Ed Callahan had long suffered from silicosis or “miner’s lung,” as they called it then and insisted he could breathe best only after climbing down into the mine.[1]
Earl was still training in San Diego when word arrived that his father was dying. He was granted emergency leave and hurried back to Butte. Ed Callahan was still alive when Earl arrived and lingered through the days of his son's leave.
Then a telegram came. Earl had to return to San Diego because his unit was shipping out. It was a tearful goodbye. Nora was losing her husband and her firstborn son to war in the South Pacific.
Before Earl left, Ed made both of the boys promise to get the Callahans out of the mines.
Lorne and Eleanor were in the bedroom when Edward Graves Callahan died on May 30, 1942. Both would remember the same moment.
Their father sat up, smiling, and put out his hands as if greeting someone they could not see. Then he lay back and breathed his last.
Earl’s ship had not been a full day out on the Pacific when a telegram bearing the news of his father’s death was placed in his hands.
In 1943, Lorne joined the Navy, serving in the South Pacific.
Earl fought on the islands of Tulagi, Guadalcanal, and Okinawa. After the war, he was among the Marines sent to North China, where American troops oversaw the Japanese surrender and guarded rail lines while the country slid toward civil war.
By that time Lois, Eleanor, and their mother Nora were living in San Diego. Lois and Eleanor worked as welders in the shipyards. Their mother kept house, cared for her six grandchildren, and prayed that her sons would survive the war.
They did.
Nora Williams Callahan would spend the rest of her life in San Diego, passing on September 13, 1959.
And her children kept the promise.
A Psalm of Life
What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!—
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!
Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,—act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.[2]
NOTES
[1] It was not just Ed Callahan who noticed this phenomenon. Miners suffering from silicosis sometimes reported that breathing felt easier underground. The cool, humid, and relatively still air in mines could irritate damaged lungs less than the dry wind and dust of mountain air at the surface, even though long-term exposure to silica dust caused the disease.
[2] A book about the lives of Ed and Nora's children is in the works, if my cousins will share what they hold. dear and what they can remember.