Jr. was born at eight minutes before six on the morning of May 30, 1938. I count this the happiest moment of my life, for I sensed on that morning that our son’s birth would redeem for Joleen, even more than Max Jr.’s birth had, those hours and days of her life that had been lost to the dusky vapors of her depressive humors. Max and his wife, Mary Ellen, along with Buddy Baer and Max and Buddy’s mother, Dora, were there with us, as was a local midwife, Miss JoAnna Butler, whom Max had fetched shortly before midnight the evening before, when, upon visiting us after he put Max Jr. to sleep, as was his habit most evenings, he saw that Joleen had gone into labor, and that she was, though valiantly denying it, in considerable pain.
Horace Jr. weighed six pounds two ounces at birth—nearly three pounds less than Max Baer Jr. had weighed at his birth—and he was, miracle of miracles, born with fingers and toes noticeably longer than seemed natural for a child of his size. His skin was a ruddy, somewhat splotched mocha brown, and he arrived with a full and impressive head of black curls, the curls made slick by the liquids that had accompanied him on his journey from the womb. Although Joleen, exhausted from her labors, showed nothing but a childlike contentment in holding her son close to her and having him, within minutes of his birth, suckle at her breasts, I expect she may have been as relieved as I was that Horace had not come into our world with the fair skin or facial features that would have suggested to attentive observers the true nature of his parentage.
And just as Abraham regarded Ishmael, son of his concubine Hagar, as his true son, so did Max Baer regard Horace Jr. as his son (though without acknowledging this to others). But whereas Abraham’s wife, Sarah, childless until Ishmael was a young man, was jealous in the extreme of Hagar and Ishmael, and had Abraham banish them into the wilderness of Beersheba, an act intended by Sarah to cause their deaths (which deaths would, without God’s merciful intervention, have surely occurred), neither Max nor Mary Ellen showed anything but love and kindness toward Horace.
And Max Baer Jr. loved our son Horace Jr., and our son Horace Jr. loved Max Baer Jr., and they grew up together on the Baer ranch and, later on, in the home Max and Mary Ellen made for themselves in Sacramento, where Joleen and I also came to reside in order that we might continue to serve in their employ. Not knowing they were true brothers, and without those envies and resentments that in families too often transform natural affections into less generous feelings, Max Baer Jr. and Horace Littlejohn Jr. became great, good friends to each other even as brothers sometimes are.
The years that followed, during which the boys grew from childhood to young manhood, and, when each was eighteen years old, left home—Max Jr. for Santa Clara University, and Horace Jr. for the University of California at Berkeley—were, in the large, good and fruitful years, and I feel confident in stating that we all would have agreed, without the need to express the thought in words, that these were years informed by that rarest of entities: family happiness. And this was due, above all, to who they were —to the fact that Max Baer Jr. and Horace Littlejohn Jr. were living incarnations of a truth to which many are blind: that who we are in our time on earth is not determined merely by the biological vector produced by the coupling of a man and woman, but by something else—by that essence within each of us that, independent of our parenting and/or our up-bringing, is an irreducible and eternal self that is I-and-no-other.
Both boys were, in my estimation, possessed of intelligence beyond that of their parents, and both boys, early on, though as gifted as their coevals in matters athletic and academic, distinguished themselves at different activities. Max Jr., for example, considerably taller, more sturdy, and more
Horace Jr. weighed six pounds two ounces at birth—nearly three pounds less than Max Baer Jr. had weighed at his birth—and he was, miracle of miracles, born with fingers and toes noticeably longer than seemed natural for a child of his size. His skin was a ruddy, somewhat splotched mocha brown, and he arrived with a full and impressive head of black curls, the curls made slick by the liquids that had accompanied him on his journey from the womb. Although Joleen, exhausted from her labors, showed nothing but a childlike contentment in holding her son close to her and having him, within minutes of his birth, suckle at her breasts, I expect she may have been as relieved as I was that Horace had not come into our world with the fair skin or facial features that would have suggested to attentive observers the true nature of his parentage.
And just as Abraham regarded Ishmael, son of his concubine Hagar, as his true son, so did Max Baer regard Horace Jr. as his son (though without acknowledging this to others). But whereas Abraham’s wife, Sarah, childless until Ishmael was a young man, was jealous in the extreme of Hagar and Ishmael, and had Abraham banish them into the wilderness of Beersheba, an act intended by Sarah to cause their deaths (which deaths would, without God’s merciful intervention, have surely occurred), neither Max nor Mary Ellen showed anything but love and kindness toward Horace.
And Max Baer Jr. loved our son Horace Jr., and our son Horace Jr. loved Max Baer Jr., and they grew up together on the Baer ranch and, later on, in the home Max and Mary Ellen made for themselves in Sacramento, where Joleen and I also came to reside in order that we might continue to serve in their employ. Not knowing they were true brothers, and without those envies and resentments that in families too often transform natural affections into less generous feelings, Max Baer Jr. and Horace Littlejohn Jr. became great, good friends to each other even as brothers sometimes are.
The years that followed, during which the boys grew from childhood to young manhood, and, when each was eighteen years old, left home—Max Jr. for Santa Clara University, and Horace Jr. for the University of California at Berkeley—were, in the large, good and fruitful years, and I feel confident in stating that we all would have agreed, without the need to express the thought in words, that these were years informed by that rarest of entities: family happiness. And this was due, above all, to who they were —to the fact that Max Baer Jr. and Horace Littlejohn Jr. were living incarnations of a truth to which many are blind: that who we are in our time on earth is not determined merely by the biological vector produced by the coupling of a man and woman, but by something else—by that essence within each of us that, independent of our parenting and/or our up-bringing, is an irreducible and eternal self that is I-and-no-other.
Both boys were, in my estimation, possessed of intelligence beyond that of their parents, and both boys, early on, though as gifted as their coevals in matters athletic and academic, distinguished themselves at different activities. Max Jr., for example, considerably taller, more sturdy, and more
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