My father’s inability to serve his country haunted him his entire adult life, and even now, some 30 years after his death, I think deeply of him every time Grand Haven hosts its fabled Coast Guard Festival. 

It’s a circuitous connection, but rooted in the fact my dad was allergic to horse serum, which was the first thing a wounded soldier during World War II was likely injected with, to ward off tetanus and the threat of contracting lockjaw.

Just 16 when the U.S. joined the war in 1941, every military branch in which he tried to enlist at age 17 and 18 denied Thomas Frederick Rademacher the opportunity to serve. Instead, he endured the torture of sitting through classes at Lansing’s Resurrection High School, surrounded mostly by female classmates, while his buddies shipped off overseas.

Over the course of 31 years working as a reporter at The Grand Rapids Press, I prided myself on getting people to open up about their pasts – grievous and glorious and otherwise. But my own father would go mum, not wanting to verbalize the pain. He lost good friends in that war, and I suspect he suffered some from survivors’ guilt.

Every year, though, I’d get a window into his soul.

It occurred each August, when the Coast Guard Festival – an annual community rite since the 1930s – brought and continues to bring thousands to the lakeshore town where our family was fortunate to spend two weeks each summer. We stayed in the cottage my mother’s father Jack Bechtold built during the 1930s, dubbing it “The House Jack Built,” at 6 Memory Lane, right across from the oval.

Until I was 16, I summered there with my folks and five siblings the first half of August, catching stringers full of perch from the pier, eating fresh corn on the cob, thrilling to perhaps one game of miniature golf, playing shuffleboard, trekking up Five Mile Hill, and learning how to bodysurf.

The Festival offered non-stop fun – music, games, the Musical Fountain, a sterling parade featuring the Green Hornets band, and more. But what came to stir me most was a short ceremony my father attended religiously, and I remember him inviting us kids to accompany him.

I can still see the tears in his eyes to watch as Raymond O’Malley gingerly stepped forward to present a wreath commemorating the deaths of his fellow Coasties. O’Malley and 102 others were aboard the cutter “Escanaba” in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic on June 13, 1943, escorting a convoy from Greenland to Newfoundland.

Hit by a suspected torpedo or mine, the ensuing explosion sunk the craft in less than three minutes with all aboard. Only O’Malley and one other shipmate – Melvin Baldwin – survived, by clinging in those hellish waters to a “strongback,” a 38-foot-long log used to secure lifeboats. They were unconscious when finally rescued by the cutter “Raritan.”

Amid the annual celebration honoring the Coast Guard – the music and fanfare and fireworks and more – time stood still for my father and me each year as O’Malley presented the wreath against the murmur of water lapping in the nearby channel.

Every year, O’Malley returned to whisper another farewell and not much else. Meanwhile, who knows what thoughts went through my father’s head, his outward purpose being nothing more than to show up and add his still-beating heart to the memory of men he’d never known and never could have served alongside.

O’Malley died in 2007, at age 86, the last living link to the Escanaba leaving behind taped interviews humbly describing his role each summer as his turn “to honor them.” He was buried at sea, very purposely in exactly 103 feet of water.

My father succumbed to heart disease at 71, some of it brought on – I’m sure of it – by his inability to ever wear a uniform.

Somehow, I think both men are still telling their stories.

Tom Rademacher served The Grand Rapids Press for more than 30 years as reporter and columnist. E-mail him at: rademachertom@gmail.com