Friday night, October 2, 1942
The Polar Bar, Nome, Alaska
Sprawled across Alaska’s coastal tundra flanking the Bering Sea, 1,051 miles northeast of Kiska, lay the remnants of a boomtown that once was home to Wyatt Earp and his wife Josephine. In its fiery gold-fueled heyday, Nome, Alaska, included seventy-five bars and three churches. It was a place men endured in hopes of striking it rich, but few got off the boat and saw its shanties, tents, and muddy streets as a permanent home. Do what Wyatt Earp did. That was the mantra. Get in fast, make a killing, then bug out to someplace warm and civilized.
The boom turned bust as fast as it started. Where once almost fifty thousand people crowded into Nome, only a tenth of that population remained in 1942. By then, the town was mostly made up of the castaways and dreamers, the hard-luck kind who drank their lives away in the Front Street bars so wild and dangerous that the town earned the nickname Boneyard of the Bering Sea. Every spring, the remaining locals would find a halo of defrosting corpses splayed across the tundra—drunks who wandered outside of town after their red-light benders, only to freeze to death on the tundra. There were so many missing persons in Nome that for years the FBI was convinced a serial killer was responsible. In the end it turned out that the only killer terrorizing the town was cheap booze.
Aside from the locals, the town hummed with airmen. In 1941, the Army Air Force decided Nome would be the last outpost of Alaska’s air defenses. The local airport had been expanded, renamed Marks Army Airfield, and became home to a squadron of Canadian Bristol Bolingbroke bombers. After the Japanese invaded the Aleutians, the P-39s of the 56th Fighter Squadron, 54th Fighter Group, arrived to defend Nome from Japanese air attack. The new squadrons lived on the end of a perilous supply line that stretched all the way back to Washington State. This meant they were perpetually short of everything.
In Seattle, the Western Defense Command discovered that sending military supplies to Alaska—and Nome in particular—was anything but an easy task. The ships plying those routes north were filled with booze and cigarettes, and the captains claimed they had no space for military necessities, so the Navy tried to make it illegal to ship hooch to Alaska, which only drove the trade underground, where it continued to thrive.
Down Front Street in the town center sat one of the establishments that specialized in the contraband: the Polar Bar. Established in the depths of the Depression, just after Prohibition ended, the Polar Bar was the classiest dead-end dive bar in western Alaska. On any given night, the area’s remaining die-hard miners might stagger in from the cold in their lace-up, knee-high boots and filthy parkas.
Pilots from Marks Field would wander in at dinnertime, still wearing their bulky cold-weather flying gear. After months of dreary patrols over the Bering Sea, their gear was grimy with grease and body oils. They felt filthy, which affected morale. They had nothing else to wear. Like Gerald Johnson and the rest of the 54th down in the Aleutians, the 56th Squadron was sent up from Southern California with nothing but their overnight kits.
More than once, a pilot from the outfit staggered outside so lit he’d get lost and fall off the wooden boardwalk lining Front Street. His buddies would find him hours later, facedown in the mud, bordering on hypothermia. They’d drag him to a car, get him back to the field, and fill him with coffee.
In the mornings, before the next patrol, they fought their hangovers by sitting in their P-39s, sucking oxygen through their masks as their stomachs fluttered. A good ten or twenty minutes of that on the flight line, and the men would be in good enough shape to carry on with the day’s mission.
The pilots mingled with an astonishing cast of characters at the Polar Bar. Drunken Inuits came and went. Local schoolteachers got their hangovers on. Toothless miners, shopkeepers, bums, and derelicts would belly up to the bar to sing together or listen to whatever the owner’s huge radio set could pick up. Nome was closer to Moscow than Miami, closer to Tokyo than San Francisco. The only Stateside radio station that could be picked up at the Polar at night featured the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Listening to Radio Moscow or to Tokyo Rose were the only other options.
So, through the hubbub of conversations, clink of drinks, and scraping of cheap wooden chairs across the floor, the bar was often filled with the sounds of Mormon music in tinny mono. Somehow, that seemed appropriate in a place full of every imaginable character.
It was just a few blocks away from this bar, on a Friday night in October 1942, that 2nd Lt. Tommy McGuire, a New Jersey native raised in the Deep South who had never seen the pulsing colors of the aurora borealis, found himself staring at the iridescent night sky. If the rest of the place was a hopeless backwater, the majesty of the phenomenon was an awe-inspiring sight. Those who were blessed to see it would never forget its beauty.
Sunset had come and gone just before seven that evening as the bars and the Glue Pot Café filled with off-duty military bent on making the most of this Friday. In the glow of the northern lights, Tommy could see figures stumbling about down Front Street. A few others were already passed out against the buildings.
He stood beside a road sign that gave directions and distances to points around the globe. Seattle’s pointed southeast, and “1,968” was neatly printed under the city’s name. The North Pole was 1,739 miles away; Moscow, 4,032. Below that was Miami, 4,475 miles. He glanced at that last one.
Four thousand miles from home.
His nose began to run. He pulled a handkerchief from a pocket and blew it repeatedly. Always a lost cause. His nose always ran. It made him self-conscious and defensive.
What had they called him in school?
Snotty McGuire.
He stepped down to the wooden boardwalk, clad in a meticulously tailored shawl-collared doeskin overcoat. It was a brand-new U.S. Army officer’s design, one that he purchased in the States just before coming up here, then took it to a local gentlemen’s clothing store, where he had it properly tailored to his unusually slim, five-foot-six frame. The coat made him look taller, and it stood out in Nome since none of his squadron mates brought anything like it up from Harding Field. It gave him a distinctive flair that he relished.
He was a late arrival to the 56th Squadron, a replacement pilot sent to the 54th to cover the Stateside training losses. Being the new guy in a squadron that already had bonded was a tough start. It got worse when he got to Harding Field to report for duty and found the unit had just left for temporary duty in California. He chased the squadron to California, only to discover it had left for Alaska two days before he arrived. Without a P-39 for him to fly, McGuire climbed aboard one of the transports bringing the squadron’s skeleton ground crew to Nome. By that fluke, he became the only pilot in the outfit to reach Marks Field with three large bags of clothing and gear. It made him a prince among paupers, the new guy with the best gear in the combat zone. That made him unpopular right from the start. His bitter tentmates at Marks warned him to watch his stuff; people were so desperate for clothes, his gear stood a good chance of being stolen.
He blew his nose again and walked toward the Polar Bar. His ongoing sinus problems grew worse in the Arctic environment. He was either always blowing his damn nose or snarfing mucus and sounding like a lunger.
He arrived in Nome that June eager to fly and fight. But his first mission set the tone for the deployment. June 21, 1942, was supposed to be a routine familiarization flight for Tommy. Once aloft, he experienced the bitter cold found even in summer at altitude during one of these Bering Sea patrols. Then another recently arrived replacement pilot named Lt. Jimmy Pierce suffered engine failure. His Allison coughed, sputtered, and quit. Too far from Marks Field to make a dead-stick landing, Pierce rode the Airacobra into the whitecaps. He never got out of his plane.
There was a lot of speculation later as to why he went down with the aircraft. Perhaps he was thrown into the instrument panel and smashed his head on the gun sight, knocking himself out as the cockpit filled with water. Or maybe when he hit the water, the doors jammed and he couldn’t get out. Maybe he couldn’t even get out of his belt and chute. Whatever the case, even if he had been able to get out on the wing, he would have been dead from hypothermia long before a boat could have saved him.
That night, the squadron commander, Capt. Bill Litton, sat down in his tent and wrote Pierce’s parents back in San Bernardino, California:
I regret to inform you of the death of your son, James…. The whole squadron had become attached to James, and consider his death a loss to our family also. We will have a hard time filling the gap made by his loss.
Could any epitaph pay proper ceremony to a twenty-six-year-old former Southern Californian clerk who joined the Army Air Force to fulfill his dreams of flight? Then war came, and he died needlessly at the end of the civilized world, thanks to a crappy engine.
For the rest of the summer, Tommy followed his flight leaders into the air on pointless patrols over a cruel and unforgiving sea. Even worse, a pointless mission in these mercurial planes could be as dangerous as any other. Do everything right, and you may just die anyway. A thrown rod, a fouled plug, and the P-39 would end up in the water. That was the lesson of Jimmy Pierce’s death. Any flight up here, as boring as they were, could kill you in one of dozens of ways.
McGuire felt a breeze blowing in from the north, and he hunched his shoulders to it. The temperature hovered around forty degrees that evening. Sometimes it howled through the buildings on the waterfront, but tonight it wasn’t too harsh.
He thought about how the gentle breeze would make for perfect sailing weather, remembering the Florida sun and the vacations he and his mom would take to the beach. His mom always invited the boys from his class to join them. Some were friends. Some were freeloaders looking to get a weekend away with the rich Yankees. They’d pile aboard a rented sailboat and skim along the surf, the wind cooling them from the tropical sun.
Here such a breeze just added a light touch of suck to the cold. The occasional gusts would send frigid, probing fingers into his overcoat, chilling his neck despite the tightly wrapped silk scarf he wore.
Even modest breezes blew through his living tent back at the airfield. As they got deeper into autumn, he added more layers to the clothing he slept in. His four other tentmates had no choice but to sleep in their heavy cold-weather flight gear, buried under as many wool blankets as they could score from supply.
Winter was on the horizon, and they’d soon be smothered in snowdrifts that surely would keep them from flying. He hoped the rumors were true that they’d be pulled out soon. Nothing had happened since they’d gotten to Nome. Well, nothing besides Pierce’s death. No Japanese aircraft appeared, no invasion fleets filled the Bering Sea. It all seemed a colossal waste of time. All the action was down in the Aleutians, where guys like Art Rice and Gerald Johnson were knocking Zeroes out of the sky over Kiska, making headlines that he wanted to make. He should have been with them. Instead, he was rotting in this backwater.
In an alley across the street, a drunken Inuit bent double and projectile vomited into the mud, one arm braced against the backside of a building.
Friday night in Nome. Fucking circus of the damned.
A moment later, he pushed through the Polar Bar’s front door. The place was packed, filled with smoke and bad music. At the bar, a collection of locals ignored the stools and stood shoulder to shoulder, belting out “Flat Foot Floogie (with a Floy Floy)” in happy off-key riffs.
Flat foot floogie with a floy, floy
Floy doy, floy doy, floy doy
Yeah, yeah yeah, byah, oh, baby!
Tommy paused at the door, unbuttoning his overcoat as he watched the revelers take shots between lines from that euphemistically dirty Slim Gaillard and Slam Stewart hit.
There’s a blast from my senior year.
A couple years after the song cracked the hit parade’s top five, Tommy was in a frat at Georgia Tech, when his brothers clued him in on the real meaning of the words. Floogie was a hooker, and “floy floy” was street lingo for the clap.
The singing all but drowned out a Greek miner who sat at a table across the room, playing some sort of stringed instrument called a zither that Tommy had heard only once before. He smiled missing teeth as he played, a bottle of ouzo sitting half drained next to him.
The barkeeper, George, stood behind the bar, slinging drinks and occasionally producing a deck of cards that he used to wow his patrons with magic tricks. When George saw Tommy at the door, he greeted him warmly.
“Evenin’, Lieutenant!” he called over the noise. Tommy nodded as he walked past the bar to find a table, shucking off his hat as he went. The Polar Bar did not include a hat- or coat rack, so everyone left their headwear on top of a pile of boxes next to a storeroom door in an alcove at the back of the place.
Tommy found a table in a corner and put his back to the wall after neatly folding his overcoat over the chair beside him. He was wearing a uniform tunic and a tie. He looked ridiculously out of place, like a man wearing a tux in a mosh pit at a death metal concert.
A few other pilots from the 56th sat clustered together around tables nearby. They acknowledged him, but only one got up to talk to him. The aviator stepped over to Tommy’s table and pulled his wallet out of his back pocket.
“Here’s what I owe you, McGuire.”
The pilot handed him a few bills, then returned to the camaraderie of his buddies. Tommy made a mental note to deduct the debt off his books when he got back to his tent. A lot of people owed Tommy McGuire money. To keep it straight, he kept a careful written account of who owed what and how much.
They didn’t like him much, but they sure didn’t mind borrowing cash from him. He never charged interest—that would have been unfitting for an officer and a gentleman. Besides, thanks to the nightly poker games in the alert shack back on post, McGuire was loaded. He didn’t need to charge interest.
A latecomer replacement pilot to the 56th who ran off his mouth and showed up the other fliers after he arrived, Tommy knew he didn’t fit in, and, aside from tolerating him on poker nights, the pilots made no pretense of being friendly. A few months back, they were sitting around talking shop and the P-39’s crazy spin/stall quirks came up. The other pilots all talked with caution and not a little fear over the plane’s nasty habits. Tommy started bragging about what he could do in an Airacobra.
He was cadet class 42B, which meant he’d been an officer and fighter pilot for about five months. A mouthy greenhorn was not welcomed in the ranks of lieutenants who had lived long enough to see some of their friends get killed.
They dared Tommy to put his flying where his mouth was. The next morning, McGuire performed for the rest of the squadron at the end of a patrol. He looped his P-39 over the airfield low enough that his squadron commander confined him to quarters. At the time, Tommy thought the stunt was worth the punishment. But he eventually found that while he may have shown the other pilots what he could do, it did not win him any friends. Neither did buying rounds for the entire bar, which he did with enough frequency to get him noticed by George and the locals. Perhaps he should have known that wouldn’t work either, he thought, and resigned himself to his lonely fate. His mother used to throw money around in Florida in hopes of winning over the locals. That didn’t work either. They were always considered Yankees in the heart of Dixie.
George’s wife came over and took Tommy’s order. After she departed, he surveyed the crowd nervously, eyeing an entry into a conversation that wouldn’t come. He reminded himself who he was, the outsider, and made his peace with it.
He never really had a place. In New Jersey, when he was just a little kid, his father was an outcast among his mom’s family there. His own people lived out of state, and his mom’s clan rejected him as beneath their class. They bounced around from apartment to apartment as his dad tried to sell cars for a living, his wife’s father buying clothes for the family that were far too fine for a working-class household. Instead of looking polished, they came across as aspirational wannabes.
When the marriage failed, Tommy’s mom followed her folks to Florida, where she and her children would be even more out of place—a rich Yankee family settling in the heart of a small, blue-collar Southern town. The family offended the strong sense of pride the locals possessed on more than one occasion. Some parents flat-out banned their children from hanging out with Tommy. The few friendships he did develop were fraught with ups and downs. Some only tolerated him because he had a game room, complete with a pool table. Nobody else in town had anything like that. Tommy’s mom paid for expensive getaway vacations in high school and went out of her way to dote on those who came over, in hopes of nurturing a social life for Tommy. She also tried donating money to the school and helping kids whose families had limited means. More than once, that triggered a prideful Southern backlash.
In fact, the generosity never worked. Tommy remained an odd duck, a gangly-looking kid whose nose always ran and who spoke without the Deep South accent everyone else had. He wore fashionable clothes in an overalls-and-denim kind of town. Paid for by his grandfather, the clothes came to symbolize his status in town. Never an outcast, but always an outsider.
He came to terms with his station by armoring up. He grew up defensive, prickly, developed a sense of superiority to conceal the insecurities that arose from the bullying he endured. When faced with a choice to fight or run, he almost always ran. Once, after a bully roughed him up, one of his classmates found him crying in the school bathroom.
Thing was, he was smarter than almost every other kid in school. He possessed a near-photographic memory and could think four or five steps ahead of everyone else. He was an accomplished clarinet player, a member of the marching band who possessed real musical talent.
He used his intellect to fight back whenever he could. He developed a razor-sharp tongue and a remarkable knack for intuiting the holes in another person’s psychological armor. He exploited that knowledge to twist the knife with snarky comments. Tommy learned to embrace his identity as the outsider who stood out. He would be the smartest, the best at whatever he did. That made him unique. Others were mere followers. Sheep. Like many superintelligent kids, Tommy developed an enduring contempt for mere mortal intellects. He rarely shied away from rubbing their noses in the fact that he was superior to them.
His food arrived. As he ate, the front door swung open and a new group flowed into the place.
Russians.
He watched them find a table and felt vaguely threatened by these guys. They were part of a new group of Red Air Force personnel recently arrived in Alaska to establish an air ferry route from North America across Siberia to the battlefields of the Eastern Front. The Russians needed combat aircraft desperately. Too many Lend-Lease fighters and bombers were being sunk at sea in the convoy battles in the North Atlantic and Barents Sea on the runs to Murmansk. Now the plan was to fly planes straight from America’s factories up to Alaska, where Russian pilots would accept them. From Fairbanks, they would fly to Nome, refuel, and start the four-thousand-mile trip to the Eastern Front.
The pilots chosen to initiate this route were rugged veterans who were probably about McGuire’s age of twenty-two but looked twice that. Liquor, the stress of combat, and the loss of countless friends at the hands of the Luftwaffe left them hardened, steel-tough, and in no mood to take crap from soft Americans playing at being fighter pilots.
The Russians lived by their own rules and ignored the Army Air Force’s. They flew through traffic patterns, ignored the ground controllers trying to direct them, and generally made things very difficult for those trying to establish cooperation. Once, after a Russian pilot was scolded for some aerial infraction over Ladd Field at Fairbanks, the Russian replied, “I have eight Nazis. How many do you have?”
Yet, in small groups or one-on-one, the Russians could warm up to their American hosts. There were transnational friendships forming, tentative as they were. For the most part, they kept to themselves in a clannish sort of way that combat veterans everywhere often do.
Then there was Tommy McGuire, the prickly one who always had to be the best and most distinctive. He loved being the one to let you know that you were second-rate.
He decided to go after the Russians. He stood up, walked over to the table of 56th pilots and announced, “I’m gonna drink those goddamned Commies under the table.”
Laughs and scoffs followed. The pilots teased him. There was drinking, then there was Russian aviator drinking. It was a whole new dimension of alcoholism that Americans could only watch with awe.
The Georgia Tech frat boy in uniform sat down with the Soviet aviators and challenged them to a drinking duel. He bought the first round. Vodka shots. The glasses appeared on the table, the bottles soon followed. A crowd gathered. The Russians laughed and pounded down the shots. McGuire struggled to stay with them.
Round after round followed. The Russians looked almost unaffected. Tommy’s eyes started watering. His nose ran even more. The world began to tilt. He took another shot and slammed the glass down hard. The Russians laughed and poured another round. Heads tilted with glasses to lips. Down the hatch. The fire spread from throat to belly, and the Russians roared and called for more.
McGuire, barely conscious now, reached for his shot. A Russian poured it for him. He tipped back and sucked it down, trying not to gag. The Georgia Tech frat parties were his metric for hard core. This was out of his league, but he was damned if he was going to give up. He straggled through a few more rounds, keeping upright by sheer force of will. The Russians still looked virtually unaffected. Their veins pulsed with 180-proof plasma.
McGuire would not give up. He drank until he passed out and fell under the table. If his body failed, his will never did. After the morning’s sledgehammer hangover passed, he took solace in that fact. Plus, he was the only American in the bar that night to have the balls to take the Russians on in their own game.
Be the best, or die trying. McGuire embodied the sentiment, and that night with the Russians in the Polar Bar was one of many examples of how he lived that creed.
He may never acquire their tolerance to alcohol, but Thomas McGuire Jr. wanted more than anything to be the same steely-eyed combat veteran they were. He longed to be a part of that elite circle. Instead, while his fellow pilots in the 54th battled the Japanese over Kiska, he bitterly climbed into his P-39 for yet another freezing three-and-a-half-hour patrol over the empty Bering Sea.
On October 16, McGuire’s time in Nome came to an end. The Army Air Force recalled the 54th Fighter Group. The men fighting the Japanese over Kiska departed first. Not long after, McGuire’s squadron received orders sending them back to Anchorage. The weather nearly killed them when they encountered a heavy snowstorm en route. All four P-39s eventually crash-landed not far from McGrath Army Air Base, where they spent a long and frigid night in their cockpits while bears prowled around their damaged P-39s.
A rescue party reached them the next day, and they caught a flight to Anchorage, Tommy more than ready to be done with the forlorn dive bars, predatory animals, and subfreezing temperatures of western Alaska.
They spent the rest of the week at Elmendorf, waiting for the rest of the squadron to make it back from Nome, unsure when the official order sending them Stateside would show up. In the meantime, Litton let his men go check out a couple of P-38 Lightnings sitting down at the flight line.
These new birds were as different as night and day from the P-39s they’d been flying, and the pilots eagerly absorbed all the preflight lessons. Over the course of a few days, they read manuals, got checked out in the cockpits so that they understood the complicated layout, and listened intently as a few men from the Lightning squadron serving in the Aleutians explained to them the ins and outs of their aircraft.
At last, on the twenty-first, McGuire got the keys to the new ride. He scaled the ladder between the booms, walked across the wing, stepped over the side of the canopy, and put his feet on the seat. From there, he sank down, sliding his legs under the instrument panel until his boots reached the rudder pedals. The plane’s crew chief helped strap him in, then showed him how to close the hatch. If the P-39 had a strange way of getting in and out of the cockpit, the P-38’s was just as unusual. Instead of a sliding canopy like nearly every fighter of the era possessed, Lockheed designed the P-38 with an overhead hatch, almost like a convertible without doors, as the point of entry and exit from the cockpit. Hinged on the right side, spring loaded on the left, where the locking mechanisms were.
McGuire secured the hatch lock, then went through his checklist before heading out to the runway. Both engines fired just fine on takeoff. He retracted the landing gear while climbing out, thrilled with the P-38’s power and its ability to rocket skyward. The P-39 seemed like an anemic dog in comparison. This aircraft was in a class of its own.
The revelry ended when the canopy hatch suddenly broke loose. One spring in the lock mechanism failed; the slipstream caught the left front corner of the hatch and wrenched it up and backward. The other lock held firm, which caused the plexiglass to shatter, filling the cockpit with flying shards. A chunk of metal bracing snapped off the hatch and struck Tommy in the head. The blow knocked him senseless.
As he regained his wits, McGuire keyed his radio, declared an emergency, and swung the Lightning back toward the runway. He stayed calm, went through the landing procedure as the slipstream howled a few inches over his head. Gear down, flaps down, a quick, shallow turn onto final, and he painted the aircraft onto the runway twenty minutes after takeoff.
Tommy tried again the following day. This time, he spent thirty minutes aloft, circling the runway and getting a proper feel for the aircraft. The next day, he scored two hours in a ’38.
He loved it, even though it almost killed him on his first flight. Fast, surprisingly maneuverable for such a large aircraft, it felt worlds ahead of the P-39s and P-40s he’d flown. He spent his time aloft in it executing touch-and-gos, making six landings through the two hours of stick time he was able to get.
Then it was over. It was such a tease to be given a glimpse of what it was like to be in the cockpit of such a capable aircraft, only to be brought back down to earth again. He fell hard. While waiting for the rest of the 54th Fighter Group to return from the Aleutians and western Alaska, the only flying McGuire got to do was in P-40E Warhawks, which now felt like flying a plane full of lead bricks.
Finally, in mid-November McGuire received leave. He flew back to see his father in New Jersey first, then he headed south to Sebring, Florida, to visit his mother.
When he got to town, things had changed dramatically. Almost everyone he knew from school was gone, scattered to the winds of global military service. His mom never remarried, never even dated after her divorce. She’d settled into a life spent giving to others. She tended to her father through a long illness that eventually claimed him, then did the same a few years after with her mom. When her mom passed, the remaining family disintegrated, torn apart by a battle over the small estate left behind. Tommy’s mom won that battle and held onto the house in Sebring as well as the remains of a once-great fortune. It was a pyrrhic victory, since it alienated her from her remaining connections in life. Once Tommy left for college, she became a lonely, almost tragic figure, living in a house far too large for her to care for. She ended up moving into a local hotel, virtually destitute after her inheritance ran out.
Tommy arrived at her room that November and knocked on the door. No answer. He knocked again. Nothing. Her only son was back from his first combat deployment, and she was either not home or not answering the door for some reason.
Tommy went to talk to the hotel staff. They told him she rarely left her room anymore and often would not answer when the staff knocked. He went upstairs and tried again. He called out to her, said he was home from Alaska.
Nothing. He went away puzzled and worried. The town gossip about his mom had always focused on two things: her money and her drinking. Much of the time the gossip about the latter was overblown, but it contained at least a kernel of truth.
The next day, Tommy went back and knocked on her room door a third time. At length, she answered. She looked sickly and worn out. Future generations would have spotted clinical depression.
When her parents died and Tommy started his own life, she was left without a backup plan. She had no family who wanted to see her, and she never succeeded in developing a network of friends in her adopted town. She found no purpose after those she’d devoted her life to either died or left. She simply existed, and for any intelligent human with a big heart, that just wasn’t enough.
The reunion was a sad one. Tommy’s mom looked so unhealthy that he told her she needed to take better care of herself. She became defensive, talked with increasing self-pity about how nobody came to visit her anymore and how much she regretted the rift the estate battle caused in the family.
It was all too late.
Tommy left Sebring a short time later, never to return.