They Marched Into Sunlight by David Maraniss

she announced that she had a terrible headache and retreated to her room. Terry Jr. was even less likely to disappoint his mother than his father, and the romance with the widow soon faded.
     
    G ENERAL A LLEN AND M ARY F RAN lived in a comfortable but un-pretentious house of limestone and wood at 21 Cumberland Circle within a mile’s jog of the Fort Bliss front gate. On the living room wall, above a long row of polo trophies and wartime photographs, were the battle flags of the Big Red One and the Timberwolves, along with the original painting of Terrible Terry that Time had used for its cover. The rest of the house, with the exception of the retired general’s den and Terry Jr.’s old bedroom, was painted in Mary Fran’s favorite shade of art deco pink. Terry Sr. sold insurance in his retirement, though he never made much money at it, and he spent much of his time corresponding with old soldiers, coaching the polo team at Fort Bliss, and trying to keep in shape. Long before running became a fitness craze, he could be seen jogging through the residential streets in a loop that took him to the military base and then around toward the fashionable stucco homes on Pennsylvania Circle where El Paso’s social elite lived. He was an unforgettable sight, decked out in army sweats with a wool wrap around his neck, carrying a medicine ball that kept his wrists supple for polo. When Jean Ponder, looking out from the backyard of her home at 230 Pennsylvania Circle, first saw this old man running down the nearby alley in the noonday heat, she went inside and asked her mother who it could be, and was told that it was General Allen.
    There are conflicting accounts of when she first met the general’s son. As her aunt Bebe Coonly remembered it, she and Bill threw a party for Terry when he came home from Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, a training ground for future colonels and generals that the near-goat of West Point had become the first member of his class to attend. Bebe’s sister Alice called and asked her to invite her daughter Jean, a gorgeous coed who had been moping around the house, depressed about being dumped by the young man who had been her escort the previous year when she was named the lady-in-waiting at the Sun Carnival. “And Jean walked in and looked like a million dollars, and Terry had been laughing, drinking, and talking and then just froze at the sight of her and that was it,” Bebe Coonly recalled. Jean remembered it differently. She was home after her freshman year at the San Diego College for Women, and her mother came up to her room and said that Terry Allen Jr. was downstairs, would she like to meet him? Jean said no, her mother insisted, and Jean relented, but said that she would not change out of her Bermuda shorts. So she went downstairs and the introductions were made, and from there “a whirlwind romance” began. They were both on the rebound, both Catholics. His family was revered in El Paso, and she felt safe around him. To him Jean represented the second coming of his mother, a young debutante socialite who was beautiful and much younger than he was. He was 32, she was 18. It was as though they had no choice but to accept the social scripts that were handed to them. He proposed in July 1960 and they were married in October.
    Always on the lookout to help his son, Terry Sr. intervened in a minor fashion to ease the way for the wedding. Terry Jr. had been shipped to Germany as an operations officer with the Eighth Infantry Division by then and needed permission to return for the wedding, which was to be held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, with a breakfast reception at the Waldorf-Astoria. The old man wrote a memorandum to Major General Robert W. Porter, deputy chief of staff for personnel at the Pentagon (and, not coincidentally, his old G-2 intelligence officer in the Big Red One during the North Africa campaign), explaining that Terry Jr. had to get married