Rejebian series: laidback and cool, book reviews and more

If you’re in Dallas and hear the name “Rejebian,” you think, oh, those are the book clubs where you don’t have to read the books. Or maybe you think of oriental rugs, which have been the Rejebian family business since Ermance Rejebian and her husband Vahram landed in Dallas more than 80 years ago as members of the Armenian diaspora. And since the entertaining book reviews and lectures Ermance gave made her a favorite speaker for the ladies who lunch bunch.

Don’t hold entertainment against her. Or against the Rejebian Summer Series of book reviews and lectures her family has established at Highland Park United Methodist Church. After all, it’s summertime, and the living ought to be easy. Although, very often, you’ll really, really want to read the book, as was the case last Wednesday night as author Sally Mott Freeman discussed her debut book, The Jersey Brothers: A Missing Naval Officer in the Pacific and His Family’s Quest to Bring Him Home.

Ordinarily, divorce might be expected to tear a family apart. Especially a divorce like that of Freeman’s grandmother Helen in the 1920’s when divorce wasn’t something “nice people” commonly did. Wouldn’t Benny and Bill Mott, Helen’s sons from her first marriage, resent her second husband?

And still more resent the status of Helen’s son from that later marriage, Barton Cross, “a spoiled child for whom no indulgence was too great,” as Freeman, daughter of Bill Mott and niece of Barton, told her audience.

Instead, the older brothers took him under their wing. Possibly it was the age gap – the Mott brothers were seven and 10 years older than their half-brother – Freeman guessed, that made sibling rivalry less intense than would have been the case if they had been closer in age.

And although he didn't do well initially in the schools his family tried, in what they considered attempts to improve his character, the older Mott brothers urged him to follow their own example, and attend the U.S. Naval Academy. But if Helen and the rest of her family hoped the Naval Academy would toughen Barton up, it didn't. He left after two years. Still, the family refused to give up on him.

The start of World War II saw one brother as a naval officer preparing to ship out to the Philippines, another soon to become a naval intelligence officer. But what was to become of Barton, now that a mandatory draft was looming? Why not a commission with the Navy’s Supply Corps?

The Mott brothers, not to mention their mother, must have breathed a collective sigh of relief at getting Barton in what seemed a relatively safe position.

Except that "safe position" put Barton in Philippines in early December 1941, just in time to be wounded when his ship was fired on by Japanese bombers. And as General MacArthur evacuated his personnel. All except a hospital ship of Navy patients and their doctors.

Captured by the Japanese, with all communications between the U.S. and the Philippines blacked out, Barton disappeared along with the rest of the Navy's sick and wounded. His family never heard from him again. His fate became the subject of endless and agonizing discussion by his family, a mystery until his niece, Sally Mott Freeman, made it her job to track him down. The result: nothing that any of Barton’s family had ever imagined.

It was a job, she said, that cost her 10 years of research and writing, producing a manuscript whose first draft was 700 pages long. Readers may be relieved to hear that the final version clocks in at only a little more than 500 pages, although her list of reference materials, including the Veterans History Project available through the Library of Congress may inspire readers to find their own stories as well.

The Rejebian Summer Series repeats Wednesdays through July 26, 7-8 p.m. in Wesley Hall of Highland Park United Methodist Church, 3300 Mockingbird Lane, Dallas. (Best parking is in the Meadows Museum parking garage on Bishop Avenue. The series is free, but see the site for details

and optional dinner reservations.

Wordcraft -- A president's life & a few words from the author

Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

***

What’s inside the 700-plus pages of Reagan: The Life, the latest in the stream of books by H.W. Brands, historian, professor, and yes, that history guy you saw on the Texas Rising miniseries?

Brands isn’t saying. As he told his audience at the opening session of the annual Rejebian summer book series, “Woodrow Wilson (subject of another of Brands’ books) once said he would never read another book if he could talk 15 minutes with its author instead.”

So Brands talked, although for considerably more than 15 minutes. After a show of hands indicated many in the audience not only remembered Reagan the politician but Reagan the actor, Brands launched into his bittersweet theme: if Ronald Reagan had been a better actor, he would never have been a politician. It was a thought still more staggering when Brands linked Republican Reagan, architect of modern American conservatism, with Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, creator of 20^th century American liberalism, as the two most influential presidents of their century.

What’s the link? And how was he going to explain a phenomenon that decades later still amazes: how a thoroughly ordinary actor managed to change the political climate of a country? And maybe: why wasn’t Reagan, outwardly affable, pleasant-looking, and hardworking – all the gifts that helped him in politics -- a better actor?

Brands credits the key to a conversation with a radio interviewer who told him, “if you want to understand Ronald Reagan, the one thing you need to keep in mind is that he was the son of an alcoholic father.”

This wasn’t news to Brands. Reagan himself had mentioned it himself in his memoirs. But, Brands’ source said, “The reason I know about this is because I am the son of an alcoholic father. (When) the first person you want to model yourself on is utterly unreliable, you do not trust anyone with your emotions.”

Underneath Reagan’s outward pleasantness – all that most voters would ever encounter – his emotional distancing, the “veil” even his wife Nancy spoke of as coming between them, destroyed him as an actor. “He would not go to that place in the human heart where the deepest emotions lie.”

Ironically, that very defensiveness may have saved him as a politician. Have to go head to head with the leader of an “evil empire” as Reagan did? Maybe you don’t want to trust him with your deepest emotions.

Reagan made no secret of voting for FDR in each of his presidential campaigns. But as FDR’s influence rose, Reagan’s acting career declined. He descended from making movies to huckstering for corporate America to giving a last ditch speech for Republican Barry Goldwater’s DOA presidential bid in 1964. It was that speech (ever afterward referred to reverently as “THE speech”) that set him on the path to a new career. Because if there was one thing he had learned as an actor, if there was anything he had in common with FDR, it was “the power to convey a vision.”

And for Reagan, the adulation of a constituency was as bracing as applause is for actors. He had found his new calling.

(What, you wanted a review? Try this one at The Dallas Morning News. This Wednesday Rejebian continues with a topic dear to the heart of host David Rejebian, Peter Belakian’s Black Dog of Fate, about the Armenian immigrant experience, one known to Rejebian’s grandparents and series founders.)