In Memory

Barry Macanally

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” — Albert Einstein

 

 

 

 

 



 
go to bottom 
  Post Comment

04/09/09 11:10 AM #1    

Barbara Saddler (Georgi)

Received from Bill Trowbridge...

One For Ripley’s


At Westside, my good friend since 4th grade, Barry MacAnally, and I
hung out together a lot, though less when we began to date regularly.
Barry dated Sue Downing for a while. Then I “went steady” with Sue for
a while and Barry with Carole Jones, with whom I’d once had a date.
After high school, we all wound up in different parts of the country,
but with the help of some other chains of events, Barry and Carole got
married and, later, so did Sue and I.


The last time Sue and I saw Barry and Carole together was in Nashville
in 1970, several years before he contracted leukemia and died. We
hadn’t seen them for nearly a decade. They were visiting us on their
way, with their infant daughter Christy, from his medical residency
in North Carolina to his three-year tour as an Army doctor at Ft.
Lewis, WA. A few years after that one-day visit, we received word of
his illness and then, in a few more years, his death. We didn’t hear
from Carole after that and thought she’d probably moved somewhere
else. Sadly, that appeared to be that.


Thirty years later, in 2004, I sent the Westside alumni newsletter an
item about the publication of my fourth book of poetry, mentioning I’d
dedicated it to another Westside alum, my old friend Barry. Carole
just happened to run across this back- page item and e-mailed me after
getting my address from my publisher. She was still living in Tacoma,
in the house where she and Barry had lived. Her two daughters, now
grown, had gone to work for her there in her medical transcription
business. It so happened that Sue’s and my two sons were also living
in the Pacific Northwest, one in Portland and the other in Seattle.
Tacoma was an easy drive from either. So Sue and I began visiting
Carole on our trips to see our children and grandchildren. On one of
those trips, Sue brought our bachelor son Randy to a lunch with Carole
at a Tacoma pizza place. By further chance, Carole happened to bring
her daughter Christy. At the lunch, believe it or not, Randy and
Christy hit it off -- big time. They dated for a year or so after that
and then got married in 2007. They’ve just bought a house in Tacoma,
not too far from Carole’s.


When Barry and I were shooting Fourth of July fireworks in my back
yard in junior high, we couldn’t have imagined we might someday become
in-laws -- couldn’t even if we hadn’t been so busy celebrating with
fuse and detonation. All the family heads still spin when we think of
the long, amazing, and wonderful chain of coincidences that led let to
Randy’s and Christy’s marriage. I like to imagine Barry getting a
major bang out of it.


For some great Trowbridge-MacAnally "family photos", check their Profiles pages...



08/31/09 11:41 AM #2    

William Trowbridge

BILL AND BARRY GO TO WAR


Growing up in America shortly after World War II, Barry and I were enamored of guns and war. In our pre-and-early teens, before we got interested in girls, we read about war, talked about it, saw movies about it, watched every minute of the the 26-part, 13-hour TV documentary Victory at Sea, marveled at the photographs in the Life magazine coffee table book Life’s Picture History of World War II. We often played what we called “Soldiers” with our neighborhood pals or just with each other. Playing Soldiers involved mock shoot outs, with one side being the Americans (Army or Marines) and the other side being the Japanese (called Japs or Nips) or the Germans (called Krauts or Nazis).

Our battles had the added appeal of involving actual weapons. My father, who fought on the European front, somehow managed to get a whole foot locker of war souvenirs shipped home, despite the illegality. The foot locker was kept in our basement, and Barry and I spent many hours down there rummaging through it, playing with the various pistols, trying on the holsters, goggles, gloves, medals, dog tags (see “Dog Tags” in Flickers), and parts of uniforms. We even learned to take my father’s Army .45 apart and reassemble it-- in less than 5 minutes, blindfolded. We were told American soldiers had to lean to do that as a part of their training. We felt like GIs, vets. Another of our favorite items was a black leather German flying suit, complete with zippers on the sleeves and legs. I sold it to Barry for $10 when we were in high school, and he had a motorcycle jacket made out of it. Helen called to tell my mother she wasn’t pleased. It had become part of Barry’s look during his Marlon Brando period, which among many things, made Helen furious.

The foot locker also contained a 20 mm. Japanese cannon shell my uncle brought back from the Pacific, where he fought. We used to toss it back and forth to one another, pretending it was live. Sometimes one of us would purposely drop the empty brass casing (the rear part of the shell) on the basement floor, making a loud clang. When my family moved from Omaha, my mother left the shell in the basement. When the people who bought our house found it there, they called the police, who in turn called the bomb squad at Offutt Air Force Base --who found the explosive projectile (the front part of the shell) was still live.

Of course, our shootouts required acting skills. To be a full-fledged soldier, you had to make a convincing sound effect for your gun going off. “Bang,” was considered amateurish. “Ka-pow,” was also bush league. You had to make what the linguists would call a loud glottal plosive to qualify for soldierhood. There were actually more German pistols in the foot locker than American ones, so sometimes the Americans had to use Lugers or Walther PPks. They had to pretend they had Colts or Remingtons. No Fair Shooting Through Bushes was our main rule of war. Another was Dead Guys Can’t Get Up Till The Battles’s Over. In Soldiers, it was usually more fun to be one of the guys who got killed. They got to die dramatically, pitching forward like John Wayne did in The Sands of Iwo Jima or clawing at their chests like the rat-faced Japs in God Is My Co-pilot. The survivors, on the other hand, had to just stand and watch (see “Playing Dead” in Flickers).

When we reached our early teens, Barry and I even managed to purchase ammunition for some of these pistols and go into the woods outside Omaha to do some actual shooting. We shot trees, bushes, bits of trash, anything that wasn’t flesh and bone. Neither of us wanted to really kill anything. About this time, our fathers succumbed to years of entreaty and bought us .22 rifles for our target forays. Of course we solemnly agreed to observe all the rules of firearm safety. Several of our friends’ fathers had bought such rifles for their sons, too, so we began to go shooting almost every Saturday morning in a group of from 5 to 7. Also about this time, we discovered a dump in a ravine behind Happy Hollow Country Club, a great place for target shooting with its array of cans, boxes, jars, old dishes, discarded toilets, and such. The color slides you have of Barry in his strange winter hat and me in my jean jacket aiming our rifles at various things -- including the camera -- are from this time. My father was taking these pictures of an outing that included just Barry and me, using the Lieca camera he brought home from the War. Barry and I and our friends would sometimes go through two or three hundred rounds or more each, shooting every dump object in sight. On one occasion our group separated into two groups, which lost track of one another. Some time after that, I heard a high-pitched zzzzzz-sound pass about two feet over my head. Looking behind me, I noticed the other group through a scattering of trees about 100 yards away. They were shooting at something and didn’t seem notice some of their bullets were going toward the group Barry and I were in. At that age, one idiotic action deserves another , so we began returning fire to “show them how it felt,”aiming, of course, a little above them but low enough so they, too, would hear the zzzzz. Then they returned fire -- also, I think, aiming high. I don’t remember how long shots were exchanged, but suddenly both groups seemed to realize simultaneously that someone could actually be hit or even killed. Ceasing fire, we passed through yet another of those youthful moments when one does something dumb and potentially deadly and winds up dumbly gettting away with it. I’m sure everyone over twenty-one can recount at least five such incidents from early youth. Barry and I reprised the dump shoot one last time when we were both home from college, our freshman year, as I recall. This time we went to a dump off Center Street, one infested with rats, which we didn’t mind shooting. Rats, after all, are a danger to humans and they reminded us of the sneaky Japanese snipers shown on Victory at Sea. So, for an afternoon, we reverted to our days of playing Marines in the Pacific (see “Dump Rats,” in O Paradise, though I made the characters in that poem much younger and less “mature” than we were at the time and added some stuff about one of our Scoutmasters).

Perhaps the most dramatic incident of our gun-toting days involved Barry by himself. Jim kept a “Saturday night special” pistol in a bedroom drawer, for protection, I suppose. It was loaded. Naturally, Barry took an intense interest. One day when he was home alone, he got the pistol out of the drawer, put it in his jeans pocket, and went to the back yard to practice some fast draw techniques. On one of his tries, the gun went off in his pocket, angling a .22 bullet into his thigh. Most kids would have shouted for help, but Barry was too worried about Jim’s anger -- or, more likely, Helen’s wrath. So he hobbled inside, got a kitchen knife and some towels and proceeded to dig out the bullet. I recall him saying he got a stick from the back yard to bite on during the surgery. We’d seen soldiers and cowboys do that many times in movies. It seemed to help them cope with the pain. I don’t remember how he said he closed the wound, with some kind of stitching or some kind of tape, but the operation was mostly a success. As you know, Barry survived, though he told me that, after the wound healed, he didn’t have any feeling in that part of his thigh. Thus ended another of those youthful moments I mentioned earlier. I don’t think Jim or Helen ever found out about it.

The last element I can recall of our love of bullets and bombs was the Fourth of July ritual, our annual D-Day. In those years, you could get a crate of fireworks from the Spencer Fireworks Company in Roswell, NM, for $8.50, one which contained enough explosives to occupy two boys from about 8 a.m. till midnight. I saved my allowance for months, and I studied the Spencer catalog -- cherry bombs, Black Cats, Roman candles, lady fingers, Silver Tube Salutes -- more thrills than the photography magazines we’d sometimes steal for the bathing beauty pictures. Then I’d send in my money and wait till I got the call from Railway Express (Even then, it was illegal to ship fireworks by mail.) Then, my father would drive me downtown to Burlington station, where I’d proudly load the crate into the trunk. On the side of the crate, red letters announced this: “EXPLOSIVES.” Does life get any better? Here’s where Barry came in. Because of her antipathy to fun, Helen forbade Barry from buying fireworks. So he’d come over to my house and help me shoot off mine. Barry spent much more time at my house than I did at his. I think Jim would have liked to join us sometimes. We put two metal drinking glasses in our shirt pockets and filled them with explosives, carrying more in sacks. Lighting the fuses with the required “punk” sticks, we blew up toy cars, toy soldiers (which gave off real shrapnel), tin cans, cardboard boxes, dirt clods, wood scraps, and anything else that caught our craven fancies. Occasionally the fuses of two-inchers would do a “fast burn” and the firecrackers would go off in our hands, numbing the thumb and index finger for sometimes half an hour. Cherry bombs (see “Cherry Bombs” in Enter Dark Stranger) and Silver Tube Salutes were our favorites, each reputedly equal to a fifth of a stick of dynamite. Quite possible. They could blow out plumbing, blow off fingers, blow out eyes. They made our ears ring for hours. They were great fun. We hardly had time for lunch. Toward the end of one evening we tried to rig a particularly exciting explosion. We got a large Mason jar and filled it with gasoline from the can in our garage. Then, in the back of our back yard, I set off a two-incher I’d lodged in one of my plastic model airplanes (see “Foxfire” in O Paradise) while Barry stood there pouring on the gasoline. I remember seeing the fire travel up the stream of gasoline toward Barry in what seemed like slow motion, though it went very fast. He managed to let the jar go and jump back just before the loud whoosh and ball of fire: one more of those youthful moments. Around midnight, when I finally had to come in and go to bed, I’d hear the fireworks going off till I fell asleep, though I knew the sounds were only in my head. I’m sure Barry, back in Helen’s DMZ, heard them too.

02/06/20 11:13 PM #3    

Nancy Hester (Nicholson)

Barry James MacAnally
Birth: 19 Jun 1941
Death: 10 May 1973 (aged 31)
Burial: Mountain View Memorial Park, Lakewood, Pierce County, Washington, USA
Plot: Garden of Hope
Memorial #: 183661007
Created by: Tara Finnie Curley (47001263); Added: 22 Sep 2017
URL: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/183661007/barry-james-macanally
 

 


go to top 
  Post Comment

 




agape