Remembering the ordeal of a World War II hero and his Philly family | Frank’s Place

Though I wasn’t born until five years after he died on a Japanese “hell ship,” when I recently stumbled across Eddie Houseman’s story in an old Inquirer, I felt as though I ought to have known it.

He inhabited the same tiny slice of Oxford Circle geography and shared the same sports interests and Catholic DNA as my father. They both went to grade school and Sunday Mass at St. Martin of Tours, both played sports in that schoolyard or along Roosevelt Boulevard’s wide medians. And Houseman’s Miriam Road home was just three doors from the one in which my great-grandmother and several great-aunts lived, where my father and his parents lived for a time and visited constantly.

Yet, despite those connections, despite the newsworthy details that marked his final years, despite my appetite for the past, I never heard Eddie Houseman’s story.

Why? My grandmother and aunts told detailed stories about Miriam Road, about neighbors, about the World War II home front. My father knew every neighborhood athlete. So, why were they silent on the hero who lived a few houses away?

I should have discovered it on my own. His name is on a plaque at the Summerdale Avenue playground that honors him -- the Houseman Rec Center -- yet, somehow, in all the boyhood hours I spent there with cousins, I never saw it.

In my defense, who pays attention to a playground’s name?

How many Rose Playground regulars, for example, realize the Overbrook Park facility was named for a Philly politician? Fitzpatrick Playground on Academy Road honors a onetime Girl Scout who died at 19; Picariello Playground near Academy, a neighborhood mother who volunteered with local youth groups.

But the story of Eddie Houseman? That was different.

Born in 1918 to John A. Houseman and his wife, he was the second son in a family of four boys and three girls at 5645 Miriam Rd. That block, then on the city’s outskirts, was an Eden in my father’s sepia-toned recollections.

The tree-shaded row homes had tile roofs, substantial lawns, and enclosed front porches or wide picture windows. The block’s north end was enclosed by the imposing stone structures of St. Martin’s, which hovered there reassuringly like medieval sentinels.

Houseman was one of 197 North Catholic graduates to die in World War II, 19 from his Class of 1936. He was on the football and basketball teams there and at La Salle College.

While at North, he caught passes from Frankie Reagan, the single-wing quarterback who would later star at Penn and play seven NFL seasons for the Giants and Eagles. At La Salle, Houseman, a freshman end, scored a touchdown in the first game ever played at the Explorers’ McCarthy Stadium, a 47-12 win over St. Mary’s in the fall of 1936.

In September 1940, three months after earning a La Salle business degree and 14 months before Pearl Harbor, Houseman enlisted in the Army. After pilot training in Alabama and Australia, he was assigned to the Air Corps’ 24th Pursuit Group.

His wartime experiences would be harrowing. The Japanese wiped out his unit in the chaotic fighting that followed Pearl Harbor. At least one of his planes went down. He was listed three times as missing in action and spent years in the Bilibid prison camp in the Philippines.

Miriam Road couldn’t shield his parents from all that, and throughout the war they must have yo-yo’d between despair and relief, their emotions oscillating like fan blades.

In a December 1941 battle, Lt. Houseman’s P-34A lost its engine. He parachuted into waters off the island of Luzon, made it to shore, and hooked up with another distressed American pilot. They commandeered two horses and journeyed through the unknown jungle.

A telegram delivered to Miriam Road notified the Housemans of their son’s uncertain status. The cycle of prayers, agony, and deliverance began.

A week later, the pilots emerged safely in a north-central Luzon village. The Inquirer reported that Houseman’s family, which had spent much of that holiday season warily scanning military casualty lists, was “overjoyed.”

“This will be the happiest Christmas we have ever known,” said an aunt, Mrs. J.J. Keenan.

The details aren’t as clear on the second incident, but he was captured in March 1942 , perhaps after another of his planes went down. Months after another MIA telegram reached Miriam Road, the Housemans learned of their son’s capture.

He remained at Bilibid until October 1944, when the Japanese, desperate for manpower, decided their thousands of POWs could be put to better use rebuilding Tokyo.

Houseman and the others were stuffed into the dank lower levels of the Arisan Maru, one of three ships used on this mission. Conditions on these hell ships were so deplorable that many prisoners died of asphyxia, starvation, or dysentery.

Though the ships offered no outward clues to their human cargo, Allied commanders, according to Gregory Michno’s 2001 book, Death on the Hell Ships, knew prisoners were aboard. They decided to attack anyway, Michno wrote, because, in their view, destroying the strategic materials on board was more vital than saving the POWs.

About 5 p.m. on Oct. 24, as the Arisan Maru moved through the South China Sea, an American sub torpedoed it. Only nine of the 1,781 civilian and military prisoners survived. Overall, more than 20,000 POWs died in attacks on 13 hell ships.

By then, Houseman’s parents had moved across the Boulevard to a larger twin home at 956 Foulkrod St. The next telegram found them anyway. Their son had been aboard a sunken Japanese ship and could not be accounted for.

Eight months later, on a late June afternoon, when the playground on Summerdale Avenue was likely teeming with children, the last telegram arrived.

Eddie Houseman’s parents opened it, as they had all the others. This time, there was no reprieve. One nightmare was over. Another, which would last the rest of their lives, began.