My soldier and I, Teresa Newton-Terres, were stationed in Hawaii. We lived in housing on Fort Shafter, Honolulu. I worked as a Project Professional. He worked at the joint command headquarters located at Camp Smith, just above Pearl Harbor.
Returning home from a Project Management Institute (PMI) luncheon with my colleagues, I put aside a box that the mailperson delivered as I changed my heels for flip-flops. And I dashed off to where the filming of Pearl Harbor was in progress. I had tried to get on as an extra, but they only wanted men who were scuba divers and women who were nurses with white uniforms. I told them I was a scuba diver and would cut my hair and act like a man, but they didn’t go for it. So, I did the next best thing. I went to watch the film production of Pearl Harbor.
“When I finally opened it, the first thing I saw was a small black and white photo of my grandfather. He wore a heavy coat and binoculars hung around his neck. He held a soda bottle in one hand and grasped the helm of a sailboat with the other. Standing behind my grandfather was Uncle Albert, my father’s younger brother. Grandfather peered in on direction; Albert looked the other way.
The headline above the photo read, “Search on for Marie Victims.”
“I flipped to the next page and then the next as I read other headlines: “Six Santa Barbarans Lot at Sea; Body of 7th Found,” “Testing Secret Gear,” “SECRET MISSION,” “Six Feared Victims of Shark Pack.”
I glanced over more pictures and maps. One had a photo of my father. His dark eyes looked directly at me as if he were trying to tell me something.
Grandmother Terres never spoke about my father or the shipwreck.
As I turned the pages, it slowly dawned on me that this scrapbook was her attempt to understand the tragedy that took her son.
The heavy tropical air felt thick, and I found it difficult to breath.
The scrapbook was part of grandmother’s personal effects, willed to her surviving son, my Uncle Albert. My father was her firstborn, but because he was no longer living, Grandmother’s assets were distributed equally between my uncle, my three brothers, and me. Most notably, those assets were what our family called “the Goleta property,” a block of stores with two apartments on the second floor in Old Town Goleta.
After Grandmother’s death, the Goleta property was sold, and the proceeds were distributed among her heirs. My share later helped pay my college expenses.
“It will all be yours one day,” Grandmother told me many times as I played with her collectibles and personal things, dressing up in her clothes, jewelry, and high-heels.
She gave many of those possessions to me while she was alive: Spanish combs, white lace mantilla, crocheted bedspreads, a steamer trunk, a spindle rocking chair and dresser that had traveled from Spain, and her treasured lace maker.
I cared for these things because, even when I was young, I felt a sense of responsibility toward family treasures. Now, perhaps, Grandmother’s greatest treasure had been entrusted to me.
At first, I saw the scrapbook as a connection to my identity that my father couldn’t provide. I didn’t realize it was also a pathway that led to the secrets of the shipwreck that changed the course of my life. I have grappled with where to begin telling this story. Some might argue it began when my father and his friends began scuba diving in the waters off Santa Barbara. Others might say the story began when dad and mother took leave from Navy duties to marry and honeymoon at the family’s cabin in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. Still, other will argue this story began with Pearl Harbor and our nation’s transformation to peace time after World War II, or even that the story began with a California Cultural History Project. For me, the story began the day my eyes scanned the images and artifacts preserved in my grandma’s -mi abuela’s- scrapbook. That moment was like the first light of a new dawn.”
(Excerpt, The Mystery of the Marie: Memoir of How my Childhood Tragedy Surfaced a Cold War Secret, by Teresa Newton-Terres, published TNTpress, 2022)
Initially, The MARIE Commemoration Art, “Real-time Luke-15”, multimedia, by Teresa Newton-Terres, compiled the images and news found in the dusty secret scrapbook. The art piece became a way to understand the story that had haunted her heart visually. A display of the project team and men shows the seven from the bottom up, in order to help tell the story 1960. This artwork tells of the past and present. The men are displayed from the bottom up in the order in which victims were recovered and the three who disappeared 1960 – Lovette (Thu 9-June), Mackie (Fri 10-June), Howell (found 15-June), Russell (21-June); The three who displayed from the bottom up to the top – McCaffrey, Terres, and Beardsley. The Marie Commemoration art was initially created for a Luke-15 Art Festival sponsored by Fellowship Bible Church, Little Rock, Arkansas.
MARIE REMEMBERED DOCUMENTARY
Later, a documentary film was created, MARIE REMEMBERED (19min) for the first-ever gathering at the 50th anniversary.
| “I consider these men as being as worthy of hero stature as the pilot of the U-2 planes because even though they did not know that their lives were in danger, they did die while undertaking a project to help ensure the safety of the free world.”Markham Field MacLin, SB News-Press, 17 June 1960 |
Now, with graying hair, a “Family” by circumstance continues to ask the persisting question, . . . “What happened”?
MARIE LEGACY & THE COLD WAR:
The MARIE and its Raytheon-related project team disappeared serving an effort during a HOT time in the COLD WAR; yet, after years . . . we know so little.
Join me on this journey in the revelation of the … MARIE EVENT’s Legacy!
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