: I could. But this is better.
MAXINE: For you, perhaps. For the listener, it’s a metal noise interrupting one of the most emotionally significant moments in the piece.
PHRED: The noise is the moment, Maxine. The sword is the moment. A six-year-old boy meeting his father for the first time, essentially, and the father hands him a weapon taken from the enemy. There’s something so — I don’t know — so military about that gesture. So perfectly George Emery Baya. “I don’t know who you are, son, but here’s a souvenir from the war.”
MAXINE: And Harry didn’t recognise him. Was frightened by him. That’s the part that stays with me. Five years of absence. The father goes from being an idea to being a stranger with a sword.
PHRED: And then they move to Washington. The Pentagon. And this is where Harry’s father’s world starts to shape Harry’s, even though Harry doesn’t know it yet. His father helps draft what becomes the National Security Act of 1947. Signed by President Truman. Harry’s father was there at the signing.
MAXINE: The detail that follows is so telling. Harry writes: “At that point the organization was called JAMAG — Joint American Assistance Group.” The acronym. The full name in parentheses. That precision — that’s inherited. That’s Harry getting names right the way his father would have.
PHRED: Right! And it’s exactly the same instinct we see in Harry’s own writing, isn’t it? The instructional technologist’s habit of getting the terminology exact. The parenthetical clarification. The careful distinction.
MAXINE: Though I notice he writes “I belief this badge commanded considerable respect” — he means “believe,” but the typo gives us “I belief.” Which is almost too perfect for a man who doesn’t believe in believing.
PHRED: Ha! I didn’t catch that. That’s brilliant.
MAXINE: The Washington section also has the Catholic school scene, which I think is important. First day. Harry’s never been around nuns. They seem mean and scary. It’s raining. He walks out the front door, into the rain, crying. A woman driving by picks him up, drives around until he recognises his house, takes him to his mother.
[SFX: rain-on-pavement]
MAXINE: Phred, that rain sound again?
PHRED: It’s the scene, Maxine. The rain. The crying. The walking out. He was six years old and he’d already worked out that if an institution feels wrong, you leave. You just… walk out.
MAXINE: That’s a very Phred reading of it.
PHRED: Is it wrong, though? He eventually adjusted, he says. He even won prizes for memorising the catechism. But that first reaction — the visceral rejection, the tears, the walking into the rain — that’s pure Harry. The same Harry who left the Catholic Church after intense discussions at MIT. The same Harry who questions every authority he meets.
MAXINE: I think you’re right. And I think it’s also worth noting what comes after the school scene. The Falls Church years are full of sensory detail — the icebox, the milkman, the cream at the top of the bottle, the garden hose dams, the tree climbing, the backyard fires where the adults sang army songs and “Dixie.” He’s remembering what it felt like to be a child in that particular America, just after the war.
PHRED: And then the move to Fairlington. Third, fourth, fifth grade. And the piece ends with the ship. “We left for England in the summer of 1950.”
[BED: ocean-ship-ambience]
MAXINE: Oh, not this as well.
PHRED: Just a hint. Because we know what happens next. We’ve been there. The voyage, the Spies girls, Purley, the John Fisher School. Harry at ten, about to become someone else entirely.
MAXINE: It’s a good closing line. Not dramatic. Just a statement of fact that contains an entire world of change. And it bridges directly to what we’ve already covered.
[BED: END]
PHRED: Right. So — standing questions. Who’s the audience for this piece?
MAXINE: Himself, I think. Primarily. His children and grandchildren, secondarily. He’s writing to preserve what he can of a self that barely exists in memory anymore. The amount of “I don’t remember this but my parents told me” and “I assume” and “my best guess” tells me he’s not writing for strangers who need convincing. He’s writing for people who will forgive the uncertainty.
PHRED: I reckon that’s right. And how does it connect to his other writings?
MAXINE: The thread of displacement, for one. Tampa to Abingdon to Falls Church to Fairlington to England. By the time he gets to Caracas — which we’ve also covered — he’s done this before. The new school, the new language, the not-belonging. It’s old hat by fourteen. This piece shows us where that pattern started.
PHRED: And the father thread runs all the way through, doesn’t it? The career Army colonel. Harry himself becomes a lieutenant in Germany a couple of decades later. Different war, same uniform. But Harry’s never the organised-mind type. He’s the half-track thrill-seeker, not the Pentagon drafter.
MAXINE: What did we learn about Harry today that we didn’t know?
PHRED: That he nearly drowned at two or three. That his earliest clear memories pair danger with excitement. That he didn’t recognise his own father. That the man who helped create the CIA and the modern Department of Defense was someone Harry felt fundamentally different from. Those are big things, Maxine.
MAXINE: They are. And my question for Harry would be about that samurai sword. He says he had it until about fifteen years ago and doesn’t know what happened to it. But I want to know — when he held it, as an adult, did he think about that night? The stranger coming home, the frightened child, the weapon passed across the gap? Or had it just become an object by then?
PHRED: That’s a good question. My question is about the rain. The walking out. Did he ever tell his parents why he left? Did the nuns ever ask? Or did he just absorb the lesson that you can walk away from things that feel wrong, and carry that forward into every decision he ever made?
MAXINE: What stays with you, Phred?
PHRED: The bullet, I think. The father pouring out the powder, lighting it with a match. Not yelling. Not punishing. Showing. That calm, that patience, that trust in demonstration over discipline. Harry remembers that. Of all the things he could have kept from his father, he kept that. And I reckon that’s why Harry’s a teacher, Maxine. That’s why he spent ten good years at Hofstra helping people, why he taught robotics and Python to kids at Emory & Henry. That’s the inheritance. Not the Pentagon badge. Not the sword. The match. The little flame showing you how something works instead of telling you off for getting it wrong.
MAXINE: That’s beautifully said.
PHRED: Thanks, mate.
MAXINE: What stays with me is the precision of the uncertainty. The way Harry writes “I don’t know when my father left” and “I assume this was in December” and “I don’t know what happened to it.” He’s building a memoir out of admitted gaps. And somehow that makes it more trustworthy, not less. He’s not pretending to remember more than he does. He’s honouring the fragments by presenting them exactly as they are — broken, partial, held together by inference and love.
PHRED: Right. Let’s close it out.
MAXINE: Here’s to the next archive, and to this one. Goodbye.
MAXINE: You rushed it.
PHRED: I prefer ‘kept it moving.’
[SFX: OUTRO_SHIP_HORN]
MAXINE: …A ship horn, Phred?
PHRED: They’re about to sail to England, Maxine. Seemed right.
MAXINE: It was one blast.
PHRED: One blast is all you need.