Part 1 of 2
By Mark Soneson.
On August 30th, Neal Blodgett [will] hit the century mark. I had the pleasure of interviewing him at his home in Higganum the week before his birthday. Occasionally, Neal would struggle to come up with a name or a date, but in his opinion, he was still “pretty sharp for a man my age.” As our conversation progressed, it became clear that Neal is pretty sharp for a man of any age. This is what I learned about his remarkable life.
Neal was born in Hartford in 1921. When asked what the city was like in the 1920’s, Neal said “Hartford was poor. We were poor. We lived in a poor neighborhood. Park Street. The real bad section of Hartford.” Neal lived on the second floor of a large apartment building that housed about thirty families.
One of his earliest memories was when his toy monkey disappeared. It was a gift from his father. Neal went down to the vestibule of the building, found a police officer, and told him someone stole his monkey. He took Neal by the hand, brought him to his mother, and subsequently determined that the monkey was on their back porch. The officer had a good laugh over it.
Neal still thinks about that day. “He was quite a monkey. He had a nice little hat, a brass bell, he was life sized…” There was a warmth in his voice when he described this treasured possession. As the reader will soon learn, Neal has a deep appreciation for well-crafted items. It would seem to be a trait developed early in life.
When Neal was six, the family moved to Green Terrace in East Hartford. Neal’s father worked for Pratt & Whitney as a stock chaser. “My dad was the kind of guy, he always carried cigars with him, and he would just come up to complete strangers and he’d be smoking a cigar and he’d offer them a cigar. He smoked White Owls. Everybody loved him.”
Neal didn’t inherit his longevity from his parents. His father died a few days short of his 65th birthday and his retirement party, as well. His mother, a homemaker, passed away at age 72 from cancer. Conversely, Neal has enjoyed good health his whole life.
Neal earned money as a kid by weeding the carrot beds at Christianson’s Farm in Wilson for three dollars a day. The pay was better at the tobacco farms, where he worked as he grew older. Neal also set up pins at the YMCA bowling alley, which was done by hand. At age twelve, he was paying his mother five dollars a week in rent, and opened a savings account for what was leftover.
Neal attended Weaver High School, where he was a self-described poor student. His best subject was history. He liked biology, too, primarily for the anatomical drawing. But mostly, Neal just “coasted by” and rarely carried a book home.
He was on the swimming team, and played in an intra-city football league for the Rangers. Neal was a fullback at “115 pounds, soaking, sopping wet.” He and his teammates liked to read their names in the newspaper articles about their games. Neal kept the clippings for years, but threw them out at some point, which he now regrets.
Neal met Marjorie Jarman while at Weaver High School. Marjorie was a sophomore. Neal was a senior. They were introduced at a skating pond by her friend, Frannie Johnson. Neal used to be a pretty good skater, and was executing his best moves that day. As a result, “Marge didn’t like me because she thought I was a show-off.” But it wasn’t long before they were an item. “At the age of 15, she was my girl and that was it. One look and I knew.”
Neal graduated in 1939. He went to work at the Underwood Elliott Fisher Typewriter Company for $12 a week, and then at the Underwood research labs in the blueprint department for $16.
Neal bought his first car in 1939, a 1930 Ford Model A. It was a black two door coupe with a convertible top and a rumble seat. He paid $35 for it. He made good use of the car. “We went skiing all over the place. We went to Vermont.” The engine caught fire on one road trip. He pulled over and threw sand on it to extinguish the flames. It started right up and they were on their way as if nothing had happened.
World War II interrupted many lives and Neal and Marjorie were no exception. In the summer of 1942, Neal drove to New Haven and enlisted in the Navy. During his medical exam, he scrunched his feet to mask the fact that he was flat-footed. The doctor let him know he wasn’t being fooled, saying “You want to get in real bad, don’t you?” Neal said yes and the doctor passed him. Neal’s condition was a constant source of pain on the steel decks of his ship, but he learned to live with it.
Neal was stationed in Newport, Rhode Island. He came home on leave in December. He and Marjorie were married on Christmas Eve. Shortly thereafter, Neal was off to war.
Neal was assigned to a LST (Landing Ship, Tank) which carried equipment and supplies. It was designed to be grounded on the beach and unloaded when piers weren’t available. It was ideal for invasions and accordingly, often put its crew under heavy fire. Neal and his shipmates were subjected to strafing and dive-bombing on several occasions.
While docked during the invasion of Sicily, Neal was the sole occupant of the Conn early one morning. As the sun was just coming up, an army officer with three stars on his helmet and a pair of ivory handled pistols on his hips shouted up to Neal from 75 feet away. “Unload this ship and get it out of here!” (he used an adjective that Neal didn’t want printed in this story, but your guess is most likely correct). Every man on the ship soon went to work unloading the LST. They were back out to sea in short order. While the encounter with the demanding officer wasn’t congenial in nature, Neal must be the only resident of our town who can say he met George S. Patton.
From Sicily, it was off to the port of Oran in Algeria, where the ship came under heavy bombing. Neal had a misfire in his deck gun that had to be cleared after the bombing stopped. His shipmates watched from a distance as he pulled the live projectile from the breach. If he fumbled, it stood a good chance of detonating. He got it out and tossed it over the side. The thought of it still unnerves him.
That night, the ship was strafed. Neal crawled into the turret of his deck gun. “I felt protected on three sides. And I said a few prayers. Made a few promises. And I kept them.”
They left Oran for Tunisia, where they picked up British 8th Army Commandos and took them to Burma via the Mediterranean Sea, the Suez Canal and then through the Red Sea. Neal recalls the uneasy feeling as they sailed down the west coast of the Arabian Peninsula, as they had no escort for that leg of the trip.
In 1944, Neal’s ship sailed back through the Mediterranean, made a stop in Italy, and then continued on to England to prepare for the invasion of Normandy. He recalled with great detail the lading of supplies and armaments and how they were secured, as if it occurred yesterday. And he will never forget being part of a nearly 7,000 ship armada forging its way across the English Channel. Neal’s LST delivered its cargo to Gold Beach on D-Day. It then transported the wounded to England on the return trip.
Neal managed to squeeze in a visit to Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s Cathedral before the invasion was launched. He told me that he went to church whenever he could, no matter where he was. Neal has been a person of faith his entire life. He rarely misses a service at the Higganum Congregational Church. He reads a few chapters of the Bible every night before going to sleep. Yet midway through our interview, Neal said he still wasn’t sure about God’s purpose for him.
At the end of our interview, which ran three and a half hours, I brought up this question to Neal again. He came up with an answer. And anyone who knows Neal would agree with him on it.
