AMERICA 250
"Grandpa Boom-Boom"
As always, unapologetically, unedited.
I am a genealogist by training and by inclination. I have spent a good part of my adult life pulling the threads of family stories apart to see what holds and what doesn't. I (mostly sometimes!) know the difference between a fact and a legend, and I know that the truth usually lives somewhere between the two. So when my uncle pointed to an old black and white photograph of some sort of transport truck hanging on his garage wall and said to me — and I am paraphrasing here, because this was the late 1990s — "Yes, Dad drove that truck. It was left on one of the islands in the Pacific during the Atomic Bomb tests" — I did what genealogists do. I filed it away.
I waited. And eventually, I started pulling the thread.
My grandfather was Howard J. Record (1909-1987). He had a hard life, but he never complained about it, at least not that I ever heard. He had some pretty tough physical disabilities that would have sidelined a lot of men, but he had an eighth grade education and a family to feed, so he drove trucks and he worked in the oil fields. That was his life, and by most accounts he was good at it.
He was a good man.
At some point in the 1950s — and possibly extending into the 1960s, though I can't pin the exact dates down yet — he worked for a company called Crail Brothers Trucking and Transportation, out of Long Beach, California. The company was owned and operated by Frederick W. Crail and his brothers. I know this from family memory, and aside from a 1953 Long Beach, California City Directory, not yet from any primary sources documents. Even though "this" is only about merely unraveling folklore, I want to be honest about that distinction throughout this piece. That is how genealogy works. You start with what you know, and you go looking for what you can prove.
What I do have is a newspaper clipping from the Long Beach Press-Telegram, dated Sunday, January 19, 1958. The headline reads, in bold type: "Oilman Crail Falls Dead on Tennis Court." Frederick W. Crail, the paper reports, was a "veteran Long Beach oilman" who collapsed and died the previous Saturday while playing tennis at the Racquet Club in Palm Springs. He was 57. He was secretary of Victory Oil Co., a firm he ran with his three brothers — Edwin P., George B., and L. A. Crail.
What makes this clipping striking — and I will admit this is the kind of thing that hooks a researcher — is what runs directly alongside it. The headline immediately above the death notice reads: "Nerve-Gas Attack by Missile Seen." The juxtaposition is purely accidental, the ordinary chaos of a newspaper page. But it sets a mood. This was 1958. The Cold War was not an abstraction. The atomic age was not history yet. It was Tuesday.
And dang it, my family couldn't afford a darn bomb shelter. Ugh.
But that brings me back to my uncle's photograph and what he said about it.
Here is what I know, and what I don't.
What I know: My uncle pointed to a photograph of a truck and told me his father — my grandfather — drove it, and that it was left on an island in the Pacific during atomic bomb testing. My uncle was a "salesman's salesman," colorful and confident, and I would not have called him a liar. I believed him then. I have no reason to doubt the core of the story now.
What I don't know: Whether the truck went to Bikini Atoll specifically, or somewhere else. Whether it was connected to Castle Bravo in 1954, Operation Crossroads in 1946, or another test entirely. Whether Crail Brothers had any documented contract with the military or the Atomic Energy Commission. Whether my grandfather's role was to haul the truck to a Long Beach pier, or something else. The photograph itself is gone. My uncle passed away nearly a decade ago, and I don't know what became of it.
With any luck, the photo still exists. Maybe my cousins have it. Maybe it's among my grandmother's things...
What is historically plausible: During the Pacific nuclear tests of the 1940s and 1950s, the U.S. military placed vehicles — trucks, jeeps, heavy equipment — on target islands and on the decks of ships to measure blast and radiation effects. Equipment sent to the atolls largely did not come back. Long Beach was a major military logistics hub. A heavy-haul oil-field trucking company based there, in that era, could plausibly have had contracts to move equipment to the naval docks. I have searched for any documented connection between Crail Brothers, Victory Oil Co., and military contracting. I found nothing — not because the connection didn't exist, but because civilian contractor records from that era are not digitized. If they survive at all, they are in the National Archives. That is where this trail leads next.
There is one other thread worth noting. The Crail family business did not end with Frederick W. Crail's death on that tennis court in 1958. Victory Oil Company, founded in 1934, still exists. A Crail family descendant runs it today, alongside a family foundation in Los Angeles. Whether anyone in that family has records, photographs, or institutional memory that touches on what their company hauled and for whom in the 1950s — I don't know. But it is a question worth asking.
What I am left with is a family story that has the texture of truth without yet having the documentation to confirm it. That is not an unusual place for a genealogist to be. It is, in fact, exactly where the work begins.
Howard J. Record died in 1987. He drove trucks most of his life. He worked for a Long Beach oil company whose owner died in 1958, in the middle of the atomic age, with a nerve-gas headline running alongside his obituary purely by accident. And somewhere, in a garage that no longer exists, there was a black and white photograph of a truck that may have ended up on an island in the Pacific.
I'm still looking for the documents. I'll let you know what I find.
And, I still wouldn't mind a really snazzy bomb shelter. Just sayin'
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