PHRED: G’day and welcome back to Harry’s World. I’m Phred.
MAXINE: And I’m Maxine.
PHRED: We’ve been at this a while now, Maxine. A month and a half of Harry’s essays, his memoir chapters, his songs, his sermons. And I’m starting to notice something. Every time we think we’ve found the centre of Harry — the philosopher, the technologist, the folk singer, the humanist preacher — he shifts. He turns out to have another room we haven’t opened.
MAXINE: That’s true. He’s not a single story. He’s a house with many doors.
PHRED: Today’s piece is one of those doors. It’s called “My Father’s Career.” Harry wrote it in May 2020, when he was eighty years old. It’s a biographical essay about his father, Colonel George Emery Baya — VMI graduate, Florida lawyer, Pacific theatre officer, Pentagon legislative counsel, Army War College attendee, commander of the Georgia Military District. And it’s not a piece Harry could have written at thirty. It took him eighty years to be able to look at his father this way.
MAXINE: Let’s start with what he’s doing. Harry is reconstructing a life from documents. He says — and I want to quote this directly — “In reviewing the papers I found last night I found that he may have remained in the U.S. until Feb of 1944.” He’s eighty. He’s doing primary-source research on his own father’s life, and he’s discovering he was wrong about basic facts he’d assumed for decades.
PHRED: That line stopped me cold. An eighty-year-old man, sitting up late with his father’s army records, realising the timeline he’d carried in his head since childhood was inaccurate. He’d always assumed his father served in the Pacific from 1941 to 1945. The records say: stateside until February 1944. The research brief called this “classic Harry” — wanting the romantic version to be true but not falsifying the record.
MAXINE: The “I believe” and “based more on stories” hedges are everywhere in this piece. “I believe he ended up on General MacArthur’s staff planning the invasion of Japan, though that is based more on stories he told me about the end of the war than anything I could find in his army records.” He wants the MacArthur connection. He’s not willing to invent it.
PHRED: That’s the whole essay, isn’t it? A son trying to pin down a father who was always slightly out of reach. Professional achievements, clear. The man himself, less so.
MAXINE: Let’s talk about the arc. George Emery Baya graduates VMI at nineteen, second in his class in Civil Engineering. Practices law in Tampa from 1930 to 1940. National Guard unit activated November 1940. Pacific theatre — New Guinea, Okinawa, Korean occupation. Then the Pentagon, 1945 to 1950, where Harry believes he was primary author of one of the major post-war military restructuring bills.
PHRED: And he has the photo to prove it. “A large photo that my father treasured showing him and a group of other officers, mostly Generals, standing behind President Harry Truman as he signed the bill.” That’s a striking image. The father, not quite a General himself, standing behind the Generals, behind the President, at the moment of signing. The photo his father treasured.
MAXINE: There’s a quiet tragedy in that photo, isn’t there? All those Generals. His father never made General. Harry names it plainly: “My father had hoped to become a general and was disappointed that he did not do so. However, the end of the war and the dominance of West Point generals worked against him in this goal.” No sentimentality. Just the fact.
PHRED: But here’s what struck me most. The choice that shaped where Harry lived as a boy — England, Monterey, Caracas, Atlanta — was a choice his father made not for ambition but for family. He was offered Korea. A hardship tour, no family. He’d have been a General. He turned it down. “He did not want to be separated from us, or mother, for two or three years at this point in his life.”
MAXINE: That’s the pivot of the whole piece, Phred. The father’s career was a series of attractive assignments accepted one after another — “he had never intended to be a career army officer” — and the one that mattered most for Harry’s life was the one he turned down. Venezuela instead of Korea. Monterey instead of the Pentagon pipeline. Caracas instead of the general’s star.
PHRED: And there’s a lovely moment where Harry finally sees himself in the story. “My father extended his tour in Caracas by six months, mainly, I think, so that I could finish my last year of high school there.” That’s the only place in the essay where Harry attributes a motive to his father that is directly about him. The rest is reconstructed from papers and letters. That one — “mainly, I think, so that I could finish my last year of high school” — comes from belief, not documentation.
MAXINE: It lands harder because of that. The whole essay is dry, factual, chronological. Names, dates, postings. And then — that one warm guess.
PHRED: Now, we need to talk about how this connects to pieces we’ve already covered. Episode 25 — Chapter Two, “Early Years.” We read about Harry being woken up at Carpet Hill and brought downstairs to meet a stranger who turned out to be his father, back from the Pacific in December 1945. Harry was frightened. Didn’t recognise him. The father gave him a Japanese officer’s samurai sword. Today we read that same man’s career from the other end — Harry at eighty, doing research, trying to understand a father he never really knew.
MAXINE: And Episode 20 — Monterey. We covered it as a corridor, a liminal space between England and Caracas. Today we learn it wasn’t a corridor for Harry’s father. It was a price. Six months learning Spanish at the Army Language School, the cost of choosing Venezuela over Korea. The Monterey months were the price of staying with his family.
PHRED: Episode 21 — Caracas. Harry wrote about it as “the City of Eternal Spring,” a teenager’s paradise. Today we see it from his father’s angle: another assignment, accepted because it was interesting, extended by six months so his son could graduate. The father’s career was a series of “attractive” assignments that just happened to shape Harry’s life.
MAXINE: And Episode 32 — Summer Jobs. Harry driving from Atlanta to South Carolina for summer work, 1961 and 1962, while his father commanded the Georgia Military District. In his own memoir, Harry mentions the summer jobs but not the command stripes — “commander’s green stripes” and the General Staff badge, “treated with great respect on sight when in uniform.”
PHRED: That’s the piece, isn’t it? Parallel lives. The father who was “somewhat an intellectual and, like me, had few people he could have ‘intellectual’ discussion with.” Harry names the kinship at the very end — the shared loneliness of smart men in worlds that don’t quite fit them. But it’s the “like me” that hurts. He’s eighty years old, still mapping himself onto a father he never fully knew.
MAXINE: Let’s talk about voice. This is not Harry the philosopher, with his “belief versus assumption” framework. This is not Harry the technologist, sketching ant colonies on grids. This is Harry the biographer — dry, chronological, occasionally repetitive. He tells us his father’s birthdate twice. He loops back to the VMI timeline. It’s not polished prose. It feels like notes toward understanding.
PHRED: And that’s what makes it honest. He doesn’t know how to end it. The actual ending — “In spite of being a little dry and what you would expect from a Colonel in the army, my father was basically a happy person and quite social. He was somewhat an intellectual and, like me, had few people he could have ‘intellectual’ discussion with” — it just stops. Then he drops in links to a letter and a certificate and that is that. No conclusion. No lesson. Just the facts, and the one sentence where he claims kinship, and then silence.
MAXINE: The absence of a proper ending is the ending. Harry can’t sum up his father because he never fully knew him. The essay peters out because the relationship did.
PHRED: Now — standing questions. Who was the audience? I think Harry wrote this for himself, primarily. And for his descendants — the same people he’s been building the memoir for all along. But also, maybe, for his father. A belated attempt to see the man clearly.
MAXINE: How does it connect to his other writings? There’s a pattern here of Harry measuring himself against fathers and father figures. The biological father. Buckminster Fuller, who gave him the honesty commitment. The professors at MIT. Even General Lowery, who mentored his father and whom Harry met as a young man. Harry keeps finding men to learn from — and testing himself against them.
PHRED: What did we learn about Harry that we didn’t know? He carries a specific melancholy around his father — not grief, exactly, but a sense of missed connection. “I think my father was very bright, probably considerably smarter than me. He also had a well organised mind, and life. I did not… I don’t think he ever felt he really understood me.” We read that in Chapter Two. Today we see the adult Harry still circling that same absence, still doing research at eighty hoping the papers will tell him something the man never did.
MAXINE: And our question for Harry? Mine is this: You found that letter your father wrote your mother — the “wonderful letter” where he said he’d stay in the Army if he could be with his family. Did you ever find a letter he wrote about you? About what he thought of his son, the MIT student, the future programmer, the man who would leave the Catholic church and marry outside it and build his own life so differently from anything the Colonel would have planned?
PHRED: My question is simpler. You say your father shared your intellectual loneliness — few people he could really talk ideas with. Did you ever try to be that person for him? Did you ever sit down with the Colonel and talk about the world, about technology, about whether God exists? Or was the gap too wide by the time you were old enough to try?
MAXINE: What stays with me, Phred, is the quietness of this piece. Harry has written about ecstasy and consciousness and the future of the human race. Here he’s just trying to get the dates right. And somehow the smallness of the ambition makes it more moving. An old man, late at night, sorting his father’s papers, correcting his own assumptions. That’s the whole thing.
PHRED: What stays with me is that photo. The father standing behind Truman, behind the Generals, at the signing of the bill. All those years of service, all that work, and what he treasured was proof that he’d been in the room. Harry treasures the photo too — it’s in the essay. Both of them, father and son, holding onto the same evidence that the life mattered.
MAXINE: Shall we?
PHRED: Let’s sign off before I explain myself again. Goodbye.
MAXINE: Safe passage, listeners.
PHRED: Safe passage.
[SFX: OUTRO_MILITARY_TAPS]
MAXINE: Was that a bugle?
PHRED: Taps, Maxine. A single bugle. For the Colonel.
MAXINE: That was actually appropriate.
PHRED: I can do appropriate.
MAXINE: No you can’t. That was a fluke.
PHRED: I’ll take it.