A CIA Agent

An Alcoholic Playboy

A POW

Steve Earle

Every June, Americans take a Sunday to celebrate fatherhood. This year, as in years past, families will hop into their SUVs and sedans, have brunch at Pargo’s or Shoney’s, and present dad with a matching tie and shirt. But for every father who represents some kind of suburbanized ideal, there’s a maverick who—for better or worse, or both—isn’t what you’d call typical. Maybe, like Mike Gaffney’s father, he’s a secret agent, albeit with none of the glamour that we assume the job entails. Or maybe he’s an irresponsible, drunken playboy, like Jean Harrison’s father. Below, we present four such tales, as four Nashvillians talk about their very unusual dads.

The Dad: Ray Gaffney, CIA agent

The Son: Mike Gaffney, site acquisition, wireless telecommunications

Mike Gaffney was about to leave for college in June 1972 when he found out his father wasn’t simply a government bureaucrat—something he’d long suspected. Ray Gaffney was being transferred from Washington, D.C., to Greece, and while Mike knew it was a big promotion, he wasn’t unduly impressed.

“What are you going to do in Greece?” he asked his father, who was sipping his pre-dinner martini at the kitchen table.

“Mike,” his father said, “who do you think I work for?” The family’s frequent moves—Indonesia, the Philippines, Saipan, interspersed with stints in the Washington area—flashed through Mike’s mind.

“That’s a good question,” he said. “I really don’t know. You work for the government, but I can’t keep up with which part of it.” Sometimes it was the Department of the Army or the Navy. Sometimes it was an agency dealing with overseas communications. It was never anything Mike could really put his finger on.

“He looked at me and said, 'I work for the CIA,’ ” Mike recalls three decades later. “He said he’d been with them for 19 years. My mouth must have hit the table. I was in an absolute state of shock. I said, 'Wow! You’re kidding me, aren’t you?’

“If you looked at the lifestyle we lived in Virginia, the last thing you would have thought was CIA. My dad dressed the way a lot of guys did back then—dark suits and ties, short-sleeved white shirts. He was a regular Joe. My idea of a spy was Sean Connery, that kind of pseudo-intellectual sophistication. Thunderball was my first Bond movie, and to me that was it. My father had a wife and five kids and a Ford Fairlane—stripped, not even a radio in it! You would never have thought he’d been a spook.”

Today Mike works in site acquisition for a wireless telecommunications company in Middle Tennessee, where he remained after attending Tennessee Tech in Cookeville. Still, it’s no trouble for him to recall his days as a politically interested but naive suburban D.C. teenager. In an era when government in general and the CIA in particular were losing popularity in a lot of quarters, Mike had found himself drifting at least a little in that direction. So when he found out what his father did for a living, he managed to blurt out, “Gosh, I’ve been saying some disparaging things about the Agency at school, and now I find out my father works for them.”

The CIA certainly explained a lot of things, ranging from his father’s unexplained “business trips” that could last for months at a time to a briefcase that transmitted a tracking signal. Mike knew his dad worked in communications, and the best he can piece it together, it involved gathering and disseminating information using cutting-edge technology in the world’s hottest spots. “The beauty is that everything I’ve told you is secondhand or my observation,” he says. “My father has never told me anything, period.”

The elder Gaffney did disabuse him of some glamorous suppositions. “My father told me about watching a spy thriller on TV with one of his colleagues,” Mike says. “The agent was being tempted by this gorgeous woman, and the guy turns to my dad and says, 'Why doesn’t that ever happen to us?’ Looking back, I realize he was part of a CIA community of really dedicated guys that had families and went to work as part of this incredible thing. They were a very special kind of people.”

Ray Gaffney had come out of a working-class Catholic neighborhood in Holyoke, Mass. He graduated high school as valedictorian in 1944, joined the Navy and went off to war. After a stint as a radio man in a bomber, a Grumman Avenger, he returned to Boston and went to a trade school for communications. He took a job as a radio operator for TWA, then worked at a radio station in Norwich, Conn. One of his instructors at the radio school told him of a government job, and Ray jumped at it. It was with the CIA. The Agency did background checks on his entire family, including his new wife, then sent him to Washington for training.

His first assignment was in Indonesia, and Mike, the family story goes, was conceived during a layover in Holland on the way. From there on, it was a life filled with exotic locales and frequent moves, a life whose rhythm didn’t really make sense until that kitchen table conversation.

“It was a mixed blessing,” Mike says, “because when I found out what he did, I felt like I could never quite measure up to his standards. If your dad is a four-star general and you become a two-star general, it’s not enough.”

Ray retired after the Iran hostage crisis, when the overrunning of the American embassy symbolized a seismic shift in how the U.S. was perceived by the rest of the world. He did consulting work after that and was in Egypt when President Sadat was killed. “I said to him one time, 'Why don’t you think about trying to find work in the private sector?’ ” Mike says. “He told me, 'There’s nobody that needs those particular talents.’ ”

Much of what Mike learns from his father is tangential, based on casual conversations about current events. When the post-Sept. 11 anthrax scare made the news, his father saw pictures of the envelopes on TV and said, “That is not the handwriting of someone from the Middle East.” Later, it was determined that the sender was indeed most probably an American.

Looking back, Mike is grateful for what could seem like an oddly disjointed boyhood. “My father gave us a lot of great opportunities,” he says. “I’ve gotten to see places and things I’m sure I’ll never see again.”

And that brief kitchen conversation remains a life-changing moment. “From that point on,” Mike says, “I never saw him in the same light again. I don’t think I could have done what he did, dealt with the pressure he was under. He was a very mature man, a very smart guy, and I’m incredibly proud of him.”

The Dad: Samuel Abbott, playboy

The Daughter: Jean Harrison, attorney

Jean Harrison is a Nashville attorney, a wife, an animal lover and a woman whose stated aim is “to get through life doing the least amount of harm possible with the most good.” But that isn’t what you notice first about her. It’s that she’s all quick wit and acid tongue. She’s been that way almost as long as she’s been talking, and she knows why.

“Around my biodad,” she says, “children were all about entertainment. If you weren’t entertaining, you were probably going to get screamed at.” Her father was a playboy, “a pill-popping alcoholic” whose personality was as unpredictable as his sources of income.

There were adventures, some of them great, like the day on a North Carolina beach when she wasn’t more than 4. “I could swim by then,” she says, “and he was heaving me into a tide pool that was probably 4 feet deep. My mother was having a complete coronary, but I was laughing and having a great time.”

When they left the beach, he gave his precocious daughter a little prompting and sent her on an errand. “He thought it would be funny to have a 4-year-old go into a liquor store to order a bottle of wine in French,” she says, “and he sent me in with the money. I can just barely remember it, but my mother must have been livid.”

Home in those days, she says, “was like Studio 54, with things going on all night. Even if he was there alone, it would be a one-man party. My mom would put my little sister and me to bed, and he’d get us up to entertain him. That was his quality time with us.”

Jean was expected to hold up her end of a conversation, and she feared what would happen when she stopped amusing him. “If you were going to hang with his crowd when he was up, you’d better conduct yourself intelligently, even if you were 4,” she says. “If he got bored, he’d walk off. He was erratic, and I both feared him and wanted him to like me. His mood swings were dramatic. He didn’t think anything of giving us a drink. 'Have at it. It’s right over there,’ he’d say. If we wanted to stay up all night or throw mud everywhere, that was OK. Then he could turn on a dime and be very angry that you weren’t doing what you were supposed to do.”

Jean was conceived during the Summer of Love, in 1967. Her mother was a trained opera singer, a lyric soprano working as a cocktail waitress in an upscale bar in Kansas City, Mo. He was on an auto racing circuit, and said he was a former Green Beret. She married him within weeks of meeting him.

“It’s hard to say what my mother’s motivation was,” Jean says. “I suspect it was to get away from an overbearing mother. He was older, intelligent, well-traveled, drove fancy cars and by all appearances he had a significant amount of cash at his disposal. I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. Then she found out that he hadn’t quite gotten around to divorcing his last wife, which would have been his second or third.” Eventually, she says, the number of wives would run into double digits. She has half-siblings from their mid-teens to their 50s—“I don’t even want to guess how many.”

From a wealthy East Coast family, Samuel Abbott lived the fast life while he could, but it was soon a touch-and-go existence. “We moved practically every other month when I was a young child,” says Jean. “He alienated his family and the money dried up. My mom told me stories about how we lived this lavish lifestyle with nothing to support it. At one point, she had a ring repossessed off her hand on Mother’s Day. We lived in some very large places because he was completely scamming people.”

By the time she was 5, “things were falling apart. He picked up different jobs along the way. It had gotten to the point where I’d seen more than I should have. I remember tremendous fights, and the sheriff coming to the house, and all the drama attendant to tossing someone out on his ear.”

She and her mother and sister moved into a trailer next to her mother’s parents in Kansas, and for the next two years, her father was on the scene only occasionally. “He would do things like have us visit him at the presidential suite at the Crown Center in Kansas City, one of those chichi hotels, the day after it had been vacated by President Ford.”

The last time she saw him was during a trip to Denver in 1977. “I remember going up into the mountains with him and he gave me a stuffed animal. Then I don’t remember anything. He dropped out of our lives by the time I was 8. He wasn’t paying a dime in child support. My mother became a single mom with two small kids, working and going to school. It must have been quite a feat. We’d get a photo of him fishing for marlin off the coast of Mexico, or a postcard from Monte Carlo saying, 'Wish you were here,’ and we’d be living on peanut butter or ramen noodles.”

Her mother eventually got a degree and married an attorney she’d met while in court on a case. By that time, Jean was a handful, and she doesn’t envy her stepfather. “I was a difficult child,” she says. “I’d grown up independently, and I had a mouth on me. He was a strict disciplinarian, and I wasn’t interested in following the program.”

She was bright enough to do very well in school, and her personality gave her an extra push. “I was incredibly driven to get approval,” she says, “and I could get approval for good grades. I was so desperate to make everyone happy. It was a direct result of both fathers. First I was trying to please an irrational, all-over-the-place, partying-till-dawn, drug-addicted alcoholic, and then I was trying to please his exact opposite.”

Her good grades helped get her into Vanderbilt Law School, but the course of her life changed in the wake of her mother’s death the Christmas before she enrolled. “It was a pretty dramatic punctuation for me, a sudden, unexpected death,” she says. “She was always talking about the stuff she was going to do, and she died before she got the chance. I made it a point that I would never let the trappings of life get in the way of what I wanted to do.”

Jean was in law school when her sister Susan came down with an auto-immune disorder. In need of a family medical history, she tracked down and called her father. “That just about sucked the life out of me to even have to do it,” she says. “He took it pretty well, probably because no one else will talk to him. He wanted to establish an instant relationship, [but] he hasn’t earned the right to do that.”

If there is, within her look back at the parenting she was dealt, a note of affection that has flowered well after the fact, it is for the stepfather who dealt with what she had become at the hands of her biodad. “I can look back,” she says, “and have great appreciation for what he must have suffered.”

The Dad: Bill Lawrence, fighter pilot, Vietnam POW

The Daughter: Laurie Lawrence, assistant professor of emergency medicine, Vanderbilt University Medical Center

One day in 1972, during her junior year in high school in Encinitas, Calif., Laurie Lawrence realized her father was never coming home again. Five years earlier, Navy Capt. Bill Lawrence had been shot down over North Vietnam, a fighter pilot whose luck had run out on his 76th mission.

“They had a father-daughter event at school,” she says, “and I remember it just hitting me like a ton of bricks that I didn’t have a dad and wasn’t ever going to have a dad. In my mind, he was dead. It was the first time it ever really seemed permanent.”

On a June afternoon in 1967, Laurie had learned he’d been shot down when a friend’s mother, rather than her own, picked her and some friends up after an afternoon sporting event. “Where’s my mom?” she asked the friend’s mother, who remained strangely silent.

“I knew what it meant when the official car was at our house,” says Laurie, who had grown up with an older brother and younger sister on and around military bases. Her mother knew the life as well—her own father had been shot down in the Philippines during World War II. “It was so typical of my mother—she was real matter-of-fact. She told us, 'Your father’s been shot down and they don’t know if he’s alive.’ We weren’t allowed to cry. It was just, 'That’s how it is. There’s nothing to cry about, so we’re just going to carry on.’ She was just like the mother in Pat Conroy’s The Great Santini.”

For months there were mixed signals. The family received a stilted letter, ostensibly from her father. Laurie’s mother declared it a fake and said he probably wasn’t coming home. She eventually began dating someone else and finally remarried. Laurie let herself hope for a time that her dad was returning, but as the war in Vietnam dragged on, that hope faded and finally died for good by the time she turned 16.

When Laurie was a small child, Bill Lawrence was a test pilot at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland—“perhaps the ablest...Pax River was to produce,” according to James A. Michener in his book Space. It was high praise, since Lawrence’s colleagues included the core of the future astronaut crew—Alan Shepard, Wally Schirra, Pete Conrad, Jim Lovell. In fact, it was only a minor congenital heart valve problem that kept Bill Lawrence, a star scholar/athlete at Nashville’s West High, from an almost certain future as one of the first astronauts.

He rose through the ranks, alternating long periods at sea with work at bases in Florida. He flew in the missing man formation at the funeral of President John F. Kennedy. Laurie saw him as a strict but fair disciplinarian who wanted to pass on life’s lessons as he saw them. “We were expected to do our best, to give something back to society,” she says. “We weren’t here just to take a free ride.”

By the mid-’60s, Vietnam was heating up and Capt. Lawrence, prompted by his own sense of duty, wanted to go. He got his wish, becoming a squadron leader in the Pukin’ Dogs, a legendary group of fighter pilots. Then, on June 28, 1967, after four hours’ sleep aboard the carrier Constellation, he led a 35-jet bombing raid on Haiphong. When his F-4 Phantom was hit, he could have turned and reached the safety of the Gulf of Tonkin, but he decided to take the hard-to-control plane through the rest of his mission and try to knock out North Vietnamese who might otherwise shoot down more American jets.

In late 1972, Laurie lived with her mother, stepfather, sister and two stepbrothers near San Diego. She had gone through a period of depression and fought with her stepfather, chafing at his attempts to discipline her. No one talked about her father. Then one day in 1973, the world turned upside down. “It was one of those really beautiful days in January,” she says. “I was out riding my bike with some friends when my stepdad came down the road in his car and said, 'They just announced that your father’s going to come home. You need to go home right now.’ He looked like someone had hit him with a wet fish.”

Laurie was just as shocked. “You know how you pinch yourself to see that you’re not dreaming? That’s how I felt. I knew there was going to be both happiness and sadness. I thought for a while that my mother would go back to my dad.”

Her father returned in March with the scores of other prisoners who had been held in the infamous Hoa Lo prison—the Hanoi Hilton. Capt. Lawrence had been there nearly six years, enduring seemingly endless torture and solitary confinement. Laurie and her siblings met him in Memphis. “I remember hugging him and he was real, real thin, but it was weird that there was really somebody there,” she says. “To me, he’d come back from the dead.”

She would get to know him again during the ensuing months and years, changing her college plans from UCLA to Vanderbilt to be nearer to him. But no matter how closely they drew together, there was one part of his life he wouldn’t share with her. “He’ll tell me blow by blow about the operations he’s had since he’s been back,” she says, “but he doesn’t tell me anything about Vietnam, about being tortured, unless it’s really light—maybe talking about the nicknames they’d given the guards and how they teased them.”

He and Laurie’s mother talked once after his return, but there would be no reconciliation. The family returned to the business of living out his creed of giving back. Laurie became a physician, and she currently oversees the night shift in Vanderbilt Medical Center’s ER. Her sister Wendy became an astronaut, her brother Bill Jr. an information technology manager of the Americas Region with Edison Mission Energy.

Capt. Lawrence remarried and got on a career fast track, becoming a rear admiral and deputy chief of naval operations. Laurie has since made peace with her stepdad, “apologizing for some of the less than lovely things I said when I was 14.”

In recent years, Bill Lawrence has faced another battle, working through the effects of a stroke. “He wasn’t supposed to survive, and then he did,” says Laurie. “I think he came out of it saying, 'I’m going to beat this.’ We thought he might get back to normal, but it was a devastating stroke and it’s a miracle he’s gotten as far as he has.”

His attitude in the face of this latest adversity continues to teach lessons. “I think he’s always been a guidepost to us,” Laurie says. “I think of him as an overcomer. One thing I’ve learned from my dad is that we can go a lot farther than we think we can. I learned just to persevere and hold to love and duty. I’ve always been so thankful I can be proud of who my dad is. That’s such a gift.”

The Dad: Steve Earle, musician, former addict, activist

The Son: Justin Earle, musician

“I think the road was definitely a big part of it,” Justin Earle says of the journey his father undertook from brash, rising newcomer to imprisoned junkie in the space of a fast and furious decade. “It’s like Robbie Robertson said in The Last Waltz: 'It’s a goddamn impossible way of life because every night’s a party.’ ”

Justin was 4 in 1986, when Guitar Town turned Steve Earle into a star, and he was 13 when the drugs finally put his father in prison. Steve is clean these days, his career again flowering. Justin, now 20, is looking for publishing and recording deals and playing shows with his own band, The Swindlers, his eyes fixed on the very road that helped both to grease the skids downward for his father and to give him work as he learned to live again.

When Justin was born, Steve Earle was a 26-year-old staff writer at Silverline/Goldline Music whose “When You Fall in Love” was about to become a hit for Johnny Lee. Justin’s mother, Carol Ann, was Steve’s third wife. “I don’t think he or my mom were prepared for me,” says Justin. “I don’t know if they knew what they were getting into.” By the time he was 2, the marriage was over.

Growing up, Justin knew enough about his dad’s job to realize it was special, and he was never shy about that. “I’d brag my ass off about it,” he says. “I thought it was big shit. I remember probably one of my first fights was when I told this boy that was my dad on the radio and he called me a liar.”

Meanwhile, he and the Nashville school system were not getting along. “I probably attended about eight different schools and got pitched from about every one,” he says. “I think it came from just being a wild-ass boy whose mother didn’t really have any idea of how to raise a young boy.”

Justin hung out with a crowd of tough older kids and wasn’t above vandalism and the like. There was the occasional lecture from dad, but mostly not much was said—Steve had problems of his own. “In the early ’90s, when he got pretty bad off, I still saw him a good deal,” says Justin. “Not as much as one would probably hope to see their father, but he always made sure that we had what we needed.”

Justin remembers much that was good. He and his father would go to the movies now and then, and once, when he mentioned he was a fan of AC/DC, the elder Earle “sent a package from L.A. with every AC/DC album ever made on tape, because I didn’t have a CD player at the time.”

The worst of his father’s drug use, he says, “was kept pretty hidden from me, mainly because I lived in town with my mom. Plus, I just didn’t want to acknowledge it. Even if I did, what was I going to say?”

In the midst of it all, he even lived with his father and stepmother Lynn for a while. “I just went to school and came home, and he’d be there or he’d be gone. He’d show up sometimes, he’d wreck cars, all kinds of strange stuff. He was never really all that violent a person. Everybody’s got this image of his being this mean tough guy, but he’s a teddy bear. Of course, substance can draw the evil out of people at times. Overall, in the position that he put himself in, he was the best dad that he could possibly have been.”

One memory from those years remains particularly clear: “I remember one Christmas, either right before or after he was in jail, so I was about 13, I walked into the living room and he was sitting on the couch wearing a Santa Claus hat with a Malcolm X emblem on it. 'Ho ho ho, motherfucker,’ is what he said.”

If Justin had missed much of the worst of his father’s behavior, others in the family hadn’t, and Steve’s imprisonment was by no means a matter of sorrow. “We all kind of thanked God that they got him,” Justin says. “For months, we knew he was going to be in one place. Everybody knew where to find him. Not that jail is safe or anything. There’s just as much dope in jail as on the street, but there was a sigh of relief from everybody in the Earle family.”

Partway through his sentence, Steve was transferred to a treatment center and, as Justin puts it, “he got it.” The father-son relationship, though, paradoxically reached its nadir when the elder Earle pulled out of his drug-induced tailspin. He threw himself into his work, staying in the studio and on the road, and his teenage son grew bitter. “I thought, 'He’s clean now, but what good’s it do if I can’t see him?’ ” Justin recalls. “It just took me a little while to realize that’s what he does.... [Being] a musician requires being out on the road, then being in the studio working on a reason to get back out on the road.”

Justin was as wild as ever at home, and when Steve began to take him on the road, it was out of necessity. “I was getting in too much trouble here. He couldn’t leave me at home.” Justin played guitar on “Here I Am” on 1997’s El Corazon, and for much of the accompanying tour he joined his father onstage for the song. He had begun playing at 12 or 13, influenced profoundly by his father. “I started off playing in a string of the worst punk bands that ever graced the face of Nashville. Then, when I was 16 I started fingerstyle blues. That’s when my music really took off.” Father and son lived together for a brief time in Chicago, a period during which Justin says he found his own singing style under his father’s guidance.

For the past two years, Justin has split his time between his own projects and touring with his father as a guitar tech and occasional singer-guitarist. They do occasional gigs together as a duo. Back in Nashville, his reputation has not yet had the degree of rehabilitation his father’s has had. “I was a little shit for years,” he says. “I just did the exact opposite usually of what everybody said to do. The only thing that matured me and pulled me out of it was playing music.... I’d probably be in jail if it wasn’t for music.”

The bitterness that Justin once felt toward his father has long since been replaced by respect and friendship. They play each other new songs. Both are big fans of Oscar Wilde and poet Ted Hughes, as well as the Beat generation. During a European tour, they went to museums together. “I think I have a relationship with my father that most kids wish they could have with theirs,” he says. “We sit around and we just act like friends. We watch baseball and football together, cuss and scratch ourselves, stuff like that.”

His father does all the things a 20-year-old would want him to do—providing advice, a sounding board and, when necessary, cash. “He’s good with all that—especially the advice. He has a very sound head on his shoulders and, yes, I’m a 20-year-old and I’ve been out on my own, but I still need to borrow money once in a while.”

Father doesn’t lean on son much more than he did a decade ago, even when it comes to drugs. “He just tells me he knows I’m going to do what I want to do, but if I’m smart I’m going to take what he did and maybe learn from it and not have to experience it at that level. We’re a lot alike. We’re both bullheaded and loudmouthed. I don’t know how my dad was when he got drunk, but I’m sure he was just as wild as I am when I get drunk.”

He says they don’t talk much about the old days. “Especially when there’s a rocky past involved,” he says, “the best thing you can do, when everything’s been apologized for and everybody’s doing all they can to make good on what they’ve done, is just to leave it alone.”

At the core, as they hit the road together again, it is the music that unites them, and Justin is still watching, still learning. “The shows have a vengeance about them,” he says. “They’re very exciting to watch. It’s one of the most amazing things. I couldn’t be more proud of my father for what he’s done. He’s come out of the darkness and is doing his best to make up for it, to make up for lost time. He’s doing everything he can.”