Darryl Hannon:  

Check out darrylhannon.org, which is where I sometimes put a picture or a story. In a recent newsletter John Hudnor wrote about life changing events. I felt challenged to share what Greer meant to me; I don't know that at the time (or even later) I recognized the experience as “life-changing”, but in retrospect it was certainly life-forming. That's most likely just a semantic quibble. I was born in Mountainside Hospital in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. The story I was told is that the maternity section was in the part of the hospital that was just over the town line, otherwise I would have been born in the next township. I always assumed that was Montclair, where my mother lived in a second floor apartment with her father and her sister, but who knows? Current maps don’t bear the story out; maybe I got it wrong, but the hospital does sit on the border between two towns. My mother was the youngest of three children. They grew up in Hackettstown, New Jersey, but I never knew my maternal grandmother. The children all grew up to careers in health care in the metropolitan NY area. After I started school, my mother moved from the Montclair apartment, and we lived in various towns in Essex County, NJ, as well as in Brooklyn when she worked at Maimonides Hospital. I was baptized at the Episcopal Church in Montclair. Lynn and I were living in New York (Staten Island) when daughter Tracey was born, and she was baptized at the same church. Tom and Cynthia Percy came down from Greer to be Tracey’s godparents. For my first few years I lived in that second floor apartment with my mother, my aunt, and my grandfather. Just down the street lived my great-aunt Anna. My grandfather had come to America from England with his brother Arthur just before the turn of the 20th century. Anna became a well known author (Room For One More and The Gentle House), while her husband Arthur was a merchant seaman in the Pacific and my grandfather Robert was a rate clerk for the Erie Lackawanna Railroad. I never met Arthur, and met Aunt Anna only a couple of times, long after the events she related in her books were just memories. My father was in the Merchant Marine (or perhaps the U.S. Navy; I never cared enough to track him down and get the full story) during the Second World War, and chose never to return to New Jersey when the war was over. I think he was born in Rhode Island, but his side of the family was never, except for his sister (my Aunt Helen), very big in my life. Helen said she had never heard from him, so apparently it wasn’t just my mother and me that he abandoned. According to the Social Security Death Index, he died in Florida in 1986. My mother died in 2004 in Neptune, New Jersey. I have little memory of those early years, and absolutely no memory of my father. There were probably a whole mess of paternal cousins and other relatives in various places, but I never knew any of them, although every now and again my mother would mention one of them in passing. It was when I was old enough to begin school that the fun began. I had bounced from foster home to foster home every year since I was old enough to attend school; impermanence was what I was used to, and fat, dumb and naïve, I didn’t know any better. My father had sailed off into the Pacific during World War II and decided there was no point in coming back to his wife and child. Things were tough. And then. And then. Glory hallelujah. Miracle of miracles. My mother decided to ship me off to Greer in 1954. Of course I didn’t realize it at the time, but as that chubby little eleven year old walked dejectedly into Daisy, suddenly everything was right with the world. The years I spent at Greer gave me the wonderful gifts of stability, relative constancy, and belongingfulness (I know that's not a real word, but it expresses how I feel) that were missing from my family life. I suppose I should recite the standard litany of people, traditions, experiences, etc, etc, but I won't. Please consider it a given that I was culturally and personally enriched by all those things, particularly the people, and miracle of miracles, turned out OK (although I still tend to regret missing out on the sex, drugs, and rock & roll of the '60's and '70's. Oh, well.). I tend to be wordy anyway, and if I get started, I'll probably not be able to stop. There is one tradition that I don't recall being mentioned, though; the annual Mite Box service (was that at the end of Lent?). I was always struck by the concept (the poor giving to the poorer) behind the Mite Boxes and still am, just as the concept behind the Thanksgiving food baskets has stuck with me. After graduating (just barely) from Greer, I worked for an insurance company for a couple of years (started out in the mail room and worked my way up to the print shop. Don't ya just love it?). Continuing family "problems" prompted a return to Greer, where by some magic I ended up as 'houseparent' at Rapallo. The draft was metaphorically breathing down my neck, and, since I really didn't want to go to Vietnam, I followed the 'other' Bob Jenkins and enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard. The concept of saving lives while satisfying my national service obligation and serving my nation and the community appealed to me. After boot camp at Cape May, NJ, where they grabbed me for the drill team since I was tall and skinny, (read no traditional "boot" training, learning how to do tricks with rifles, special barracks, trips to parades, etc) I was sent to the Coast Guard Air Station at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. Once I had done the obligatory mess cooking (KP for you Army types), interminable floor buffing, 0-dark-thirty Detex clock punching, and painting anything that didn't move, the powers that were encouraged me to apply to any tech school that the Coast Guard offered. Since I knew how to type (thank you, Helene Robertson), I applied for Yeo...Expand for more