More Than Just A Name

BRISTOL, Va. – J Wright stood between the Gardens of Gethsemane and Resurrection, on top of the highest hill at Mountain View Cemetery. Below him, the ground raced away, emptying into green trees, green hills, green mountains, all outlined against a perfect blue sky. But Wright turned his back on it all.

His bulky frame concealed in a sport jacket and loose slacks, the Georgia high school football coach stared down at a plain, stone marker. Three miniature American flags decorated the slab’s edges, red and white carnations draped its corners.

“I find myself thinking back to the day. That day by the graveside. That March 16,” Wright said. “Thinking of what it must have been like to hear the taps. I’m sure there was a 21-gun salute. I find myself thinking about those kinds of things.”

Etched into the grave marker was a name. Up until that moment, it was just a name to Wright. But now that he was there, it finally meant something. 

“That’s my name,” Wright said. “That was my birth name. James Byron Farmer. That’s the first thing that hits me. ... The second thing you think is, ‘Gosh, that’s your dad. Even though I never knew him, that’s my father.’ ”

In the 1960s, Farmer was a star lineman on the Virginia High School football team. The Ruthian home runs he clubbed as the Bearcats’ catcher still inspire gasps of astonishment from the school’s student body. The James Byron Farmer Memorial Trophy is given annually to Virginia High’s best male and female athletes.

Farmer went to Eastern Kentucky University on a football scholarship, where he met and married a swimmer, the former Connie Abel, before enlisting in the U.S. Marine Corps after his freshman year.

But on March 16, 1968, four months before Wright was born, Farmer was killed in South Vietnam. On Wednesday, Wright traveled to Bristol to meet his father for the first time.

Accompanied by an aunt he’d met only a year earlier, Wright visited the house on Valley Drive where Farmer grew up. He stopped by the Eastern Little League Park where his father fell in love with baseball. He walked down the halls of Farmer’s high school and admired the trophy that bears his name.

And on Thursday, at the Virginia High All-Sports Luncheon, after visiting Farmer’s grave, Wright gave the trophy to Aubree Hutt and Ahmad Eccleston, the school’s premier athletes of 2008-09.

But before presenting the award, Wright gripped both sides of the podium, gestured to his aunt in the audience and said:

“I never knew my father. I never knew my family ...”

Survival

At first, Farmer was listed as missing in action. But after four or five days, the Marines told the family he’d been found – dead – killed in the Viet Cong’s most lethal charge, the Tet Offensive.

“The missing-in-action aspect, that was sort of worse than being told he was dead,” MaryNell Ferry, Farmer’s sister, said. “The funeral was held at the Episcopal Church. I could not get over the emotional outpouring of the community. Especially the young people.”

But after the service, Ferry, then living in Pittsburgh with her husband, fell out of contact with her sister-in-law, Connie, Wright’s mother. Ferry lost the announcement card from the couple’s marriage, she said, and had no idea where Connie’s family lived.

“That time was really frenzied,” Connie recalled in a telephone interview. “People were already being [drafted], people were worried about that. That’s where a lot of our time and a lot of our emotion went. When people don’t grow up in that time, they don’t understand. We were worried about survival.”

So, they survived. Connie Farmer escaped with her newborn son to her hometown in North Carolina and returned to school at Appalachian State University. She married Tom Wright, who adopted her son. They had another child, a girl, and eventually settled in Georgia, where Connie Wright became a teacher and then an assistant principal.

J. Wright took Tom’s last name and never had to wonder about what life would be like without a father. Tom Wright was always there.

But there were hints about J. Wright’s missing family, such as the wedding album he discovered at his grandparents’ house when he was in the eighth grade. He flipped open the scrapbook and saw his mirror image staring back at him – “James Byron Farmer, no doubt about it,” he said – from the buzz cut to the gap in his teeth.

“There were times when I was a kid when I’d wonder, ‘Why don’t I get a birthday present from them?’ or ‘Why don’t I get a Christmas present from them?’ But I never asked my mom about it,” Wright said. “We had a family. There was no reason for me to search. I had all that.”

As his biological father did, Wright played football, earning a scholarship to Georgia Southern University before becoming an assistant coach at North Oconee High School in Bogart, Ga.

In 2008, Wright, who doubles as a special education teacher, helped lead a history class. Researching the Vietnam War, Wright, on a lark, typed his father’s name into the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall Web site.

The Web page held an entry from Gary Rosenbaum, posted in 2005, who claimed to have been Farmer’s best friend in elementary, middle and high school. And he was looking for Wright.

“Just on a whim, because I thought it’d be cool, I e-mailed the guy back,” Wright said.

Two days later, Rosenbaum answered. Two weeks later, Wright received another e-mail. This time from Ferry, his biological father’s sister.

Ferry and Wright began to talk on the phone and exchange e-mails. Soon, boxes and boxes of Farmer’s old baseball gloves, footballs, newspaper clippings and his letter jacket arrived in the mail. The Ferrys traveled to Georgia and met their estranged relative, taking Connie and Wright to dinner.

“It’s wonderful. It’s another stage in life,” Ferry said. “I used to say, ‘[Connie] had to get on with her life.’ I was an only child after [Farmer] was killed. I only have two children. It gives my family new challenges. A new dimension for me to include him in our family.”

Wright finally met Rosenbaum at a horse show in Tennessee a few months ago.

Connie established the James Byron Farmer Award in 1968, the year he died, and presented it to its first winners. Wright thought he might like to do the same, and asked if it would be OK.

“No doubt,” Rosenbaum replied.

‘My name’

Inside the auditorium at Virginia High, athletic director Barry Reed regaled the school’s athletes with James Farmer’s heroic home runs. One, he said, was so mighty it flew from John S. Battle’s field onto the school’s roof. When the lost ball was finally retrieved, Farmer’s power had turned the sphere from round to oblong.

Another cleared the fence at Virginia High ... and then a hill ... and then a road before slamming into the roof of a small, white house.

Wright helped distribute the various athletic awards Thursday, shaking the hands of each student in turn. Reed then called him to the podium.

Before announcing this year’s winners of the James Byron Farmer Memorial Trophy, Wright gripped the lectern and stared into the crowd. He pointed to his aunt, Ferry, who was seated with her husband and son in the audience. He told the young athletes about his circuitous journey, how he’d finally made it home – about visiting his father’s old house on Valley Drive and then his final resting place.

A few hours before the athletic banquet, sitting on a brick wall at Mountain View Cemetery, Wright, behind a pair of sunglasses, finally takes in the view.

Tom Wright will always be his father, and Connie his mother. But this trip connects the pieces in his mind, he said, and explains why he acts the way he does. Nature over nurture.

Still, while he connects to Ferry by blood, there remains the awkward feeling of newness between them.

“There [are] certain things you say that hurt their feelings,” Wright said. “I was talking to my mother’s sister this morning, and I talk to her so much differently than I talk to MaryNell. I hope that doesn’t hurt her feelings, I just don’t know.”

He motioned behind him to his father’s grave.

“Is that who I am? No. That’s not who I am. But that’s my name.”

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