Portraits of My Father as a Young Man

We never have the opportunity to know our parents when they were young, growing up in time that seems so distant from our own. If we are lucky, they tell us stories, even luckier if a grandparent, an uncle, or aunt tells a tale our parent might not have wanted us to hear. Over time we create a picture of what they might have been like long before we came along. And if we have old photos the stories are ever richer.

These last few days I have been thinking about my father as February 25 was his birthday. He was born in 1920 in Butte, Montana to Jeremiah Egan and Mary Sullivan Egan. Irish immigrants, he from Dromcollogher, County Limerick and she from Ardgroom, County Cork, they met and married in Butte. Jerry, like many of his countrymen, came to Butte to work in the mines. He was successful enough to purchase a home for his bride at 423 North Jackson Street, the home where my father and my uncle Eddy grew-up. Sadly, in 1926, Jerry died of consumption the cause of the death for too many miners. Mary was left to raise her young sons, James aged six and Edmund aged two, on her own.

My father and his brother Eddy about the time of their father’s death.

Fortunately for Mary several of her siblings had come to Butte, her brothers Mike and Florry to mine and her sisters Margaret, Bridget, Kate, and Hannah to find work. They joined in mutual support with the brothers moving in with their widowed sisters, Mary and Margaret, to help raise their sons. My father and Eddy banded together with their cousins, Dan, John, Gerald, and Emmett Murphy, to play as children and later to run a newspaper boy network, the proceeds of which helped their mothers to manage in the difficult days of the depression.

The graduate, Butte High School, Class of 1941.

Mary and Margaret wanted to be sure their sons did not "go down the mines" and stressed the importance of education. Despite the hard times, my father and Eddy attended the Immaculate Conception grade school, where some 30 years later I was a student. Daddy went on to Butte High School and the Montana School of Mines, where he received his degree in mining engineering.

When the United States entered World War II in December 1941, my father was working at the Fort Peck Dam. By the fall of 1942 he had enlisted in the Navy and was sent to the Naval Academy at Annapolis for training. As a Lieutenant jg, my father was stationed in Seattle before being assigned to the U.S.S. Carlson, a Destroyer Escort was serving in the Pacific Theater.

The handsome young Lieutenant James P. Egan.

He met the ship in Eniwetok in the fall of 1944. During his time aboard, the Carlson patrolled the Pacific islands contributing to the success of operations in the Philippines and Okinawa. When the Carlson was decommissioned in December 1945 my father was released from active duty. Like many of his generation, he rarely spoke about the war, yet he saved many of his records of service that detail the story of the young lieutenant and his time in the Pacific.

After the war my father found work as an engineer working in the oil fields along the Hi-Line in northern Montana. He returned to Butte often enough to see his mother, to socialize with his friends and eventually meet my mother Mary Kay, the "pretty girl" who would be his bride by February 1948.