Camera Familia — Chapter 1

Signalman Benjamin Franklin Dyer, United States Navy, the South Pacific, circa 1944.

I have Frank Dyer’s semaphore flag, his father’s shotgun, a war trophy Japanese rifle, an engineering handbook printed in 1934.

But I never knew my natural father. He died in July 1950 when I was five months old, heart stopped by a stray current traveling between an electric stove and a washing machine, in our kitchen on Mountain View Circle in Flintstone Georgia, far from the battlefield.

By all accounts, Frank Dyer was a prince of a man. My mother grieved for years. I didn’t hear the story of his passing until I was ten.  I didn’t meet my Uncle John Greene Dyer II, Frank Dyer’s brother, until 1980.

I then learned that JGD the Second and I were both named after his and Frank’s father, my grandfather. Thus, even though my birth certificate says John Greene Dyer III, custom says otherwise.

You might think I was unconscious as a kid, but I wasn’t that unconscious. We moved overseas in 1956, before my sixth birthday, and all this history was set aside until much later.

If you have a minute, I’ll tell you what happened.