ON JULY 8, GRIFF BOARDED THE USAT US GRANT, AND THREE WEEKS later he arrived in San Francisco and boarded a train to Temple, Texas, to visit his father and other family. By then, Welborn Sr. was living in the family house in Temple with only Philip, Griff’s twenty-eight-year-old brother. Lawrence and his sisters had all married. At the time, Welborn Sr. and Philip operated three different M System Food Stores, two in Temple and one eleven miles southwest, in Belton, halfway between Temple and Salado, the Griffiths’ ancestral home.
During his stay, Griff visited Philip at one of the Temple stores. Philip would stand at the scale in the central rectangular island of counters in the store fronted by a glass display case that offered sausages, cheeses, and cigars. Two other employees in white aprons worked the floor, assembling orders for customers, pulling canned goods from shelves on the left, dairy from the refrigerated display in the back, bulk items and tools from the back, and produce from wire bins in the front. Philip—in his white shirt, tie, and white apron—weighed and tallied. Since the time Griff had been working in the family’s old Quanah store, advances in packaging and distribution had streamlined such stores, now affording the customer a broad selection and swift special ordering of containers, light bulbs, canning supplies, and just about any other goods one might want in a home kitchen.
Welborn Sr., now sixty-seven, his blond hair thinning and showing more of his already-high forehead, was still taller and thinner than Griff. He usually listened and offered advice to his son. The visit afforded the two opportunities for talks, perhaps sitting in the A-frame swing Welborn Sr. had brought from Quanah, with his dog, Rosa, nearby. Griff may have brought up his marital strife, his efforts to cultivate a relationship with little Alice, and his frustrations with the lack of opportunity for advancement in the Army. Welborn Sr., then seven years a widower, would have been enjoying his work with Philip and relished living so nearby his married daughter and grandchildren. He also loved dogs; in Temple, he always owned either a fox terrier or a Scottie and had named every one of them Rosa, in honor of John R. Good’s wife.
Soon following the visit, Griff reported to Fort Frances E. Warren, adjoining Cheyenne, Wyoming, along Crow Creek. The post–Civil War fort had been a major Army cavalry post and, in World War I, a mobilization center for artillery and cavalry training, with twenty thousand horses in brick stables, five parade grounds, barracks, officer housing, and a hospital. By 1916, it was the Army’s largest cavalry post in the United States, but after the war, all cavalry had left, and by Griff’s time it had become an infantry post. Griff moved into one of the several dozen officer’s houses arranged in a circle surrounded by shaded lawns, and he set to work training infantry.
The following year, in 1936, he transferred to the Pole Mountain Target and Maneuver Area, a sixty-two-thousand-acre site east of Laramie, where he acquired further training, including in artillery and chemical warfare and a field officers’ course. Little did Griff know that the field-officer training in Wyoming would be so important to him. The repetition of the drills he and his fellow soldiers performed instilled muscle memory. He enjoyed his time there, much of it in forests, open plains, and mountains covered with trees and rock formations with scenic views, hunting, and riding. While stationed there, he learned fly-fishing. Several times over the Wyoming summers he went down to Laramie to buy fishing tackle, and on those trips he paid visits to the mother of his brother-in-law, Tiny’s husband, Count DeKay, who had been reared in Laramie.
By 1938, Welborn Sr. had contracted Parkinson’s disease. His muscles had become so stiff that in bed he could be propped into a sitting position and would stay that way with no danger of falling. Philip gradually took over the stores and within a few years would sell them.
Griff’s life at Pole Mountain, although enjoyable in summer and fall, might have taken on a be-careful-what-you-wish-for element, with the north-plains winters and never-arriving spring. Eventually, he questioned whether he was chasing some unattainable dream. The Wyoming wind and snow probably drove him to wonder what to do next and question whether to go on with his military career. In the difficult interwar years in the Army, with limited budgets, officers with personal drive like Griff’s—when confronted with lack of advancement, moribund assignments, and endless relocation—reached their end. He pondered resigning in order to pursue another career, his patience for action and for some bigger challenge or purpose nearly exhausted.
On leave, Griff went to Virginia to see little Alice, who was living with her mother and grandparents, Major Torrey and his wife. Griff still refused to recognize the Reno divorce as valid and was fed up with his separation from his daughter, so he sued little Alice’s mother in court in Alexandria and won the right to see his daughter at reasonable times and to have her with him for three months a year, so long as he would arrange transportation and increase monthly child care payments from $25 to $35.
Filing suit against Alice Torrey, daughter of a major from a family of military officers, took guts. Griff would have had to ponder the risks to his career before confronting her, but he pressed his case and won.
In mid-1938, Count DeKay, who had been living with his wife, Tiny, in Washington, D.C., landed an assignment as military attaché in Paris and would soon be leaving with Griff’s little sister for France. So Griff took the train from Cheyenne to see them off, taking the opportunity to see little Alice, then aged seven and living with the Torreys nearby. When Griff arrived, Tiny and Count were spending a long weekend at the D.C. home of Count’s uncle, Emory Land, known to his family as Uncle Jerry. Land was a Navy man, a recently retired vice admiral and naval architect who had made contributions to submarine design and who in February 1938 had become chairman of the US Maritime Commission. Griff joined them for part of the weekend, including a Chevy Chase Country Club party hosted by Jerry’s wife, Betty. Over that period, Griff likely talked with Uncle Jerry about career opportunities in the defense industry and government.
Griff picked little Alice up at her grandparents’ home to spend the day with her while Tiny, Count, and the Lands attended a Senators– Red Sox ball game. The next day, Tiny and Count moved out of their rented house, and Griff and Count loaded the DeKays’ car with their Europe-bound luggage and drove from Washington to the home of Griff and Tiny’s uncle Tex and his wife, Edie, in Larchmont, New York, where Griff had lived during his West Point summers. Tiny accompanied Alice on the train to New York, reaching Larchmont by late afternoon. For Tiny, it was a sad time to be leaving her family behind in the United States. On the train, Alice read the funny papers to her aunt to keep Tiny from crying.
Count and Griff arrived in the afternoon in time to drink one of Tex’s mint juleps before dinner. When Alice and Tiny arrived, Alice over-flowed with excitement about their house, moving from room to room, inspecting and commenting. The adults got a kick out of it. The next day, Sunday, the weather having turned hot, Alice swam at the Westchester Club with other neighborhood children. In the evening, she stayed with the maid while the adults attended a dinner party. The next day, Edie, Griff, Alice, and Tiny swam together in the Long Island Sound at a beach club, and then Tiny and Alice took a boat ride into the city to the Battery and saw the aquarium and construction under way for the World’s Fair, returning by boat late in the afternoon.
Griff likely talked with his uncle Tex about some career opportunities, or even about perhaps working again for Leslie Myer—who had been the contractor in charge of the Hoover Dam construction, for whom Griff had worked during his West Point summers.
Griff and Count drove Count’s car the next day into the city to leave it to be loaded on the ship for Europe, and Tex hosted a reunion luncheon party at a downtown club with several of Count’s Harvard classmates. Griff went to meet with Leslie Myer. That night, back in Larchmont at a barbecue on Tex’s terrace, Griff probably consulted again with Tex about Myer and job prospects. The next day in New York, Tiny and Count boarded the SS President Roosevelt, seen off by everyone, including some friends they had known at Fort McKinley in Manila. Griff brought Alice to the dock an hour before sailing to see the ship, which fascinated her.
Tiny received three boxes of flowers and several corsages for the send-off, rendering her quite emotional, but she was nothing but happy with the case of Folger’s coffee that their brother Philip had sent from Temple. Count locked it in the trunk of their car in the hold; they would wait to savor it in France.
Griff took Alice to see the sights in New York. They enjoyed the city together—everyone busy, determined to get some place, do something, the aural tapestry of the city, the country clubs and dinner parties, with smells of cigars and mint juleps. They returned to Washington by train. While they were together, Griff told her how discontented he was with the Army.
Within a month, Griff and the rest of the family were receiving Tiny’s letters from Paris. Upon arrival they’d had to place their furniture in storage and were staying temporarily in a friend’s Paris apartment, unable to get settled until they could resolve with the War Department an outstanding issue regarding Count’s assignment.
Tiny and Count were aware that Europe was tense, but she had also heard from neighbors that many French believed Chamberlain’s visit to Hitler would circumvent war. She had seen about her few signs of preparation for war. But she had seen swarms of reserve officers—just activated for service—surrounding the military academy near the Paris apartment where she and Count were staying. And she had learned from neighbors that government trucks were delivering piles of sand to every house in Paris to be spread four inches deep on their attic floors as a precaution against fires from bombing.
One Sunday afternoon in September 1938, Tiny and Count took a drive from Paris to Chartres to see the famous cathedral. They were eager to explore Paris and its surrounding sights, even though they could sense the fears of war in the air. They drove from Paris the sixty miles to Chartres with another American couple, Dottie and Knight Pryor. Tiny would describe their excursion in a letter to her family—one of many she sent them. In it, she asked that copies again be distributed to her siblings, including Griff.
The foursome approached Chartres at the end of their drive from Paris, and Tiny could see the cathedral towering on the top of its hill in the middle of the city.
Her first glimpse of the cathedral’s west facade transformed her visit into a daydream. She entered the archway, pushed open the ancient, nut-brown wooden door, and stepped into the dark, wood-paneled entryway. She gave a tug on the inner wooden door, pulled aside the plum-purple curtain, and made contact with the cathedral’s sweeping, timeworn, almond-brown stone floor and felt the vastness of the nave. The darkness enveloped her. She mused in her letter that she was transported by the windows. They exerted an unforeseen sway on her, the beginning of what for Tiny was a four-hour visit to what must have seemed a new and contrasting space in the fresh old-world environment she was already loving so much after only a short first few weeks in France.
In the cathedral, she felt the cool, damp air brush against her face, in a hush of quiet, accompanied by the sliding of shoes on the stone and the echo of people’s murmurs, stirred by the rustling of wooden chairs being arranged for the upcoming late-afternoon Mass and the occasional drone of a biplane taking off from the air base a mile north.
The windows were like shoots of strangely dusky-yet-rich, gleaming, and colorful stalks of flowers rising upward. And there were no pews but instead a collection of hundreds of uniform wooden chairs. Men and boys in robes were arranging the chairs in rows facing the altar but parted them around a circular gap, leaving a space at the west end for a circular pattern of darker polished-stone channels inlaid in the lighter smoothly polished cathedral floor in what formed a labyrinth or maze forty feet in diameter.
Tiny lingered for four hours inside the cathedral with her husband and companions. She reported that she sat through the entire Sunday late-afternoon Mass, conducted in a language she could not understand.
The Mass began with the plaintive ring of a triangle, and small bells signaled the start and the transitions between portions of the service. Her eyes were drawn by the reds and clarets of the priests’ robes encrusted with gold trim, and in the hall the colored rays of sun penetrating the windows illuminated the believers. She noted the reverberation of the priests’ voices reading from scripture, the sway back and forth between the congregation’s responsive chants, the smell of fresh incense above the altar and in the aisles as priests passed, the congregation sitting, then standing, then kneeling.
Tiny’s description of her excursion to Chartres reflects her empathic, respectful enthusiasm for the French. She wrote, “Perhaps what has impressed me most about France is not the people, the ancient beautiful buildings, their artistic good taste in clothes, their fondness of children, their courteous treatment of foreigners, their universal happiness, nor their leisurely pace, but it is their gardens! . . . Ingenious use of every plot of ground to make something beautiful of it. . . . All this is what makes me love being alive and being here.” Tiny’s letter revealed the passion her visit to Charters Cathedral seems to have sparked.
That Sunday afternoon Mass would be the last at the cathedral for months.
Back stateside, Griff was finding that, despite his disenchantment with the US Army, his career achievements thus far had placed him in a select group of Regular Army captains, and in mid-1938 he was selected to attend the same Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, from which his former father-in-law had graduated. In September of that year, Griff moved into the base’s old “beehive” three-story red-brick barracks. Leavenworth was still a quiet, slow-paced post reflective of the “old” Army, with Griff’s barracks facing the polo field near shaded Pope Avenue arched by elm trees. Griff would later see Leavenworth in much busier times.
The school maintained a traditional aura for its students—who were a select group of Regular Army majors and captains with superior records—and like most, Griff probably felt a sense of fraternity with generations of graduates who over a century had come before him. The course would be a year of instruction on combat orders, field engineering, leadership and psychology, military history, “equitation” (horseback riding), methods of training strategy, tactics, planning, and troop leading—all designed to produce commanders and staff officers for general staff duty.
Leavenworth students felt pride in their selection. Griff likely felt that thrill along with them. Most also felt trepidation that they might not measure up—a mixed feeling of satisfaction mingled with uneasiness. The school gave its students a status and a conviction that they were important and part of a great ongoing concern. Griff probably shared that sense of accomplishment and of fitting into the larger institution that the Army represented.
Griff’s study and training at Leavenworth with his classmate officers consisted of classes, problem-solving maneuvers, and reading an enormity of study material, maps, and overlays. A typical day would start with rising before daylight, a shower, a shave, and a dash to breakfast, followed by a short time to glance over an unfinished assignment. Students would carry a full briefcase to their first class at 8 o’clock. The morning sessions included three classes—called conferences—many in large classrooms with a hundred or more students and three ten-minute breaks for coffee and a rest for wrists sore from note-taking. In conferences, instructors lectured and fired questions at randomly selected students. Afternoon sessions included more conferences and note-taking, followed by opportunities for physical exercise. Within a month, examinations would follow, many unannounced. Tactical problems, map maneuvers, and war games joined the mix and would constitute the final exam, beginning one day, running through the night, and finishing well into the following day.
Early in 1939, Griff received orders that once his Leavenworth coursework concluded in June, he was to attend tank school back at Fort Benning, near Columbus, Georgia, on the border with Alabama—an assignment for which he had applied that would also allow him to be closer to little Alice in Washington. He wrote to Tiny that he hoped to go to Washington, D.C., some time to pick Alice up and bring her back to New York for more sightseeing. He also wrote that he had learned that his ex-wife would be remarrying in California in May, but he did not yet know to whom. Tiny wrote back to Griff that she was curious who the “lucky man” might be. He turned out to be a divorced Navy officer, John S. Blue, who hailed from a military family with a long line of Navy officers; he would adopt little Alice and go on to have a baby daughter with Alice Torrey.
Tiny wrote back that her exploration of France had included a visit to Amiens Cathedral, where she had again been taken with the stained-glass windows.
In June, Griff and his Leavenworth graduating class of 228 paraded in their dress-white uniforms into the new War Department theater, again giving Griff grounds for satisfaction and a chance to reflect on his achievement.
Before moving to Fort Benning, he managed that trip to Washington, D.C., to pick up little Alice and take her to New York, where they saw the World’s Fair. Then Griff headed to Georgia.
Tank school at Benning not only got Griff to the East Coast but also introduced him to a new branch of the Army, sparking new opportunities that would lead to important professional contacts for him.
While in tank school, he lived in a white two-story house with a wrap-around, ivy-covered screened-in porch that was shaded by trees. He had access to horses for riding and amenities appropriate for a child to visit. Starting when little Alice was about eight, Griff began making arrangements for her to make a series of extended summer visits to spend time with him. Fort Benning was their first such visit. They shared some good times together. Griff tried to interest her in activities that then might have been considered more suitable for boys, like horse riding and bike riding, fishing and hunting, but Alice had become acculturated to refined city life with her mother and her Torrey grandparents. She did like horseback riding—but in a refined equestrian spirit rather than as Griff did, out of enjoyment of the horses as pets and, with Texan practicality, as transportation.
Photos from their time together at Benning reveal Alice as an eight-year-old with a conflicted and uncertain posture, as if she were unsure of her bearings with her mainly-only-summertime father. One shows her and Griff with his big black retriever, Smudge. In another, she is standing alone in a yard wearing her jodhpurs, English riding breeches, squinting as if eager to get on with other things. In another, hugging a cat, she seems to be more at home. And in one more, holding the handlebars of a brand-new bicycle, she seems to be trying to look happy about it. In other images, whether surrounded by a litter of puppies, or side by side on a play date with another girl her age, she seems genuinely happy.
After at least one such visit, Griff sent little Alice a pair of Sonja Henie ice skates that Alice loved. Sonja, Norway’s celebrated Olympic champion and Hollywood movie star, was the kind of female icon they could both appreciate, athletically inclined enough for Griff and glamorous enough for little Alice. She would remember Griff as an awkward and somewhat distant but well-intentioned father who tried during their times together to overcome his seriousness and meet her needs as well.
Griff’s time at Fort Benning progressed well enough, but his time with little Alice highlighted the tension he felt between pursuing his military career and quitting it in hopes of starting a normal family life. It was a period of flux and turbulence for him, which probably weighed on him. He suffered lingering effects of the divorce and his ex-wife’s accusations that he had been abusive, which could have been quite a burden to him, and from professional demands to relocate and be separated from his family.
By the time Griff finished tank school in 1940, the war in Europe had erupted, and changes were under way within the US military. It was time for Griff to move yet again. By the summer of 1940, the Army had created the new Armored Force to be relocated to Fort Knox, but for Griff there would be another destination: the college at Fort Leavenworth. The college was expanding its operations, shortening its regular course from ten months to ten weeks and quadrupling the number of students in its class to more than a thousand. Griff was recalled to serve in its academic command as one of its four faculty in the Armored Force subsection of its G-3 Section, out of a faculty of more than 150.
Griff’s concerns about whether to remain in the Army or to seek a discharge would soon be resolved for him.