A Soldier’s Lost Son English ‘war baby’ embraced by late father’s Maine family

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In recent years, Memorial Day has taken on special significance for a Crouseville man who emigrated here three years ago from his native England.

Roger Dan Greenleaf Lucas, 64, is the son of a World War II veteran from the small Aroostook County town of Washburn, one of an estimated 100,000 “war babies” fathered by American soldiers.

But that was something Lucas did not learn until more than a decade after his father died, never knowing his only child was alive.

Though Lucas never got the chance to meet his father, he got to know him through the family and friends he left behind in northern Maine and other parts of New England who embraced him like the long-lost kin he is.

Lucas’ story begins when his parents met in wartime England in the mid-1940s.

Halton “Hank” Greenleaf was a handsome young soldier stationed in Dorchester when he met Edith Lucas, a grieving war widow and mother of two. A romance sparked between the two. Greenleaf was transferred to Devon County shortly before Roger was born in December 1944.

Though Hank wanted Edith to return to his native Maine when he was discharged the next year, she refused. He continued to send her money for Roger’s care after returning to the States, but when he said he wanted to go to England to pick the boy up for a visit in 1948, she did something inconceivable.

“She told him not to bother because I was dead,” Lucas, a reticent man unaccustomed to being in the media spotlight, said in an interview this week.

Once back home, Greenleaf went on to run a successful hardware business. He remained a bachelor until the age of 52, when he married a woman 10 years his senior with two grown sons of her own.

“So Hank spent the rest of his life thinking he had killed his only son with tuberculosis,” Lucas’ wife, Jan, said. Greenleaf contracted the illness during the war, and it plagued him until he died at the age of 70.

Lucas believes that he might have become the focal point of his mother’s anger because he reminded his mother of the American soldier she once had loved.

“I turned out like my dad. I was more sensitive [than she was]. She could see my dad in me,” he said.

For reasons about which Lucas can only speculate, his mother then abandoned him in a Dorchester railroad station when he was 4 years old after years of beatings and neglect.

“He sat there for over 12 hours before a driver realized he’d been left [behind] and called the police,” his wife said.

Lucas was taken away from his mother and placed in a boys home in Devon, where the abuse continued, this time at the hands of Catholic nuns, he said. Lucas managed to escape the home when he was 15 and lived on his own for a few years.

Jan said the first time anyone ever hugged her husband was when he was 17 during a birthday party thrown for him by the couple from whom he was renting his “digs.”

Despite a childhood filled with pain and loneliness, Lucas is not bitter.

“You just get over it,” he said. “It’s surprising what you can survive when you have to. You wouldn’t treat a dog the way my mother treated me.

“The only good thing about my childhood is that I learned to run [to escape beatings] and fold socks,” Lucas said with a wry smile. He said both skills served him well when he joined the Household Cavalry, or English army, at the age of 17.

After serving in the military for seven years, Lucas moved to Australia. He had been living there for seven years when in 1978 he met Jan during a visit home to England with his stepbrother. He and Jan hit it off and he moved back. The next year, he married Jan, the warm, bubbly woman who pressed him to search for his father despite several false leads and dead ends.

Over the years, Lucas thought about his father often. The only clue his mother gave him, when he was 15, was his father’s name. Not knowing that Hank Greenleaf was an American, Lucas initially contained his search to England and Scotland because “Greenleaf” is Scottish in origin.

Lucas’ big break came after his mother’s death in 1989 when he learned from an English aunt that his father actually was an American veteran.

A new search began, but it would be several more years before Lucas would be able to pinpoint his father.

He and Jan contacted the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Mo., where the military service records of U.S. troops are archived, but their first search turned up nothing.

A fire in 1973 consumed more than 16 million official military personnel files, including those of Army troops discharged between Nov. 1, 1912, and Jan. 1, 1964.

Besides that, “There were a lot of ladies claiming they had children with American GIs in those days,” Jan Lucas said.

Undeterred, Roger and Jan e-mailed more than 1,000 Greenleafs they found around the world – one at a time because Jan didn’t know e-mails could be sent out in groups. They spent their time scouring telephone directories and calling Greenleafs. They took out ads in the New York Times and other major U.S. newspapers, not knowing then that wouldn’t help because those were hard to come by in Washburn, Maine.

In early 2003, after several more years of fruitless searching, they contacted the national archives in St. Louis again. This time, they got a hit.

“Almost immediately [we were] told that Hank was dead, but [an official from the archives] gave us the place and date of death,” Jan recalled. The couple obtained a copy of Greenleaf’s death certificate, which included the name of the funeral home that handled his burial.

The funeral home provided them a copy of Greenleaf’s obituary and from there they were able to find family and friends. The church Greenleaf attended was the first to help. Roger received the first photo of his father he had ever seen from a church member. This week, he recalled that moment as “very emotional” in his understated way.

In spring 2003, Roger and Jan traveled to Washburn for a visit. There, they said, any doubts about Roger’s paternity were immediately alleviated.

For starters, photographs supplied by family and friends showed that Roger looks a great deal like his father in terms of height, build and facial features. He also inherited Greenleaf’s green eyes and is said to walk like his father did.

To one of his father’s friends, the resemblance was so striking that “she almost fainted as she thought she had seen the ghost of Hank,” Jan said.

She said that from the first visit, she and Roger were “embraced completely” by Greenleaf’s extended family and by those in the community whose lives he had touched.

Martha Foisy, who grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in Freedom, is Roger’s second cousin and the family genealogy whiz. Her father was Hank Greenleaf’s first cousin and served in the Army about the same time Greenleaf did. The two men grew up together and were good friends.

She was among the first relatives to learn of Roger’s existence.

“I was in a state of shock,” she said. As a girl, she often wondered why Greenleaf did not get married upon returning from the war. She was told that he had met a girl in England, had fallen in love with her and that the two had a child, but that the child died.

After she got into genealogy, she started posting information on the Internet.

“One day, lo and behold, a letter came from England from a man named Roger Lucas, who says he’s Halton Greenleaf’s son. The letter was very bittersweet,” she said, adding Lucas wrote that he would understand if the family wanted nothing to do with him because he had been born out of wedlock.

Foisy wrote back immediately, calling that notion “ridiculous” and welcoming him into the family fold. She told him that it was sad that no one knew he was alive because Hank Greenleaf’s mother, Geneva, “would have liked nothing more than to raise her only grandson.”

On the drive back to the airport after that first visit to Washburn, Roger asked a question that had been haunting him: “Why didn’t he come look for me?” he said.

He didn’t learn the answer until his next visit, when he met more of his extended family, who showed him correspondence in which his mother told his father he had died as a child.

Though Roger Lucas has no immediate family members left alive (his older stepbrother and stepsister both died when they were in their 40s, and his father didn’t have more children), he and Jan have become close with his second cousins.

After four visits in 2003 and 2004, Jan and Roger Lucas decided to emigrate. The son of a U.S. soldier, Roger was granted automatic U.S. citizenship in July 2004. Jan was granted a Green Card three months later. They have lived here ever since.

Once in Maine, the two started a catering company called Take Two Chefs and then opened Sorpreso Cafe in Presque Isle with their business partners, Judy and Clif Boudman, last November.

Lucas and his wife live in Crouseville about a mile from his father’s grave in Washburn.

This week, Lucas received a special Memorial Day honor at the Cole Land Transportation Museum.

Harry Rideout, an Aroostook County native now living in Hermon, is a Freedom Team Salute Ambassador for the U.S. Army. Rideout arranged a brief ceremony at the museum’s WWII monument during which he presented Lucas with a United States flag that had been flown over the Capitol in Washington, D.C. Rideout said he received the flag from U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, another County native.

“Susan Collins gave me this,” Rideout said of the flag during Monday’s ceremony. “I can’t think of a better person to give this to than Roger, whose father served in World War II.”

Rideout’s wife, Sharon, presented to the couple a handmade scrapbook containing information and photos about the war Greenleaf fought in. The scrapbook contains plenty of blank pages for memories yet to be made.

dgagnon@bangordailynews.net

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