Who is LaVerne’s Dad?
At 80, LaVerne Worrell knows little more about her birth father than his name
erry Grove Barbera wants to give her ailing mother a one-of-a-kind present for Father’s Day, an elusive gift for which she has looked high and low and in vain. She’s shopping for the answer to a mystery that has bedeviled her family for nearly 70 years.
“Mom’s going to turn 80 this week in a nursing home,” said Barbera, 56, who grew up in Waverly and now lives in Washington State. “She’d like to know about her real father before she dies.”
The puzzle concerns a Virginia-born tugboat man — a blue-eyed, sandy-haired engineer in his early 40s named Harrison Benjamin Worrell and known as “Happy.” Worrell vanished over the winter of ‘39-’40 after sailing from Baltimore on a tug, destination unknown.
About a decade later, a 12-year-old girl named LaVerne was rooting around in the basement — nosing into things the way kids do — and found a box with her birth certificate.
Turns out she was not LaVerne Marie Hatt but LaVerne Marie Worrell, daughter of Harrison Worrell, of whom she knew nothing. Seven decades later — laid up with Parkinson’s in a Towson nursing home, her mind slipping — she doesn’t know a whole lot more.
After discovering the truth, LaVerne closed the box and put it back where she’d found it, never saying a word and never receiving one.
The loose threads of the story — the name of the tug on which Happy left Baltimore, a hunch that a death benefit was paid and, most vexing, the absence of a death certificate — are the kind that tie families in knots for generations.
The one person who could unravel it -- a chain-smoking, club-footed, thrice-married farm girl from Rock Hall named Myrtle Whittier Joyner Worrell Hatt — has been dead and buried in Glen Burnie since 1993.
Myrtle was LaVerne’s mother and Worrell’s second wife. Her story, according to information collected by Barbera, is one of tragedy and loss followed by new beginnings and more loss.
Two of her brothers drowned, and another was killed by a truck, all young men. She had to give up a son in a custody battle with her first husband with whom she also had a daughter who died young. A second daughter fathered by Worrell — Geraldine – died of pneumonia around the age of 1. About six months after Geraldine’s death, Happy sailed into oblivion.
“So many questions,” said Barbera. “Did he Worrell die on the boat? Was it a boating accident? Did he hurl himself overboard from grief at Geraldine’s death? Did he have
Tenemies? Shady dealings from the bars?”
Or, she asked, “Did he just walk away one day and make it look like an accident?”
The man LaVerne called “Daddy”— Clyde Martin Hatt — is listed in the 1940 census as a lodger in the family’s Linden Avenue home in Reservoir Hill. Myrtle is identified as a widow. A year later, Clyde became Myrtle’s third husband, fathering two sons with her, raising LaVerne as his own and keeping mum. He’s dead, too.
As an adult, LaVerne found the courage to ask her mother about Worrell but got nowhere. Later, she hired a detective who located a niece of Worrell’s living in Dundalk — LaVerne’s cousin Catherine M. Sibiski, now in her mid-80s.
“Happy was a good dresser and he played the harmonica,” said Ms. Sibiski to Barbera last year over dinner. “He was always working on a boat, he’d be gone sometimes for six months at a time.”
Several years older than LaVerne, Ms. Sibiski has hazy memories of an insurance man delivering a check to Myrtle, but she’s not sure for what, only that the man who came to the door was saddened by the chore. And she said that her family looked for a “LaVerne Worrell” for years, not knowing she was going under the name “LaVerne Hatt.”
It’s all a lot to keep straight — was the tug called the “Scudik” as LaVerne thinks she saw once in a book or the “Skudik” or something not even close? — and hardly the half of it. Angry at her grandmother’s silence, exhausted by dead-ends and obsessed with knowing more, Barbera persists.
“Myrtle stonewalled when Mom asked her about it, didn’t want to go there,” said Barbera, “Why didn’t she talk?” What could have been so awful?”
Today, not much seems particularly awful. While some people share their traumas to get beyond them, others vomit secrets all over the place for a few moments of attention.
Back in Myrtle’s day — when the closest thing to a shrink for working people in Baltimore was the parish priest — folks might have dissected someone else’s heartaches over a clothesline or a glass of beer. But not their own.
“Unforgivable, especially after my mother already knew,” says Barbera. “Good or bad, some stories would have given my mother a personal narrative.”
Personal narrative: the beginning, middle and end of who we are and where we come from ornamented with anecdote and geography, recipes and relatives. Remember that time? Who could forget? Fifty years from today, how many kids will remember the ugly tie they picked out by themselves for dear old Dad on Father’s Day? Maybe how Pop spilled tomato sauce on it and Mom said the stain was an improvement. And, somewhere down the line, laugh about it with their own children.
“I would love to give my mother a rich story about her father,” said Barbera. “It’s the only thing left that she could use.”