August 1945.
The war in Europe is over, and America turns its full attention to the east, wearily.
Years of horrendous island hopping: Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Tarawa, Okinawa. And now: a land invasion of Japan. A public conditioned to think of the Japanese as little more than savages ready to kill their own families before surrendering….Millions of deaths foretold on all sides, more Japanese of course, but plenty American.
All that bore heavily on young John’s head as he entered the recruitment station in Philadelphia. Better to get in the Navy, where, because of his race, he’d likely just be a cook. The Jap navy had been destroyed, and so he’d sit offshore and sling Whitey shit-on-a-shingle while they had their war on the mainland.
Passed the physical. Swore the oath, And then it was up to bumfuck New York. Not the city but the state. Springtime but still cold, young John got on the bus with a few dozen Navy recruits not knowing what the future held.
And here is the story of another John: He’d hoped for combat when he enlisted. He believed in America and its cause in the fight against Fascism and here he was in his late 30s, fit as a fiddle, sharp as a tack, but the Navy had other plans for him. No D-Day or Pacific maneuvers; no battle of Midway or the Bulge; he was to remain stateside and give Navy recruits their most basic survival tactic
The ability to swim. Commissioned as a Lieutenant Junior Grade, that was where Texas John would spend the war. A sort of Navy drill sergeant, blowing a whistle and hollering instructions to raw recruits. And so it was to Sampson Navy Base he went, with wife Mimi. And it was there that in August 1944, they welcomed their first child into the world. It was a small miracle; as Mimi was then in her late ‘30s, successfully carrying a child to term had proven difficult, with several heartbreaks on the way. But their baby was hale and hearty, and they named him John, after his father, and his father’s father before him.
And that was how my dad came to be born in New York state. It’s not something he likes to admit, this failure to have been born in Texas, but as he will invariably remind you: “There was a war on.”
Pops, Mimi and my dad circa 1946.
But back to that other John, the Philly kid. Back in the City of Brotherly Love, he’d just embarked on his true calling. He was gifted musically, and after progressing through clarinet and alto horn, his widowed mother scrimped and saved enough to buy him an alto sax, about eight months before he joined the Navy. He wasted no time, and was already playing professionally backed by piano and guitar in little cocktail lounges in and around his Strawberry Mansion neighborhood, and perhaps he was allowed to take it with him as he boarded that bus north on August 6, 1945. When prompted to fill in his qualifications on his enlistment card, Philly John wrote: “Musician-played saxophone and clarinet in orchestras during various musical engagements, both part time and full time.”
Which just so happened to be the day the crew of the Enola Gay dropped the “Little Boy” on Hiroshima. Within a few weeks, it became apparent that Philly John would be serving in a peacetime Navy. As horrifying as the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki must have seemed to an imaginative and compassionate soul like young John, it must have been with a sense of relief that he underwent basic training at Sampson Naval Station, where, who knows, it very well could have been my grandfather who taught young John to swim. Or maybe even a thing or two about the Texas-style blues.
In any event, Philly John never got any closer to Japan than the barracks at Pearl Harbor. By that time — October 1945 — the war was over, so there was more time to cut loose. And there his talent was quickly recognized and he was pressed into service in the Melody Masters, an elite Navy band. This despite the facts that he was both Black and had not been officially certified as a master musician by navy standards. His talent was that transcendent — it was able to leapfrog both the military’s hierarchical structure and Jim Crow.
Which makes sense when you learn that this Philly John’s last name was Coltrane, who would only go on to redefine jazz on the saxophone and revolutionize the genre as a whole. He is quite literally venerated today, sanctified into the African Orthodox Church.
Of course I have no way of knowing if it was my grandfather who taught John Coltrane to swim. On the other hand, I don’t think it can be disproven, either. And so I will choose to believe it because the very thought brings me joy.
And as the man himself once put it, “After all the investigation, all of the technique-doesn't matter! Only if the feeling is right.”
Another great log to add to the fire of Lomax family lore! Thanks for uncovering thnis possibility which I also choose to believe!