John Vernon Surr

Picture from New Directions Magazine

Published by Suburban Hospital

(a Johns Hopkins Medicine Member)

An article citing Jack’s sucessful shoulder surgery

My brother Jack is now known by his given name, John.  He was named after our father John and our maternal grandfather, Vernon.

When Polly was born, I had the mumps.  Polly, who was born on Jack’s birthday, was considered Jack’s birthday present.  Daddy threw Jack’s 7^th birthday party.  I looked longingly through the curtains at the bottom of the stairs as Daddy served Jack’s guests a bought chocolate cake.  Many of Jack’s guests belonged to his Cub Scout troop.

One of my first memories of Christmas involved hitting Jack on the head with my Christmas doll, because I coveted the large erector set with a motor that he got that Christmas.  He liked building.  Later in his childhood, someone gave him a chemistry set.  He was allowed to use this only in the laundry shed at the back of our garden.  He made pungent smells with the set and changed the color of pennies and performed other wonders.  He wore safety goggles.  I was grateful when he allowed me to hang out in the laundry shed with him.

Jack was sometimes as tough on me as Nancy had been on him.  Once, when I was in fourth grade I sharpened my fingernails as a defensive weapon.  Jack was also a loving and protective brother.  I remember him taking me to kindergarten on my first day of school, introducing me to our dragon neighbor and kindergarten teacher.  To my delight, he came back at lunch time to check on me.   

We walked together to and from Woodrow Wilson Elementary school in San Bernardino.  Our route along 28^th Street took us by mountain views to the north and views of the city down the street.  I was very proud to be escorted by my brother.  I was always happy, too, when I saw him on the playground.

We had a tough older boy in our neighborhood.  Once I remember Gregory and a friend chasing me onto my yard, I forget why.  I was later told that I had shouted angrily at the boys, “You dumb-dopes better get offa my property or Nancy and Jack will beat you up.”  Gregory and the boy ran away.

The Barkers, a congenial family from Coleman, Texas, lived across a vacant lot from us.  When we went camping, we children always called our camping lantern the “Coleman, Texas, lantern”.  The Barkers’ father was the manager of a Coca-Cola bottling plant.  The Barker sons were T.J., about Jack’s age, and Leonard, a little younger than me.  Julia Ann was my age and was my good best friend.  T.J was plump, red-faced, and later got very interested in explosives.  The Barker parents allowed their children comic books, even tough ones like Superman, unlimited Coca-Cola, chewing gum, and attendance at Saturday morning movie matinees.  My parents allowed tame comic books (Little Lulu, Donald Duck) in moderation but no Coca-Cola or gum.  Until the Barkers moved in we didn’t even know about the movie matinees for kids.  We spent a lot of time at the Barkers house reading comic books, drinking coke, and chewing gum. 

Mr. Barker invented things for his children.  He made a thing-a-majig that not only went up and down like a see-saw, but also went smoothly around, helped by ball bearings, at a push from a foot.  This he erected in the vacant lot between our yards. He invented what we all called the Gizmo.  This was a small car, a board on wheels, powered by an old washing machine motor.  At Christmas times we piled on Gizmo and went caroling.  I’m not sure any neighbors could hear the carols over Gizmo’s motor, although T.J. throttled it down during the songs.

Jack was my most creative sibling.  All my childhood long I remember him inventing things.  Between the time he was a toddler until Polly was born, World War II was raging.  When he was 6 and 7 he drew airplanes shooting each other. Jack invented a war vehicle, similar to a streamlined duck that would travel on land, and through water and air.  He turned the jack in the rumble seat of Daddy’s elderly and sporty Plymouth convertible into a machine gun, and when we went for drives, kids in the rumble seat, he busily shot at passing traffic making ack-ack noises.  We dug forts in the vacant lot, inspired by Jack and directed by Nancy.  Once, at Jack’s instigation, we threw oranges at cars passing on Valencia Avenue, until one hit Walter Lier’s car.  Walter was a friend of our parents.  He pulled his car to the curb, as we raced inside, and he came roaring into the house.  I hid under Daddy’s desk.  Walter cursed us in his Swiss French and English mixture and later reported us to our parents.  Lucky for the world, Jack is now peaceful and a Quaker.

Jack designed more pacific useful things.  As he was not fond of his chores, he designed the first self-making bed.  This had the top sheet and covers attached at their tops to strong bands which passed over two pulleys, behind the head of the bed.  Weights were attached at the far end of the bands.  Before anyone had invented contour sheets, Jack designed a contour sheet to cover the mattress.  When the child awoke, he leapt out of bed, tugged the weights and presto, the bed was made.  I believe there were other refinements, like self-attaching clothes, but I’ve forgotten the details.  I suspect he also designed something that would empty the wastebaskets, another of his chores, but I’ve forgotten those details too.

Once, when labor conflicts were in the news, Jack and Nancy organized a sibling-wide strike.  We made posters attached to sticks protesting unfair management and inadequate allowances.  Jack drew up a legal contract between management and labor.  We staged our strike; we marched in after dinner when the parents were relaxed in the living room.  Daddy was obviously so pleased and amused at Jack and Nancy’s planning and enterprise, and especially Jack’s careful contract, that the parents acceded to our demands.  We all signed.  I remember liking the increase in allowance, but failing sometimes to keep my part of the contract (do my chores).

Our father loved to ski.  His friend, Johnny Elvrum, who had been an Olympic ski jumper, had a small resort at Snow Valley in the San Bernardino Mountains.  This grew from a hot dog stand and a rope tow lift, frequented by Dad’s skiing friends, the Edelweiss club, to a skiing resort frequented by many Los Angelenos and those old Edelweissers too.  We had skiing lessons from the time we were fresh out of diapers.  Jack was a persistant skier.  He liked the feel of wind in his face and the feeling of going straight down.  Daddy called him a schussboomer.  I was a timid and inept skier, and after a few cautious sorties on the snow usually made my way to the fireplace in the lounge.  When Jack finally came in from the slopes he found ways to entertain the lounge lizards.  I was the chief lounge lizard.

On a spring holiday trip to Alta, a skiing place in Utah, Jack, who was fond of Mad Magazine, had his siblings make comic books.  Some of Jack’s featured Mad women with Adam’s apples and knobby legs with every hair delineated.   Many were genuinely witty.  We stapled sheets of paper in the middle and drew frames.  Great stories were invented.  Sometimes, between skiing sorties, we sat on the warm patio that was surrounded by snow, and drew and wrote our books.  We did this happily and quietly for hours.  An old man named Pablo would sit on the patio and enjoy the sun and our quiet concentration.

Jack took up doing magic.  He started gently, buying the whoopee cushions advertised in the backs of our tame comic books, progressing to water glasses that dribbled liquid over the unsuspecting.  His final stop on this road was real magic tricks.  He had a cape and a top hat.  I don’t remember him producing any live animals from his hat, but he produced everything else.  I would beg him, as would his other siblings and sometimes even our parents, to let us in on the secret.  He was steadfast, averring that a magician NEVER revealed his secrets.  It was only toward the end of his magic career that he divulged a secret, and then only the most insignificant one.

Jack was the banker of the family.  He saved his allowances, money from birthday and Christmas presents, wages from odd jobs.  While his self-indulgent sisters were wasting our allowances on Heywood’s ice cream cones, and Evening in Paris cologne (in pretty blue bottles at the drugstore), Jack was saving.  Jack sometimes bought one of Heywood’s balsa airplanes [Heywood loved airplanes; many fancy motored airplanes dangled from the ceiling of the ice cream parlor – too high for nosy children to reach.  Heywood sold many kinds of balsa airplanes.  Most had lead weights at the bottom to keep them on course.  Many had propellers on rubber bands.  When the propellers were wound and the airplane released, the plane would fly on its own power for a respectable distance.]  But Jack always had money.  When one of his profligate sisters needed money, Jack was always good for a loan.  I learned about interest from Jack when I was very young.

San Bernardino hosted an annual soap box derby, a home-made car race.  Entries were made by the children to any design that tickled the child’s fancy.  The soapbox cars were powered by gravity; the race started at the top of a long slope.  The soapboxes stopped by child foot friction.  Each child drove his own creation.  The winner was the fastest soap box, but recognition was given to elegant soap box designs.  I think that the car bodies were made mostly of old orange crates (I don’t remember any real soap boxes).  I remember the excitement that this event engendered in the whole family, with all of us cheering Jack on.  Jack doesn't remember finishing a soapbox, but I remember the race.

San Bernardino also had an annual kite making and flying contest.  One year Jack and Nancy decided to enter the smallest-kite-that-can-fly competition.  I remember that they made their entry with toothpick crossbars and tissue paper.  This kite was beautiful and it really flew!  They won the small kite competition.

When I was 10 and Jack was 12 we moved eight miles away to Redlands, California.  Our father had waited five years for the cost of building to go down after the war; he finally built his dream house on the lot with a view despite the inflated cost.  The house was finished several weeks before Mother allowed us to move in.  She refused to have her four kids track good red mud into the house; we waited for the grass to grow.  I was in fourth grade and Jack in sixth.  Luckily I attended McKinley elementary school for sixth grade and thus didn’t have to hear that year, as I had most years in elementary school, “Susie, I don’t understand why you don’t do better;  your brother Jack was such a fine student!”.  I was a daydreamer.

My Junior High School housed the ninth grade - students in the tenth grade crossed the street to the Senior High School.  For another year Jack and I attended the same school.  Jack and some of his friends published a humor magazine called KRAK.  Some of my brighter friends also contributed.  Roger Moore contributed, as did Peter Reimuller, who later manufactured beautiful redwood greenhouses in Washington State, and Johnny Slaughter, who gave me my first and only ride on the back of a motorcycle.  Roger was a short, bristle-headed redhead who always sat beside me on playground benches; I slumped to minimize the height contrast.  These, my friends, would have been called geeks today and they were very clever as were Jack and his friends.

In a high school class, Jack was assigned a paper on genealogy.  He managed to find some Plantagenet ancestors, and a few disreputable scoundrels like great uncle Willy, but didn’t find many scullery maids.  [Uncle Willy spent some time as a confidence man when he was in Australia.  He traveled around with a tent, selling tickets to see the Wazza.  A confederate would rattle chains inside the tent and Willy would run out shouting “Run for your lives, gentlemen, the Wazza is loose”.- then on to the next town with the proceeds.  When he was in England his brother, our great uncle Watson, would come into his study to find his brother Willy snoring on the sofa and the keys to Watson's liquor cabinet still swinging in the lock.]  Jack’s successful paper prompted Nancy, always careful of her primacy, to get into family trees.  The hobby kept the two older siblings entertained for years, culminating in a wonderful grand family reunion in San Diego in 2001, organized by them.

Jack wanted to go to an Ivy League school.  In high school he discovered the Navy scholarship, which paid 4 years tuition, books and a stipend in exchange for a few years of servitude in the Navy after college.  Jack was underweight; he didn’t meet the scholarship’s specifications.  Our family doctor recommended eating bananas and peanut butter to gain weight quickly.  Jack’s sisters, who always had to watch our weights, were envious.  The banana and peanut butter regimen was sufficient for Jack to meet the weight requirement and he was awarded the NROTC scholarship.  I always remember this when I eat peanut butter or bananas.  Jack was accepted at Yale.  He spent his years there studying the politics of economic development in the third world, the UN, and political philosophers.  He was the president of the U.S. United World Federalists while he was at Yale.

Jack enhanced my reputation in college by visiting Randolph-Macon Woman’s College (RMWC) in my freshman year. We arranged to double date at Yale.  A sophomore, whom I didn’t know well, asked to be my roommate, and angled to go to Yale on the date.  I got the better of this double-blind date.  My roommate and I took the train to New Haven.  Jack sent me detailed instructions for the trip, including instructions not to talk to strangers – that white slavers traveled on the trains.  I, always naïve, chose to talk to everyone, but I made the journey intact and I felt cherished by my big brother.

The year I was kicked out of RMWC for breaking academic probation by cutting classes, Jack graduated Magna Cum Laude from Yale.  I was so proud of him and so ashamed of myself.

Jack then spent several years as a Navy Officer.  He spent 15 months on an LSD 2 , the Belle Grove, out of Long Beach, California.  While The Belle Grove was docked in Long Beach, Jack went to a dance for foreign students with Polly and Lulu, the Chilena American Field Service student who lived with us for that year.  There he met Rauna.  He was quickly smitten.  Rauna had lived with her grandmother in Helsinki until a University of California, Riverside, professor, who was studying Russia’s 19^th century history, Theo von Laue, met them.  The von Laue family was taken with Rauna and they asked her to come live with them in Riverside.  Rauna soon became a treasured member of our family, too.  I was just a little jealous of how much we all loved her.  Rauna reveled in our trips to the mountains for skiing or picnics depending on the season.

Jack was then trained to be a financial officer in Athens, Georgia  I visited him there and he was a delightful host.    he spent the rest of his Navy years stationed in Manhattan.  He lived in a cold water flat in Greenwich Village.  Mother visited him in New York, and was shocked that he washed his dishes in his bathroom sink and cooked on the bathroom hotplate.

During his years in Manhattan Jack saved enough to put himself through Harvard Law School with help from Rauna, and our parents.

Later, because Ox and I were stationed in London, England, I was able to attend Jack and Rauna’s wedding in Helsinki.  There were two ceremonies, the civil one in the mayor’s office, conducted in French as Jack’s and the mayor’s mutual language, and the next day, the real wedding in the church.  Rauna was beautiful in Hilly von Laue’s wedding gown.  Helsinki was a sparkling city the spring days that we were there.  Rauna’s brother Juha showed us around the city.  The hotel where we stayed (Daddy paid for my room) had foot-thick walls against the winter cold, of course double glazing, high ceilings, and elegant white and gold trim walls.

Jack worked for many years at the International Monetary Fund as a lawyer.  He came to believe that the salvation of the world came through its children.  When the Monetary Fund offered early retirement to its employees, he jumped at the chance to retire and switched to working with children.  At first he was a child care worker, then a volunteer,  work he still happily does.  He now spends time working as a children’s advocate as well. He gets to play with children and clean up after them as a volunteer.  

 Jack has done much substantive good in the world, as a child advocate, a friend of children, a writer about children and children’s Spirituality, and as a Quaker peace activist.  I think he is a happy man.

Many times, the years after, Ox and I, later Ox, Betsy and I, still later, Ox, Betsy, Katie and I swooped by Jack and Rauna’s to stay for a few days.  Rauna often hosted the family parties that glued our widely dispersed siblings together and kept us the family that I cherish.