June 14, 1942
Portland, Oregon
Johnson left his men in a downtown Portland hotel, cut free for the night to explore the local clubs. The Airacobras sat lined up at the Portland airport, waiting their return in the morning. For now, Johnson could think of only one thing: Get to Barbara.
He caught a cab out in front of their hotel, and as he climbed in he asked the driver to take him to the dorms at Oregon Health & Science University. The previous fall, Barbara had moved up to the nursing school on the hill overlooking downtown, living away from home for the first time in her life.
Now, a city away from her mother, Gerald would get to spend one evening with his love before continuing his flight into combat. He relished that thought of Barbara’s mom a hundred miles south, cloistered away in the house Mr. Hall had built on Fairmount Avenue a few blocks from McArthur Court.
Ever since that first conversation in the cemetery, Johnson wanted only two things out of life: to be a husband and a father. As young and eager as he was, any talk of waiting fell on deaf ears. Barbara was his one; he didn’t need to wait. The impatience of youth driven further by the desire to finally share a bed with the woman he loved merged with a sense of urgency as the Army Air Force tore him away from the Pacific Northwest.
What if he did not return from battle? Well, hopefully he would have left Barbara with a son or daughter who would be the part of him to survive his contact with the enemy.
The thought of that set his mind at ease. A child would ensure his footsteps through life would not be erased. He’d have a legacy. He’d have his love.
His parents never stood in his way of this dream, but Mrs. Hall sabotaged things every chance she got. She considered Gerald “too fun” to be a legitimate husband candidate for her girl. She took shots at him whenever she could and injected herself into the relationship more than once.
Gerald looked out the cab’s window as they worked their way through downtown. He and Barbara had spent part of the previous fall and winter exploring the city together, eating dinner at Jantzen Beach, on a little island in the Columbia River, or going to the Oaks Park carnival, where Gerald’s marksmanship meant Barbara returned to her dorm room with an armload of stuffed animals.
The 57th had been in Washington through that fall and winter. When it moved to Baton Rouge, the weekend leaves together in the Rose City ended, and their relationship was sustained by long, passionate letters. Long-distance love was an anguish to both of them, but at least with Barbara in Portland, her mother could not throw a wrench in things.
Johnson ground his teeth as he thought about what Mrs. Hall had done the previous year when Gerald was just starting flight school in California. He was living in an abandoned elementary school in the middle of the desert east of Los Angeles, going through primary training at the Cal Aero Academy. Lonely, depressed, surrounded by wild-haired young men, he felt more alone than ever. In a deep blue mood, he wrote home to Barbara, reminiscing about a kiss they’d shared by moonlight early in their relationship.
It was a kiss that had staggered them both. That moment of pure connection, where the energy flowed between them in such a way that it unlocked something deep within them that neither had ever felt before. Being young under a full moon in their quiet little Oregon town, that kiss felt like forever.
Mrs. Hall intercepted the letter. When she read Gerald’s gentle and romantic words describing the kiss, she exploded in rage. She ambushed Barbara as she came home from school, waving the letter and yelling at her for allowing a boy to kiss her—especially that boy who knew how to have too much fun.
“Now that you’ve been kissed, I’m done with you!” she screamed. Broken and now guilt-racked, Barbara ran upstairs and collapsed on the window seat in her room, wanting only to see Gerald’s face appear over the eaves.
Mrs. Hall summarily banned any further communication between the star-crossed lovers. She failed to realize that forbidden fruit is much more sweet, and Gerald was not going to let his would-be mother-in-law wreck his first experience with love.
He organized an underground network to Barbara. His folks, sympathetic to his cause, secretly allowed Gerald’s younger brother Art to pass letters between them. This spy ring lasted for many weeks, until finally, Gerald’s imposing father, H. V., decided to go to bat for his son. He went over to the house on Fairmount for a frank discussion with the Halls. The kids were in love, ease up, and let them be.
Mrs. Hall relented, but resentment toward Gerald and the Johnson family simmered on through the rest of Gerald’s months in training. She not so quietly hoped the separation and distance would torpedo the romance.
The cab started the climb up Marquam Hill. The medical buildings came into sight, tucked between groves of trees. It was a beautiful campus. Had Gerald finished up at the U of O in 1942 as he originally planned, he would have come up here for dental school.
Mrs. Hall intervened one further time. Gerald planned to propose on his way to Baton Rouge when the squadron transferred down from Washington earlier in the year. She saw that coming and headed it off quite ruthlessly. When Gerald left Oregon behind the wheel of his ’39 Plymouth, her meddling left him furious and bitter. For a while, he wondered if it was worth the effort to continue the romance when there were so many women drawn to aviators like himself.
He couldn’t hold out long, and soon he was back to filling pages for Barbara, expressing his love for her. Day after day, he poured his heart out to her, and she to him. Through those words, they got to know each other on an entirely new level. Instead of deep-sixing the romance, the distance actually proved to each of the lovers how much they needed to be together.
The cab lurched to a stop; Johnson paid the driver and flung himself out of the rig, fairly running for Barbara’s dorm. He waited in the lobby until she was called and came down from her room—no boys were allowed upstairs—and he swept her into his arms, smelling her fresh dark hair as the hug lingered and grew intimate.
He proposed on the spot. Barbara knew it was coming, and she accepted without hesitation. They made swift plans for a morning wedding, then called their families. H. V. and Gerald’s mom, Hazel, were excited and congratulated them. Then they told their son they’d been at a picnic when he flew over the neighborhood. When they got home, everyone on the block descended on their house to tell stories of Gerald’s aerobatics display. Art especially was crestfallen to have missed it.
Hopefully, there’d be other opportunities. Meanwhile, the Johnsons fully engaged in the wild wedding planning.
Then Barbara called her folks. There were no congratulations, just rage and tears. Mrs. Hall announced she was leaving at once for Portland, and Barbara was not to do anything until she arrived.
She got to the campus in two and a half hours, where she hustled Barbara into her dorm room for a private conversation. She forbade her daughter to marry Gerald, demanding that at the very least, she wait until she had finished nursing school.
This may have made sense in normal times. But this was anything but normal. Both Gerald’s and Barbara’s emotions were pegged at a fever pitch by the war and Gerald’s impending departure to it. They’d seen countless Hollywood good-byes and now they had their own. Wedding vows first. A dramatic farewell kiss. And the hero would vanish into the sunset to an unknown fate. It would be perfect.
Mrs. Hall saw the gravity and the consequence. She’d lived through the Great War and knew the depth of loss that could come with such good-byes. Young, eager souls in love would never grasp it. Until it happened to them. To her, they were still kids, playing at life but not understanding the stakes.
Barbara had always been an obedient daughter. She lived in a strict household, where she was raised to respect her elders and God. Her parents’ will would always be respected; she did not know how to break free of it. Perhaps that’s why Mrs. Hall saw Gerald as such a threat. He was not a man inhibited by convention. If there were rules he didn’t like, he found ways around them. That bit of rebel in him always alarmed Mrs. Hall. Rebels have a way of spreading rebellion, after all. Especially to those whom they loved.
The next morning, on what Gerald had hoped would be his wedding day, the couple found themselves instead in the lobby of Barbara’s dorm. Tearfully, she described the situation, and Gerald was frustrated by Mrs. Hall’s meddling once again.
I could die in Alaska. Without a family of my own, no legacy at all. Without ever knowing Barbara.
They held each other, and Barbara sobbed. At length, she pulled away for a moment. They sat side by side, legs and shoulders touching, as Barbara produced a velvet box. She handed it to Gerald.
Inside was an elegant, ruby ring that once belonged to Barbara’s grandmother.
“Take it with you. Know that when the time is right, I will marry you.”
It didn’t fit his fingers, so Gerald pulled his dog tags off and attached the ring to the chain. It slipped down between the thin metal plates inscribed with his name, serial number, and blood type. When Gerald put them back around his neck, the ring hung right next to his heart.
He promised to never take it off. They kissed, a final, impassioned embrace fueled by the failure of their plans and the uncertain future that awaited them. Then, Gerald was gone.
Barbara, heartsick, climbed the stairs back to her dorm room, where her mother waited. She entered, sat down on her bed, and perhaps for the first time in her life, she found her voice.
“I did what you wanted, Mother. But if Gerald dies before I can marry him, I will never forgive you.”
The words sucked the joy out of Mrs. Hall’s victory. She realized that maybe this time she might have pushed too hard, and it had cost her some of the power she possessed over her daughter.
A few hours later, as Barbara lay cried out on her bed, her mother gone at last, she heard the distant growl of an Allison engine. She perked up, tilting one ear toward the glass door that opened onto a narrow porch. She and the other nursing students used the porch railings to dry their laundry, and at the moment she had a bath towel draped over hers.
The engine sound grew louder. She sat up, watery blue eyes wide. She went to the door and peered through. An Airacobra was over downtown, following the Columbia River as if it had just taken off from the airport to the east. A moment later, it turned for Marquam Hill.
It was Gerald. It had to be. She watched him bore straight for her building, her anticipation building as the engine screamed closer. Faster and faster, the P-39 resolving until she could see a figure in the cockpit and could almost imagine that puckish grin she loved so much.
At the last second, Gerald flipped the Airacobra on a knife edge barreling toward the building at a football field and a half per second. He flew between Barbara’s dorm and the building next door. The space was so narrow that in later years, those who saw Gerald’s feat had trouble convincing others they’d actually witnessed it.
Barbara watched her fiancé disappear to the east, standing on her porch, the towel fluttering beside her in the June breeze, dreading what the future held for them both.