IN LATE SUMMER 1918, WEB ARRIVED IN DALLAS, ALREADY HOME TO 150,000, its central area packed with brick buildings, mostly five stories tall, and church steeples. There were none of the open lots Web had been used to in Quanah. Trolley cars screeched past horse-drawn wagons, while autos and trucks clamored on paved streets lined with curbs and sidewalks. Electric signs and streetlights kept the night alive—a new world for Web.
Sometime after he arrived, Web seems to have wanted a new name, because soon he would be called Griff (likely because that’s what he wanted), but Quanah folks, and relatives, would continue to call him Web.
Within days, word reached him that his friend Sydney Good from Quanah had died at El Paso’s Fort Bliss, which was the Army’s cavalry center and a rail hub for soldiers returning from Europe. Flu had broken out the prior spring and was now spreading to pig farms and converting into a human pandemic, with a rapid course, some victims dying within hours of contracting it.
Griff rode the train back home to Quanah for the funeral. Graveside at Memorial Park Cemetery, on its windy hill with a few scattered trees along the road, Griffiths and Goods and a large group of Quanah friends watched Sydney’s casket lowered into a plot near the grave of Alline, Sydney’s mother, who had died when he was four.
Back in Dallas, James Wilson oriented Griff to his job as clerk at the Wilsons’ retail grocery store. Griff got settled in the Wilson home as well. The Wilsons had been long-standing friends of Griff’s parents and watched over him but likely gave him more latitude than they had given their own children. He likely had his own room in their house to be alone, read, and study, and he would have been able to explore the city. He probably missed his family but would have been glad to not have to devote time to caring for his siblings, and he surely wouldn’t have missed the extra harvest work required of Quanah children and mothers that fall, with manpower to harvest the cotton having been absorbed by the war.
Web’s work at the store and school filled his days. Time off wasn’t in the cards. He would have ridden buses and the noisy streetcars, but he probably did a lot of walking between home, the store, and school. Trucks and autos were everywhere and were breaking down in the street and clogging traffic amid the dwindling number of horse-drawn wagons and riders, signs of continuing transition, and the grime of congestion contrasted with Quanah’s dust and wind and open horizons.
That fall, he started twelfth grade at Bryan Street High School, located in a four-story rectangular brick building downtown that was two to three times the size of Quanah’s Hardeman County courthouse, the biggest building Griff had seen up close until then. He began with English, geometry and trigonometry, bookkeeping, military science, and physics and inorganic chemistry, both with a laboratory component.
About this time, the influenza pandemic hit Dallas. Newspapers reported cases in two counties by early September. In Dallas, there were calls to ban gatherings, but pressure mounted to save the September 28 Liberty Loan parade, in which five thousand civilians and 2,500 enlisted men paraded down South Harwood Street to launch the government’s fourth campaign to sell Liberty bonds for the war effort. The gathering was good for the campaign but bad for public health. On October 3, Dallas had 119 reported influenza cases and one death. By October 9, there were one thousand. On the tenth, all Dallas theaters, playhouses, and other places of public amusement were ordered closed, and on the twelfth all public and private schools were closed, by which time the total number of cases had exceeded 2,700, the pandemic peaking in the fall, but new cases continuing to arise into winter and spring.
On October 31, the schools reopened.
Before news of the November 11 armistice reached Dallas, Griff had longed to join the military but knew that for him World War I had come too early. Still, he was determined to be ready for the next war. Finally, availing himself of the Junior ROTC cadet training at his new school, he was able to do something about it. When he put on his cadet uniform as Private Griffith of Company B, with high black collar over white shirt and solid vertical stripe down his chest, his extraordinary good looks showed as never before. He already stood at six feet, one inch tall, and he was handsome with his short, curly hair, dark eyebrows, broad forehead, and pronounced chin, with the beginning of what would become a distinctive dimple; yet his complexion still reflected a boyish softness.
Even without his family, Griff thrived in Dallas, keeping busy at the store and school—while at the store in Quanah Griff’s brothers took up the slack caused by his absence. Later in his first year at Bryan Street High, and in the half year that followed, Griff’s studies included Spanish, civics, and economics, and he shone in geometry, physics, military science, and bookkeeping.
During the year, he rode the train south to College Station, two-thirds of the way to Houston, to visit his cousin Orville (F. O. Jr.) at Texas A&M and to see what life might be like as an Aggie in the Corps of Cadets—the next step after Junior ROTC—if he were to matriculate there. Orville was three years older than Griff and had F. O. Sr.’s prominent forehead, closely trimmed hair, but his thicker eyebrows framed the focused, no-nonsense look he shared with this entrepreneurial father. Orville showed Griff around campus, with its line of stone buildings surrounding its Greek-style domed administration building, paneled halls, huge classrooms, dining halls, cavalry barns, and training and parade fields. It had to have made a strong impression on Griff.
Back in Dallas at Bryan Street High, Griff found time for football practice and made the Wolf Pack team, at left tackle for the 1919 season.
After fifteen months at Bryan, Griff’s demeanor had developed a seriousness, a focus, and a sense of concentration that distinguished him.
On a Friday in January 1920, Griff graduated from Bryan Street High School, and on the following Monday he enrolled at A&M, intending to major in agriculture, rounding out his course schedule with classes in chemistry, rhetoric, composition, and literature. Upon matriculation, however, the majority of his time was spent as an ROTC Company D cadet, among the school’s mile-wide, open-grass parade grounds and training woods. Drills included calisthenics, escort to the colors, pitching tents, bayonet practice, and mapmaking. Signal corps maneuvers included the military’s new use of radio, map reading, and telegraph practice. Artillery drills including marching with rolling caissons, fording rivers with mobile cannons, and firing practice. And parade formation and cavalry drills included work with sabers, saddling instruction, and equestrian class.
Griff also continued in football, this time as one of twenty-eight reserves on A&M’s team, which was Southwest Conference cochampion (with Texas) in 1920, never scored upon, aggregating a score of 275–0 in eleven games.
He studied at A&M for twenty months and in the spring of 1921 got himself nominated to the United States Military Academy at West Point by Eugene Black, US congressman for East Texas’s First District and a teacher, lawyer, and wholesale grocer. Griff was soon appointed to West Point without examination by James Young, US congressman from Texas’s Third District and a lawyer from Kaufman, where Griff’s father had briefly farmed.
Griff entered the academy in July, and within weeks he had written to his family that he was having the time of his life and, being “initiated” as a plebe, could scarcely sit down, but he knew he would get over it, and the next year, he wrote, he would be as bad as those who were hazing him. He continued to write his family, and the next January, Griff’s ten-year-old sister Tiny wrote with news: an electrical fire had broken out in the family’s Quanah store and burned it to the ground. By then, his father had parted ways with F. O., and with insurance proceeds from the fire, he began his replacement venture: a novel kind of self-service retail grocery in which customers entered through a turnstile, picked out their own items, and took them to the checkout counter themselves. Welborn had opened in Quanah one of the first franchises of the new Piggly Wiggly chain.
Though Griff apparently remained close with the family through letters, he rarely saw them. Over the summers of his undergrad years, he remained on the East Coast, living in Larchmont, New York, with his uncle Tex Smith, who had moved with his wife to suburban Westchester County from Temple, Texas, to become partner in the New York engineering firm Sanderson & Porter, which handled large projects like the Pennsylvania Railroad tunnels. Each summer Griff worked in the company’s New York office for Leslie Myer, the man in charge of construction of the Hoover Dam.
In the fall of 1923, Griff began his third year at West Point, by which point he’d been promoted to lieutenant, having earned his strongest ratings in “military bearing” and leadership. Every year he was rising in class rank among his 270 fellow cadets, excelling most in athletics. In fact, over his four years as a cadet, sports would consume most of Griff’s nonacademic time: He played four years of football as an all-American and was on the wrestling team for three, and he played lacrosse, ran track, and joined the rifle-sharpshooting and pistol-marksmanship teams. In wrestling, he won an individual championship in his second year, in the unlimited-weight class, in which he “threw” a fellow named Barry, of Yale, the reigning intercollegiate champion. In his senior year, with Griff as offensive tackle, the football team suffered only one defeat all season—thirteen to seven, to Knute Rockne’s Four Horsemen of Notre Dame, allowing them a single touchdown—and they tied Yale and Columbia, beat Florida by a touchdown, and won four additional shutouts.
Griff’s West Point yearbook extolled his athletic record, and pictured is a handsome young man with eye-catching curly hair noted for his work on “Beast Detail” hazing underclassmen and his propensity for action: “When the game ahead calls for a good scrap and furnishes a thrill, there you will find Griff.”
All this exercise and outdoorsmanship had their effect, and Griff’s height, build, and magazine-cover face landed him a part as an extra in a Hollywood movie, Classmates, filmed partly at West Point. It was screened in February 1925 at Quanah’s Texan theater.
By early 1925, Welborn Sr. was feeling the effects of Quanah’s increasing cost of living. For a year, he had cut business costs where he could, eliminating delivery services and cutting expenses and prices where possible. But now two locals, J. G. Wilkerson and Tom Mitchell, were opening a new store in town—part of the chain of Massie-Cope M System Food Stores—where they sold groceries and meat and offered to take their customers’ orders by phone and include delivery. By September, Welborn sold the store and, five months later, the family house, and the family moved back to Temple, where he opened several M System Food Stores of his own. Here were better schools and nearby colleges for the children, and Lula was back home, but she would not be so active in club or church work now, because she helped part time in the stores’ office.
After graduating in June 1925, Griff obtained leave and managed a trip home to Quanah before he was to report for duty in August. What with the Griffith family’s impending move to Temple, this would mark his last extended visit in Quanah.
Griff volunteered for paratrooper training, but on arrival for duty at San Antonio’s Brooks Field, he was rejected as too tall. So he opted to take infantry training at Fort Benning instead.
Once in Georgia, Griff met Alice Torrey, daughter of Major Daniel H. Torrey, a lawyer and Fort Benning adjutant general whose father and maternal grandfather had also been infantry officers and West Pointers. Alice’s spirit and energy caught Griff’s attention. At West Point, Griff had focused on athletics, weapons, and achievements, but now it was perhaps time to expand his circle of interests to include women. There were certainly worse picks than Alice: her father could advance Griff’s career, and Griff and Alice made a startlingly good-looking couple. His former classmates had long teased him that his looks would get him lassoed by a woman before long, and why not by petite, pretty Alice, who with her movie-star appeal and dyed-blonde hair could have been mistaken for Mary Pickford? The couple married in 1929 at Fort Benning, the bride wearing a Gatsby-style gown complemented by a Juliet cap and twelve-foot-long veil that would have been Hollywood standard fare, the groom dressed in gold-trimmed ceremonial uniform, complete with saber and white gloves.
The same year, the statuesque Griff was tapped as the Army’s photo model to display its newest postwar uniforms for field, dress, and work.
Soon Griff was transferred for more infantry training, first to Fort Leavenworth, near Kansas City, and then to Fort Leonard Wood, in the Ozarks, north of Springfield. Then it was on to Jefferson Barracks, near Saint Louis. Alice accompanied him on his transfers until she became pregnant, during which time she moved in with her parents, who were then living at Fort Leavenworth, where the major was serving as adjutant. Griff and Alice’s daughter was born in 1931. They named her Alice.
But Griff’s joy was cut short when in September of that year his mother was injured in a rollover auto accident near Temple. She died four days later, at the age of fifty-five. Her funeral took place in Temple, but it is not clear whether Griff was able to attend. By mid-1931, he had been reassigned to serve as a first lieutenant and military observer with the Thirty-First Infantry in the Philippines. The instruction he would receive there was considered the best overseas training available for any Army officer, and selection as an observer reflected recognition of Griff’s talent and intellect, and he must have seen both for the opportunity they afforded.
And so in early July Griff, Alice, and the baby sailed from New York, first with a stop in San Francisco, and then on to Manila, along with fifty other officers, many with their own families. Their accommodations aboard the USS Republic were first rate, as the six-hundred-foot-long troopship had before been a North Atlantic passenger liner with United States Lines. In the Philippines, Griff was assigned to Manila’s Fort McKinley and then to Fort Stotsenburg, fifty-plus miles north, where his primary function was to engage in military-defense planning in case of Japanese attack.
In fact, soon after the Griffiths arrived in Manila, Japanese troops invaded China, and on February 1, 1932, General MacArthur ordered Griff’s regiment to deploy within four days by sea on the USAT Chaumont to guard the Shanghai International Settlement. Griff was appointed provost marshal, head of the military police. The Thirty-First were to serve as peacekeepers, augmenting the security force of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps at a time when the SVC was protecting the settlement in the face of fighting between Japanese and Chinese troops, and also to provide reinforcements for the Fourth Marine Regiment and a British force.
Although adjacent parts of Shanghai were demolished by fighting between Japanese and Chinese troops, the International Settlement remained an island of security. By April, Griff and other officers had sent for their families to come from Manila by commercial liner and had billeted them at the Cathay Mansion, a hotel in the International Settlement. There the children attended the American mission school, and the women shopped together on Shanghai’s renowned market streets. A Chinese caretaker named Amah Le Su cared for little Alice.
In July, when the crisis had passed, Griff and his family returned by ship to the Philippines with the full regiment. Griff and Alice again took up residence at Fort McKinley. Alice and Griff engaged a Philippine nurse for little Alice, to whom she became attached. But the household peace was not to last. Griff and Alice had begun to fight, and Alice was growing increasingly unhappy in her marriage. Alice was a sociable woman, with little interest in domestic life, whereas Griff’s predominant trait was seriousness: it was becoming increasingly clear that the couple was a mismatch.
A month later, Major Torrey and his wife sailed from New York to Manila for a long stay and visited Griff and Alice. This stay likely afforded the opportunity for private talks with their daughter, because, by November, Alice had left Griff for the first time. Soon she returned, however. She told her parents that Griff had promised to be a model husband if she would only come back, but “no sooner would I come back than he would start all this again.”
Alice left again, with the baby, to return stateside, where she took up residence in Reno. In the 1930s, Nevada’s divorce laws were more liberal than the rest of the country’s, and many women moved there, where, after establishing a six-week residency, they could apply for divorce and be almost assured of getting it. With his own thirty-second birthday approaching, Griff took stock of his life thus far. In a letter to his father, he revealed his growing disillusionment, wondering “if the Army is worth it all. It’s a hell of a life in some ways but in others all I could ask.”
Griff felt isolated and was greatly disappointed over Alice’s threat to divorce him. Welborn Sr. grew concerned enough over his brokenhearted son that he urged Griff’s youngest sister, Tiny, to travel to Manila to be with her brother. “You’ve got to go,” Welborn Sr. said, worrying his son might be distraught enough to take his own life.
Tiny came to live with Griff in Manila soon after Alice left, to keep house for him. Tiny loved life in Manila, driving her own car through the streets of the old city, with walled gardens alive with rose-purple rhododendrons and large China roses, and down Dewey Boulevard though the American Ermita district, with the bells of Santo Domingo Church pealing and traffic at a near standstill, buses competing with taxis, trucks, cars, jeeps, and pony carts, no one in a hurry. She took her first office job there, working as a secretary for a Mr. Kemp, a politician, and after a while resigned before his scheduled time away for the hot weather months. With his recommendation, she landed a teaching job at the American Business School, attended by most of the “Army girls”—wives, daughters, and followers of stationed military men.
Tiny’s sibling companionship cheered Griff, but he was still somewhat unsettled: After almost two years, he was finding defense planning boring, and so, when the opportunity arose, he took over management of the Army and Navy Club, an assignment Tiny considered a “lifesaver” for her struggling brother. The club, housed in an old Spanish-style two-story building located on Manila Bay, operated its own restaurant, several bars, a reading room, a bowling alley, a swimming pool, and tennis courts. The work did not excite Griff, but at least it kept him busy—especially in the spring of 1934, in the weeks leading up to departure of the American fleet for China, where it was to stay until the fall, and when most other Americans were leaving for the hot season. Tiny was busy, too: During that time, she had a date almost every night for four weeks straight. While in Manila she planned to find a husband among the American officers stationed there.
Griff enjoyed having Tiny stay with him. They got along surprisingly well. When Tiny started getting serious with one of her beaux, Charles DeKay—nicknamed “Count,” a naval officer whom she would eventually marry—Griff got a kick out of teasing his sister about how many dates she went on with other officers while Count was off on a Navy cruise, calling them her “affairs.” But his teasing aside, he was learning at lot from his kid sister, to his surprise. She was showing him, undoubtedly, that his family was his foundation of support, even though he would spend most of his adult life away from them.
Alice, meanwhile, had established residence in Reno with the baby, supported by her parents, and in November 1933 had sued for divorce. She had testified, without cross-examination, that Griff had treated her with extreme cruelty since the earliest months of their marriage. He had insisted that everything be done his way and ruled with an ungovernable temper. He was physically violent all during their four years of marriage—more than ten times—twisting her arm, knocking her down, even breaking one of her teeth.
Griff had received his copy of the divorce complaint while on assignment abroad, but he couldn’t appear in court. She won the divorce and custody of the baby. He would never recognize the Reno divorce as valid.
In late 1934, Griff was transferred back to Shanghai, and late that year Tiny married Count DeKay in Manila and the following February moved back to the States, setting up home in Washington, D.C. Griff served for nine months as provost marshal in charge of the military police and lived in an Americanized part of Shanghai. But he quickly grew bored with the assignment and decided he was ready to return to the United States, where he would be faced with rebuilding his life.
But before boarding his return ship to San Francisco, he was ready for his next adventure.