Travels with Grumpus

The battle for the liberation of Manila, near the end of the second world war, is an important event in the Mickey and Maya family history. Mickey’s grandfather was the first known allied casualty in that battle (scroll down that article and you’ll see his name), and I will tell that story another time. My grandmother had spent the war with the resistance, then imprisoned for that insolence, and then finally widowed in a bombing raid. She was 25 when the Americans came marching into Manila but had already lived several lifetimes when a brash young American soldier came into her life.

Manila was the most destroyed city in the world in the second world war, after Warsaw. I believe that my father and his parents had moved back to Lipa (as fate would have it, the second most destroyed city in the Philippines, after Manila). My grandmother and her mother stayed in the capital but had no place to live. As family lore would have it, they had been allowed to stay temporarily in the home of Manuel Roxas but, as they were about to move in, they were stopped by an American army captain with the words “Well if I had a dime for everybody who claimed they were related to President Roxas … ” The next day they did move in. I think my grandmother brought her baby grand piano with her. Don’t ask me how or why - there must have been a truck or something that had all their earthly belongings. Re-enter Captain Burt Winn who, after directing his men on the entry of that piano, asked my grandmother to play him a song. Classic. Weary and heartbroken, she played some sad Spanish or Tagalog tune. Captain Winn, true to form, belted out “Oh what a beautiful mooooorning!” Classic.

Shortly after, my great-grandmother sent my grandmother to the States to recover. Winn followed, courted, and married her, and this union produced my beautiful mother. Unfortunately I don’t think my grandmother was fated for lasting happiness anytime in her short life, because my grandfather died in a car accident 2 months before my mother was born. My grandmother had just turned 28. My mother was born in New York City in November 1948 but moved to Manila when she was 3. Apart from a few brief stints in New York as a teenager, she never really knew her American half.

Flash forward some 16 or 17 years and my mother is peacefully enrolled in a convent school in Manila. The mother superior comes up to her one day and says, “There are two American soldiers here to see you. One of them is your cousin but he says not to tell you which one he is. You’re supposed to guess.” Naughty, naughty. My mother picked him out immediately, “You’re Winn, aren’t you?” she said to the one with the crinkly-eyed smile. He must have been gratified - he’d been hunting for his Filipino cousin for a week while on a short break from Vietnam boot camp (I’ll have to revise that statement as soon as I get a more accurate version), and had nearly given up when the US embassy had turned up nothing. He tells me that he saw her picture on the cover of a magazine, and that the accompanying photo shoot had her name and the name of her school. That second Winn soldier, my mother’s cousin, Peter is the son of Burt’s brother, Frank. Although he and my mother hit it off, they didn’t see each other again until my brother and I moved to New York in 2000.