Sacred Heart of Guy Charles Bailey

*


Guy Bailey was drafted into the US navy in 1943, at the age of 17, and spent the next couple of years operating teletype apparatus, climbing masts to maintain shipboard antennae and, on bad days, hauling huge bags of classified messages to the incinerator, turning them into a slurry of ash and water and dumping the gloopy mix over the side of the boat. By the time he came home from the war, not yet 20, he had become a radioman, first class.

There wasn't much call for radiomen in New Castle, so he worked in construction for a few years before the navy recalled him and sent him off to Korea in 1950, where he would have passed his days doing pretty much what he'd done in world war 2.

Between his wars, he found time to marry a woman called Agnes Lynch, have a son with her and drunkenly crash his car into a parked car on Washington street, which resulted in him posing for this busted-lip mugshot on July 27, 1948, when he was 22.

After the Korean war, New Castle still hadn't come up with a use for Bailey's special radioman skills, so he went back to his construction job, where he worked until he died in 1975, at the age of 49, just two months after the death of his wife.


*


Text lifted from, and image inspired by Small Town Noir.



*




By way of saying we are all holy.




***



Namaste.



****