Lucky 666 1 WANDERLUST JAY ZEAMER JR.''S PARENTS SUSPECTED early on that their oldest child was a born renegade. The boy was not long out of cloth diapers, no older than four, when he began disappearing from the Zeamer household in the verdant suburb of Orange, New Jersey. Sometimes his mother, Marjorie, would find him sitting on the roof of the porch jutting from their clapboard Victorian home, having crawled out of an upstairs window to study the stars in the night sky. At other times he went missing for hours, before a frantic Jay Sr. would receive a call from a local policeman informing him that his son had been discovered wandering among the breweries and hatmakers that dominated the city''s downtown streets. Jay''s wanderlust should not have come as a surprise to his parents, particularly Jay Sr. The branches of the Zeamer family tree were thick with wayfarers and adventurers, including at least fifteen of Jay''s German-born forebears who had fought for the Colonies during America''s Revolution.
Continuing the custom, Jay Jr.''s great-great-grandfather John had become a teamster by the age of fourteen, hauling lumber and whiskey across hundreds of miles of Pennsylvania backcountry over bone-jarring tracks. And his grandfather Jeremiah had traced the Oregon Trail to California by covered wagon and sidewheeler steamer at the conclusion of the Civil War. Then he had sailed home to Philadelphia via the Cape Horn passage to edit and publish a weekly newspaper. After Jay Sr. had served a short apprenticeship on his father''s newspaper, he too took to the road, wrangling an appointment through a family friend to Puerto Rico''s Department of Education. "The job involved bookkeeping," he wrote back to his family, "of which I had no practical knowledge." His government employer apparently agreed, and dismissed him after seven months.
But Jay Sr. had made use of his short stint in San Juan to become fluent in Spanish, an achievement that he parlayed into a job as a stenographic interpreter on various Spanish-speaking Caribbean islands and, later, for the Mexican Railway in Veracruz. Sensing that revolution was imminent, he left Mexico in 1911, and spent his next 42 years, he wrote, as a globe-hopping "traveling man," selling leather belting for machinery "the world over covering all industrial countries except Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa." Jay Sr. made his home base in the southeastern Pennsylvania town of Carlisle, not far from where his great-great-grandfather had purchased a 218-acre homestead in 1765 from the family of William Penn himself. And it was into this cosmopolitan family that Jay Jr., the first of four Zeamer children, arrived on July 25, 1918. World War I was well into its fourth grinding year when Jay Jr.
was born. Since America''s entry into the conflict a little over a year earlier, newspapers had covered the war like no other before. That July was no different, and as the Zeamers welcomed their first child into the world the front pages of newspapers and radio broadcasts were replete with reports from the Western Front chronicling the latest bloodletting at the Second Battle of the Marne, Germany''s last great offensive. Like hundreds of small towns across the country, Carlisle, with close to 11,000 residents, did its patriotic part, and had also mourned its fallen sons, including the privates Doyle Ashburn and Harvey Kelley, who were killed that week on the banks of that faraway French river. Jay Sr. had enlisted in the Army infantry at the war''s outset and earned his "doughboy" credentials in boot camp, although the lingering effects of a childhood bout with tuberculosis had kept him stateside. Still, if the appellation of the "War to End All Wars" was to be believed, he and Marjorie hoped and prayed that babies born in 1918, including their older son, would never have to fight in another global conflict. Jay was only two when his father pulled up stakes in Pennsylvania and moved the family to New Jersey in order to be nearer to the major transportation hubs of Newark and New York City, a mere 15 miles away from Orange.
It was around this time that Marjorie, a striking, dark-eyed brunette whose cheekbones could cut falling silk, realized that if she didn''t keep a constant eye on her oldest boy she often would have no idea where he''d vanished to. Despite its proximity to New York, Orange in the 1920s had only recently shed its pastoral roots. And though its main streets were by then crowded with breweries and thriving boot- and shoemaking factories taking advantage of the tannic acid produced by the town''s thousands of hemlock trees, spinneys of thick oak enclosing small farmsteads were only a short distance away. These rural areas virtually called out to be explored by a boy who was, as Marjorie wrote of Jay Jr., "brimming with an almost unrestrained energy, a curious spirit of investigation and adventure." At the same time Jay also exhibited a natural mechanical bent. His parents marveled over the toy trains and automobiles he built in his father''s workshop, mobile facsimiles propelled by springs or elaborate elastic-band motors that the boy concocted from scratch. Foremost in the Zeamer family''s memory, however, was Jay''s fascination with airplanes; his brother Jere, three years younger, described the model planes Jay constructed as "impressive for both their complexity and quality.
" In 1926, when Jay was eight, his father''s successful career had allowed the family to put away enough money to purchase a clapboard vacation cottage in the bucolic seaside hamlet of Boothbay Harbor, Maine. By this time the Zeamer family had expanded to six with the arrivals of Jere and two sisters: Isabel and Anne. The first summer that the family packed into their station wagon and headed north, it was as if an entire new world opened up to their eldest child. In fact, Boothbay Harbor would have a hold on Jay for the rest of his life. The Zeamer cottage was hard by the seashore and surrounded by a seemingly unending forest that made the outlands of Orange seem sparse. This heightened young Jay''s innate curiosity. It was as if the little New England hamlet had sprung from the ground solely for his amusement, and he would disappear for hours on end exploring the ancient Abenaki Indian trails that crosshatched the thick north woods. There was also a timeless aspect to the harbor itself, and the buzzing hive of fisherman and shipbuilders made it seem to Jay like the busiest place on earth.
On summer afternoons, when the prevailing southwest breezes strengthened to form thunderheads to the north, Jay imagined being transported back in time. One day he fancied himself fighting in the Revolutionary War, perhaps as the captain of the ship of the line in the Continental Navy which had traded shot with a British antagonist right outside the cove; the next, he was a mate aboard the Confederate schooner that sneaked into Portland Harbor a few miles down the coast at the height of the Civil War and made off onto the high seas with a captured Union revenue cutter. Jay''s love of the water came to fruition with the rowboat that he built from scratch, like his toy cars, trains, and airplanes, shortly after his tenth birthday. He had nailed it together from cadged planks and stray building material he found lying about the village--even its oars had been fashioned from hardwood scavenged from behind an abandoned sawmill--and it was the joy he took in sailing this flat-bottomed dory that sealed his parents'' suspicion that he was a different kind of boy. Though Jay Sr. took his older son''s adventurous nature in the spirit of a proud father, Marjorie hated it when Jay rowed off alone during the predawn hours in what she referred to as "the tub," sculling across the placid cove, dipping out of sight into the harbor''s every rocky nook. She would watch nervously from her front porch as he weaved among the rows of tall-masted schooners, survivors of the Great War''s Merchant Marine fleet, lying at anchor far off in the Gulf of Maine. Jay''s little rowboat, she remembered, "was no masterpiece, to be sure," but it was watertight and shipshape, and Jay never seemed to tire of tying onto those old schooners and clambering up through their rigging, staring out to sea.
It was if something was beckoning him to make a mark in the wide world. Soon Jay became a regular sight prowling the fishing wharves down at the harbor. His mother was taken aback one afternoon when, as she walked into the village center with her son, several fishermen and lobstermen waved and paused to chat with her boy about everything from the tide tables to the day''s catch. On special occasions, such as a birthday or holiday, Jay would even be invited to accompany these hard, leather-skinned men out on their day trips. Later, when the Zeamer family sat down to dinner, Jay regaled them with fishing lore and the rudiments of navigation he had soaked up like a sponge. He made certain, of course, to leave out the salty phrases his new friends were teaching him. Jay''s parents sensed that it was on these day trips that their son was discovering what it was like to be part of a crew working together toward a shared goal. Sometimes in the early evenings Jay rowed out to the harbor mouth to await the return of the village''s small commercial fleet, his dory nearly obscured by the flocks of com.