Turner “Tim” Timberlake passed away in 2001, devastating his daughter (and my wife) Chris. We missed having him in our lives. Chris came to realize how little she really knew about his life. Daughters know fathers as larger than life figures. The man behind the father? Not so much.
Link to another story about Tim “Dear Pop”
A few years later when Chris’s mother passed, we found among her effects boxes of photos and a collection of old letters from Tim. What a profound revelation! We had known that Tim helped build the famous Alaska highway during World War II, but mostly we knew a couple of funny stories—that was it. He had written the letters in the boxes while he was there in Yukon—a young man writing letters to his girl back home. And the father Chris knew hadn’t written these letters. These letters had come from a passionate young man, full of piss, vinegar and himself—the age of our oldest granddaughter—and they showed every one of the characteristics of that age.
Chris read the letters and then she dug into the photographs—grainy, black and white, images of the man who was—but also wasn’t—her father and images of a very different place and very different people. She read the letters again; and, between the lines, his passionate pride in the project he worked on began to sink in. We both began to study the incredible construction project that created the first land route from the continental United States to Alaska, an epic project and a very big deal.
And another thing struck us as we looked at the old photographs. Most of the faces were black We knew, vaguely, that Tim had served with black soldiers. We didn’t understand army segregation during that era—didn’t know that black soldiers served exclusively with other black soldiers all commanded by white officers. That struck us both as wrong, but Tim, no way a racist, played a part in it. How, exactly, did that work?
Another tour through the letters and photos had Chris thoroughly hooked—obsessed, I told her. The sewing room and office in the basement of our home began to fill with books and pamphlets and printouts from the internet. Chris read everything she could find about the highway and then went looking for more. The Highway came to dominate her thoughts and our conversations.
Seven regiments built the highway, but the black soldiers, like ghosts, had somehow disappeared from the history. Newspaper and magazine articles, film, photos from 1942 followed the white regiments. More recent material revealed a few details about the black regiments—but not Tim’s regiment, the 93rd Engineers.
Obviously to understand the project and Tim’s experience, we would have to drive the Highway.
Stay tuned…