My parents were married in 1933 at Caesar’s Bar in Tijuana, Mexico. They had eloped. My mother’s parents, Archibald and Myrtle Wright, objected to the match. For months prior to their elopement, my grandmother had forbidden my father to call on my mother, believing him to be associated with a class of men—sailors—whose lifestyles were often an affront to decent people and whose wandering ways denied their wives the comforts of home and family.
My mother, Roberta Wright McCain, and her identical twin, Rowena, were the daughters of a successful oil wildcatter who had moved the family from Oklahoma to Los Angeles. Wealthy and a loving father, Archie Wright retired at the age of forty to devote his life to the raising of his children. The Wrights were very attentive parents. They provided their children a happy and comfortable childhood, but they took care not to spoil them. And in their care, my mother grew to be an extroverted and irrepressible woman.
My parents met when my father, a young ensign, served on the battleship USS Oklahoma, which was homeported at the time in Long Beach, California. Ensign Stewart McAvee, the brother of one of my Aunt Rowena’s boyfriends and an Academy classmate of my father’s, also served on the Oklahoma. At his brother’s urging, he had called on Rowena, and soon became a frequent visitor at the Wright home.
Eventually, Ensign McAvee developed a crush on my mother. He took her out on several occasions and often invited her to visit the Oklahoma. On one of those visits she met my father, who was dressed in his bathrobe when McAvee introduced them. My mother only remembers thinking how young my father looked, and small, with cheeks, she said, like two small apples. My father, however, was infatuated at once.
Until my parents’ courtship, my mother had, in her words, “never teamed up with any man.” She was, she confesses, immature and unsophisticated, possessing no serious aspirations, but cheerfully open to life’s varied experiences. Her mother frequently complained to her, “If a Japanese gardener crossed the street and asked you to go to Chinatown, you would go.” To which my mother always responded, “Why, sure I would.” When she met my father, she was a beautiful nineteen-year-old student at the University of Southern California. But unlike her twin sister, she had never fallen in love nor shown more than a casual interest in dating.
As my mother describes it, she would typically go out in large groups where the boys always outnumbered the girls. When a young man asked her for a date, she would reply by inquiring what he had in mind. If he proposed to escort her to the Friday-night dance at the Biltmore Hotel, or the Saturday-afternoon tea dance at the Ambassador Hotel, or the Saturday-evening dance at the Roosevelt Hotel, she consented, believing any other assignation to be a poor use of her time. But even obliging dates were rewarded with nothing more than my mother’s charming company and had to content themselves with membership in her wide circle of frustrated suitors.
A short time after being introduced to my mother, my father appeared on her doorstep and asked her to accompany him the following Saturday to the Roosevelt Hotel. She agreed, assuming he was acting on behalf of Ensign McAvee. But McAvee would not be among the young naval officers consorting with my mother’s crowd that evening. Instead, my mother found herself having “more fun than I had ever had in my life” with the diminutive, youthful Jack McCain.
Their romance progressed for over a year, despite my grandmother’s growing anxiety and the aggrieved McAvee’s angry reproaches. When my grandmother finally ordered an end to the relationship and banished my father from the Wright home, my mother prevailed on former suitors to call on her and take her surreptitiously to meet my father.
Until confronted with maternal opposition, my mother “had never planned on marrying anyone.” By her own admission, she was a willful, rebellious girl. Her attraction to my father was only strengthened by her mother’s disapproval, and when my father proposed marriage she consented. They eloped on a weekend when my grandmother was in San Francisco. Just before they departed for Tijuana, my mother informed her softhearted father of her intention. Despite his misgivings, he did not stand in her way.
My father had asked one of his shipmates to explain to the executive officer on the Oklahoma that he had gone off to get married, but the friend had thought my father was joking. That Saturday, during the ship’s inspection, the captain asked, “Where’s McCain?” My father’s friend responded, “He said he was going to get married or something.” When my father returned to the Oklahoma that Sunday, having dropped his new bride at home, he was confined to the ship for ten days with a stern censure from the captain for failing to ask leave to get married.
The bond between my mother and her parents was a strong one, and my grandparents’ alarm at losing their daughter to the itinerant life of a professional sailor was understandable. It took several years for them to grow accustomed to the idea. But, in due course, they accepted the marriage and shared with my father the deep affection that distinguished their family.
Captain John S. McCain, Sr., thought the match to be an excellent one from the start. He was as charmed and amused by his new daughter-in-law as she was by him. Six months after my parents married, my father was suspected by the ship’s physician of having contracted tuberculosis, and was admitted to a Navy hospital because he had suddenly lost a great deal of weight. When the doctors there asked if my father could explain his dramatic weight loss, he attributed it to his recent marriage.
Sometime later, my grandfather was in Washington, where he went to Navy Records and asked to see his son’s latest fitness report. There he read of my father’s condition and his response to the doctor’s inquiries: “My wife doesn’t know how to cook, and my meals are very irregular.” Much amused, my grandfather kept a copy of the report, and delighted in showing his friends how his “son couldn’t wait to get married, and within six months the girl had nearly killed him.”
Stationed in San Diego at the time of my parents’ elopement, my grandfather had traveled to Tijuana with them to attend the ceremony and stand at his son’s side. Theirs was also an exceptionally close relationship.
The relationship of a sailor and his children is, in large part, a metaphysical one. We see much less of our fathers than do other children. Our fathers are often at sea, in peace and war. Our mothers run our households, pay the bills, and manage most of our upbringing. For long stretches of time they are required to be both mother and father. They move us from base to base. They see to our religious, educational, and emotional needs. They arbitrate our quarrels, discipline us, and keep us safe. It is no surprise then that the personalities of children who have grown up in the Navy often resemble those of their mothers more than those of their fathers.
But our fathers, perhaps because of and not in spite of their long absences, can be a huge presence in our lives. You are taught to consider their absence not as a deprivation, but as an honor. By your father’s calling, you are born into an exclusive, noble tradition. Its standards require your father to dutifully serve a cause greater than his self-interest, and everyone around you, your mother, other relatives, and the whole Navy world, drafts you to the cause as well. Your father’s life is marked by brave and uncomplaining sacrifice. You are asked only to bear the inconveniences caused by his absence with a little of the same stoic acceptance. When your father is away, the tradition remains, and embellishes a paternal image that is powerfully attractive to a small boy, even long after the boy becomes a man.