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Many Pacific residents know Francis "Frank" Cronin as the man who operated the Western Auto Store in town. He was easy to remember, 6 foot 6 inches tall and affable as all get-out. He operated the store from 1951 until his sudden death in 1966.
After that Tom ran the store until 1985 when Wal-Mart came to town and changed the way people shopped. But that's another story.
Frank and Dorothy Cronin were married in 1934. A wedding photo of them, standing at a curb in St. Louis, shows a tall, thin young man and a pretty young woman, who even in high heels, came just to his shoulders. They look happy and eager. She was the love of his life.
The bond between them was captured in a series of letters that Frank wrote home between December 1943 and June 1944. At the time they had two children, Tom born in 1936, and Carol Marie "Snookie," born in 1942.
Frank first brought his family to Pacific in 1945 when his father-in-law was a patient at St. Joseph Hill Infirmary, which was located across the Meramec River from Pacific in an area known as Little Ireland.
His son Tom, who was 9 at the time, recalls the family getting off the train in downtown Pacific, which was a sleepy town, dominated by the chugging steam train with smoke rolling out. It didn't look like a place anybody would move to.
Frank Cronin was inducted into the Merchant Marines in December 1943 and ordered to report to Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, N.Y., for training. He knew from the outset that he was caught up in a great adventure that might take him around the world. He didn't know where it would take him, but was open to the adventure. He assigned 100 percent of his pay, $87.50 a month, to be sent to his wife, put $24 in his money belt, and surveyed the war preparation that was taking place at the New York and Brooklyn docks.
He was an astute observer. While he was still on American soil and could send letters home uncensored, he talked about the planes, tanks, Jeeps and raw materials being boarded onto ships that were lined into convoys.
He was a frequent visitor at the USO in Manhattan, saw the famous high-kicking Rockettes perform at Radio City Music Hall and witnessed repair work on the Normandie, which had suffered an explosion while it was in the New York harbor. He arranged for Dorothy to come to New York so she could see it all. He met her at Penn Station and took her to all the places he had written about.
The whole thing would have been a grand adventure, he wrote, if he could have taken his young wife and two small children, Tom and Snookie, along. He knew he had to go, but he vowed to write home every day and share his travels with his family - which is what he did.
He wrote every single day. While he was in New York for training he could mail the letters through normal postal service. Once he got to sea, he still wrote every day, adding to the letters that grew longer and longer - some as long as books - which were mailed when he reached a port.
The more he learned about the job of the merchant ships, to take men and war materiel to war theaters all over the world, the more familiar the world seemed. He mapped it all out. If his ship was sent to England the tour would take three months. A trip to Australia would take six months.
If he had to go around the world - which he could looking at all the military basis that needed materials - the trip could take nine months. At the end of each tour he would get a leave, two days home for every week at sea.
He realized that once at sea he wouldn't be able to say in his letters where he was bound for. He devised a code, by the way he addressed Dorothy in each letter she would know his destination - "My Dear Dorothy" meant England, "Dearest Dorothy" meant Russia, "Dear Dot" meant North Africa. He had a salutation for Italy, Australia, the South Seas, Hawaii, South America, India and Alaska.
Although he couldn't have foreseen it, letters from his one trip would eventually have all the salutations except the one for Alaska.
Before he shipped out, he managed a couple of long-distance telephone calls home. Dorothy didn't have a phone, but his parents did.
"I knew you wouldn't be at Mom's," he told Dorothy in his daily letter. "But just on the chance that you might, I called. The Army does everything it can to get the servicemen's calls through."
After he completed his training, he sat on the dock and watched the other ships as they sailed down the East River and headed out to sea. He was allowed to board a Liberty Ship. "Boy are they wicked," he said, "and plenty of guns on her too. They were loading steel pipe on her and she was headed for Russia." There were 25 Merchant Marines on board and 20 gunners mates from the U.S. Navy.
He described a large convoy going out through the narrows and marveled at the adventure of heading out to sea not knowing where you were going.
Finally he was assigned to the S.S. Sarah J. Hale, which he boarded at the foot of 59th Street in Brooklyn at Pier 1. She was a C-3-Z type Liberty Ship and she was brand new. She was being loaded with fighter planes and parts and all sorts of mail for the men on board. She also was going to carry troops.
The planes on board had British insignias on their sides, leading Frank to speculate that he was headed for England, but it wasn't to be.
"I guess we won't go to England after all, but will no doubt head for Egypt, Persia or India," he wrote. "It'll be a long trip."
He had one last liberty before shipping out, which he spent in New York City. He had some drinks with the guys, but wasn't into it. He went out to walk to a park that he and Dorothy had visited, walked over to the National Catholic Community Service Center where they'd gotten a sandwich together and finally he went to Penn Station and looked at that huge space with all those people moving and stood in the very place where she had stood before she boarded the train home. He wanted to hold onto that memory of her there, next to him.
She should not worry about his safety, he wrote. The convoys were completely safe.
"I don't feel too bad about this now, Mom (which meant South Seas). Just stop and think what a thrill this will be - all those ships in long rows way out in front of you and Navy warship alongside and fighter planes overhead and all types of equipment tied down on top of these decks."
The Hale, he said, was a fast ship and loaded light, carrying P-47 Thunderbolt fighter planes with the British flag on their sides "and a hell of a lot of mail bags."
"The Navy gunners say we will go into tropical waters and will go around the world as they are taking on a lot of foodstuffs," Frank wrote. "If we go to Persia and India we will go through the Panama Canal and across the Pacific then through the Mediterranean and out through the Suez Canal and across the Indian Ocean."
From this point on the mail would be censored, he told Dorothy, so neither of them could mention the Hale's destination or port of call in their letters.
He left the States on March 20, 1944, little Tom's birthday. The food on board was swell and plentiful. He could listen to the radio from New York, London and Algiers on shortwave broadcast. He wanted Dorothy to try to pick up London on the radio because "nine times out of 10 I will be listening too somewhere in the world."
He wrote of the minutiae of life on a merchant ship, what he ate for breakfast, his job of preparing the dining room for meals, his hours on board watching the sea and the sky.
"I may have the makings of a sailor after all, if I could only stop thinking of you and the kids," he wrote. "I might like this sort of life, being as I have to do it for a while."
He traveled from New York to Norfolk, Va., to Gibraltar, Algiers, North Africa, into the Mediterranean to Tobruk, Libya, and North Africa. He arrived in Egypt April 21, 1944, then traveled through the Suez Canal, to Aden, Arabia. He arrived in Karachi, India, May 1, 1944, where they unloaded mail and the P-47 Thunderbolt fighters that they had started with. From Karachi they went to Bandar Shapur in the Persian Gulf, then to Australia, San Pedro, Calif., and San Francisco, where he would board the train for home.
In San Pedro, Frank wrote that he had tissue paper and was wrapping the gifts he had for Dorothy, Tom and Snooky.
"I have a little India doll for Snooky all dressed up like a little India princess and I'm afraid that little devil will tear it to pieces when she sees it. For Tom I have a big knife and a rattan buggy whip. For you some bracelets made of freight coins and a bracelet of pure ivory and a necklace of elephant bone and various pins of handmade silver that you can wear on your shoulder," he wrote. I think of you night and day and nothing seems right without you no more."
At the end of Frank's letters is the correspondence between Dorothy and the International Freighting Corporation when Dorothy tried to get word to Frank that Carol Marie, who Frank always referred to as Snooky, was seriously ill.
Frank arrived at Union Station in St. Louis June 29, 1944. Carol Marie, his precious Snooky, died on July 8.
The Pacific community was electrified in June 1966 when Frank Cronin died unexpectedly of a heart attack in the middle of the night. Tom, who worked with his dad in the Western Auto, was in Monterrey, Calif., with his first wife and youngest sister when he got the news.
The travelers flew home, leaving the family car in Monterrey. As it turned out Mary Beth Buscher and her two sisters, who had taken another car to California for vacation, picked up the Cronin car and brought it home.
"Would you like a picture of Dad in his uniform to go with whatever you write," Tom asked me.
"Tom," I said. "This was a great read. But at the end of it all, if I close my eyes, I don't see ships, loaded down with airplanes and endless miles of ocean. I see a young couple, standing at Penn Station saying goodbye. This is a love story."
