Glenn Charles Ames

Glenn Charles Ames, son of Arletta Pearle Bucher and Charles Henry Ames, was born 28 March 1913 in Martintown, Green County, WI, the village founded by his great-grandparents Nathaniel Martin and Hannah Strader. When he was very small, the family home was reestablished a mile or so to the south in the small town of Winslow, Stephenson County, IL. Glenn was the only child of his parents’ marriage. However, he had four older half-siblings. His mother had earlier been the wife of Frank B. Ritter until Frank had died of tuberculosis at the beginning of 1910. The two children from that union, Thelma Ritter (born 1907) and Harold Ritter (born 1908), were part of Glenn’s daily life. His other half-siblings Thelma Ames and Margaret Ames, the daughters of his father and his first wife Vesta Sewell, were raised in Indiana and Glenn had only intermittent contact with them. In a sense, Thelma Ritter was the only sibling he would really know over the long haul, because Harold was struck by a train and killed when Glenn was thirteen years old.

During Glenn’s early childhood his father Charles worked as a harness-maker, but with the decline in the use of horses, switched to shoe repair, eventually operating his own cobbler shop in Freeport, Stephenson County, IL, a larger town the family moved to in August of either 1925 or 1926. Glenn was part of the Class of 1929 of Freeport High School. He graduated at only sixteen, a mark of his abilities and his drive for accomplishment.

Glenn (shown right as a small boy in Winslow) was among the first in the greater Martin/Strader clan to go to college. He spent his undergraduate years at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. For his final year, he was president of the local chapter of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity. He was also deeply involved with the Cavalry Rotary Officer Training Corps (ROTC). Upon his graduation in 1935, he followed through on his plan to go to law school, obtaining some of the necessary funding by agreeing to serve in the U.S. Army Officer Reserve Corps. In taking these two steps -- leaving for law school, and entering the military -- he reached the watershed juncture of his life story. First, his career in uniform would dominate the rest of his life in one fashion or another. Second, his choice of law school -- the University of Southern California in Los Angeles -- meant he would forevermore be a Californian.

As soon as he reached the west coast, i.e. in 1935, his stint with the Reserves began. In 1937, he was assigned to the 11th Cavalry Regiment, part of the now-romanticized “Old Horse Cavalry.” The 11th, originally created in 1901 to serve in the Philippines, had been based at the Presidio of Monterey since 1919. From 1937 to 1940, Glenn would journey up to Monterey and spend two weeks annually in his Army role, starting out, of course, as a second lieutenant. He may also have had to spend one weekend a month on duty. Otherwise, he was free to concentrate on the civilian side of his existence. He received his L.L.B. in 1937, and with a fellow Cavalry Reserve officer, his good friend Bud (full name unavailable), opened a practice in the Taft Building in Hollywood on the corner of Hollywood and Vine, next door to the Brown Derby restaurant. Glenn and Bud, both bachelors at the time, shared a house in Benedict Canyon in the Hollywood Hills. Their landlord and housemate was Forest Wayne Richards, a commercial artist employed by the motion picture industry.

Forest Richards was not the only movie-industry acquaintance Glenn would acquire. Because his office was where it was, Glenn inevitably dealt with clients who were involved in the movie and radio industry, and met many such people on a casual basis. Eventually he came to meet June Marie Jones, a secretary at Warner Brothers studios. She was also, or had been, or soon would be, the personal secretary of the star of a popular radio series. June was nine months older than Glenn. A daughter of Richard Walter Jones and Laura A. Davidson, she had been born 29 June 1912 in British Columbia, and had lived part of her childhood there, where her father had been a telegraph agent in Kamloops for the railroad. She was, however, an American citizen from birth. In the 1920s, after a period spent in Bremerton, WA, June had come to Hollywood along with her divorced mother Laura and her brother Richard Walter Jones, Jr. She was a resident of Manhattan Beach at the time Glenn proposed to her. The pair were wed 2 November 1940 in Hollywood.

(This view of Benedict Canyon was taken by Glenn in 1937 so that he could mail his parents a photo of his dwelling place. Taking along his beloved dogs -- a pair of German Shepherds -- Glenn climbed upslope to a vantage point where he could get a good angle looking down the canyon. The home he shared with Bud and Forest is not actually in view. It was hidden from the camera by trees. However, it was right next to the house visible in the lower center of the image.)

Chances are when Glenn first joined the Reserves in 1935, he viewed his involvement as a means to finance law school and did not contemplate a full-fledged military career. However, it is clear from his statements and actions throughout life that he always understood that he would have to serve full-time if war arose, and was honored to do so, even if it placed him on the front lines. Thanks to the course of world events, he was indeed forced to set aside his civilian career for quite some time. As 1940 progressed, America’s stance toward the hostilities in Europe and the Pacific rapidly shifted away from isolationism, particularly after the fall of France. More and more of the U.S. populace came to see the nation’s entry into the war as inevitable. Certainly this was the attitude of the Roosevelt administration. Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall was increasingly given the support needed by both President Roosevelt and the U.S. Congress to get the army battle-ready. In 1940, Reserve units were made Active. In September of that year, a civilian draft was initiated. Soon all elements -- Active, former Reserve, and new draftees -- were moved out of their barracks to training sites where full-fledged practice exercises -- Marshall called the process “toughening up” -- could take place. Glenn and June’s decision to marry was a classic case of a couple opting to make their bond formal in the face of an uncertain future.

Both Glenn and his partner Bud were affected by the call to Active duty. Bud would be sent off to the Philippines and would be there when Japan seized control. He would die in 1942 as a prisoner of war, one of the victims of the infamous Bataan Death March. Meanwhile, in 1940, both Bud and Glenn remained in California. Their roles consisted of reporting to their duty posts and being integrated into day-to-day, year-round military life. Glenn and the 11th remained in Monterey until November -- an article about the wedding in the “back home” newspaper, the Journal-Standard of Freeport, IL, describes the groom as being a resident of Monterey -- at which point the 11th was reorganized into two squadrons and a variety of troop companies and sent to a pair of camps in extreme southern California, close to the border with Mexico. There they proceeded with their part of the toughening-up process. The 11th’s claim to fame in the peace-time interval of the 1920s and 1930s had been horsemanship. (Monterey’s mild climate had allowed the horses to be worked twelve months a year.) Now the men became better accustomed to rapid mobilization on vehicles as well as horses, coping with desert conditions, forward observation and artillery bombardment, and much more.

Glenn was part of the 11th’s First Squadron, which trained and was housed at Camp Seeley near El Centro in the Imperial Valley. He was given command of one of the newly-created companies. This drew the ire of a fellow officer of equivalent rank, who believed that all troop command positions be given to dedicated career military men like himself, i.e. graduates of West Point, not men who had gone to civilian universities through Reserve programs. But the fact was, merit was the measuring stick, and Glenn was deserving. The two men, serving in their various capacities in different theaters, would in fact ultimately reach the rank of brigadier general at virtually the same time.

Being in the Imperial Valley meant Glenn was somewhat local to home and could see June on occasion, but obviously they were together far less than newlyweds typically are. This may have been one reason why Arley and Charles Ames chose to spend the winter in California after the wedding, and soon decided to remain permanently, buying a place just outside Reseda. It gave the couple the chance to get to know their new daughter-in-law, and it gave June some companionship and a way to get to know Glenn better, even though Glenn himself was not often present in the flesh.

Glenn thrived in his new role. Even in the relatively quiet interval of 1941, with the 11th and the rest of the U.S. forces still undeployed, he found ways to distinguish himself. With Conrad L. Boyle, he co-authored an article on the logistics of military radio communication between units in the field called “Making It Work,” published in the May/June 1941 issue of Cavalry Journal. And in June, 1941, he saw his first “not a drill” action. Four thousand night-shift workers at the North American Aviation plant in Inglewood, CA walked off the job and formed a picket line. Their main grievance was genuine -- their employer was paying them sub-standard wages, and this at a time when they were being asked to step up their performance levels in order to keep up with production needed to fulfill the contracts with the military that their bosses had obtained. F.D.R. was in no mood to allow work stoppages in industries critical to the war preparations effort. He had already taken firm steps in earlier incidents, but the Inglewood situation was particularly ominous as it was the biggest labor walkout in the U.S. since the maritime workers general strike of 1934. Roosevelt was also alarmed by American Communist Party affiliation on the part of some of the union reps. The U.S. Army was directed to seize control of the plant. As part of that action, Glenn rushed his armored car/machine-gun company from Camp Seeley up to Inglewood and occupied the property. Fortunately there were no shots fired. The government forced a mediation under the aegis of the National Labor Relations Board (an entity that had only been created three months earlier, in part to be available should situations arise like the one in Inglewood). A fair contract would soon emerge. Employees returned to the assembly line, the total interruption in production having been quite short. For all the drama, the resolution was satisfactory to all. North American Aviation would continue to be awarded military contracts for years to come. The workers got a better deal. Even the communists among the union officials came away content, because with the invasion of Russia by Nazi troops the same month as the strike, the party ceased to favor an isolationist stance. As for Glenn, he ended up with a feather in his cap for his handling of the seizure and occupation.

With the attack on Pearl Harbor, the military went through a frenetic rearrangement. Glenn was part of the absorption of the 11th Cav in early 1942 into the 41st Infantry Division, which was made up of National Guard units from several states in the Pacific Northwest. For a short interval, the 41st was tasked with defense of the coast of Oregon and Washington, where an attack by Japan was a concern. But soon, these responsibilities were handed off to other units for the duration, and the 41st was sent to reinforce the besieged Allied forces in the Philippines.

Glenn and his comrades did not reach their intended destination. The fleet was still crossing the Pacific when the order came to divert to Australia. The Philippines had fallen to the Japanese. For Glenn, the defeat held specific anguish, because his friend and partner Bud was among those captured.

The 41st was designated as a reconnaissance element. In other words, they were expected to “get in first” and assess conditions. This meant Glenn was thrust right into the thick of one of the most daunting tasks of this phase of the war, which was to patrol the northern coast of Australia, and then scout the coast of New Guinea and the many islands of Indonesia, checking for enemy presence. Time and again, Glenn and his crew proceeded along reefs, islets, and beaches where they might, without warning, find themselves under attack, possibly by an overwhelming number of the enemy.

Over the course of the war, Glenn “saw some things,” as the saying goes. In later years he kept silent about the full tapestry of his experiences, or shared it only with fellow veterans. The fragments he revealed to family members make plain the intensity of what he dealt with. One of the tasks he was obliged to perform was to visit various small islands in order to pay bounties to indigenous warriors in exchange for evidence of the actions the natives had taken against the Japanese. The evidence sometimes was as innocuous as captured rifles or ammunition stores. Sometimes it was far more grim, as in severed heads. Later, as Japanese forces began to retreat, leaving some of their units isolated and having to resort to desperate measures to survive, Glenn confronted a new sort of ugliness. Out of food, Japanese soldiers had taken to cannibalizing their Korean service troops. When the Americans arrived, they found trussed-up, half-eaten bodies hanging horizontally from the floors of thatch-and-bamboo stilt houses.

(The snapshot here of Glenn in northern Australia is one of four that survived among his mementoes. He is the man at the left, tilting his glass up to his mouth to drink.)

In October, 1943, after a year based in northern Australia and seven months in New Guinea as a patrol commander, Glenn was promoted to major and became part of the general staff corps of the intelligence department at division headquarters. He remained a major until the end of the war. He was part of the long, deadly push up from New Guinea to the Philippines and beyond. As the plans to invade Japan itself were put in place, Glenn was the intelligence officer of a task force charged with securing the port of Hiroshima. Glenn might well have expected this would be the most difficult and dangerous assignment of his career, and might represent the point when his luck would run out. Hiroshima was host to a large Japanese Army Corps headquarters, which was thoroughly “dug in” in fortified bunkers in the lower levels of the old palace. On the shore itself were machine-gun and artillery emplacements. In the water, mines. Off-shore, vessels of the Imperial Japanese Navy, ravaged through that force was by the summer of 1945, were positioned to defend the harbor. As it was generally believed the Japanese would resist the attack on their home territory the way they had defended Okinawa and Iwo Jima, the prospect facing Glenn was daunting in the extreme.

But then came the dropping of the atomic bomb. The scene confronting the American forces when they arrived at the city was far different from what they had been anticipating only days before. Hiroshima was in ruins. The only structures left standing were a handful of modern reinforced concrete buildings. Everything else had been made of wood, and had either been levelled by the force of nuclear blast itself or consumed in the subsequent firestorm. The devastation included the ornate upper levels of the palace. The army headquarters, tucked in the lower levels amid the original stones walls and the newly-wrought concrete bunkers, had come through somewhat intact, and there were even survivors -- but the Americans met no meaningful resistance. Glenn personally accepted the surrender of the remnant of the enemy fleet. He was among the very first Allied officers to enter the city itself. For him, the end of the war was not a matter of men in suits signing their names to pieces of parchment. It was the smell of char and the sight of blackened rubble extending miles in every direction.

Upon Glenn’s return to the United States, his dress uniform replete with medals (including the Legion of Merit, Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Cluster, Air Medal, Asiatic Pacific Medal with three stars and arrowhead, and Philippines Liberation Medal), he was offered the chance to continue in the Active military at the rank of lieutenant colonel. He was strongly tempted to accept. However, his mother pleaded with him not to make the Army his regular career. Arley had spent years fretting that her baby boy he would be killed, and beyond that, she had been deprived of his mere presence. Glenn chose the middle ground. He remained in the military, but returned to the Reserves, meaning he would be able to spend most nights of the calendar year sleeping in his own bed at home, he could finally have a genuine chance to get to know his wife, he could reestablish his law practice. His mother would be able to see him every day if she chose. A grateful military heirarchy gave him an assignment that would allow all of that to occur. At the rank of lieutenant colonel, he was put in charge of the 310th Armored Cavalry Regiment, an Army Reserve unit stationed in Fort MacArthur in San Pedro, CA. He and June settled into a home on Parthenia Street in Sepulveda.

Glenn’s father passed away in 1948. (Glenn is shown at right with his parents earlier in the decade.) Fortunately this was the last death in the immediate family for some time to come. In balance, his sister Thelma Ritter Welch was no longer living far away. Thelma had gone to Chicago in 1929 and he had seen relatively little of her. But in 1943, while he had been in New Guinea, she had relocated to California along with her son and daughter.

The old law practice in Hollywood having been so thoroughly disrupted, and with Bud no longer there to re-create the old partnership, Glenn opened a new office in Encino in 1946. At first, he was the sole lead lawyer, but he soon combined forces with John M. Jeffrey, another veteran of World War II who had opened a practice in Tarzana. The combined firm, Jeffrey & Ames, was based in Encino.

June offered to be Glenn’s secretary. She certainly had the skills and experience. Glenn preferred that she remain a housewife. Apparently it was a matter of pride with him to be able to support her to such a degree. She ceded to his wishes, though given that the couple remained childless, it was not as though her domestic responsibilities were overwhelming her. Perhaps Glenn wanted to leave every opportunity open for children to fit into their life. He wanted to become a father. He particularly hankered for a son who could “carry on the tradition.” Alas, that was not to happen while June was his spouse.

Having been left without Glenn’s companionship during the war, June had already learned how to fill her days, and so she continued as she had before. She was part of a social milieu of interesting characters thanks to her Hollywood connections. Moreover, her mother Laura was now the wife of Fred Bauman, a close friend of Donald Douglas of Douglas Aircraft, and this meant June had entré into the circles of southern California’s rich industrialist set. June and Laura regularly included Arley Ames in their get-togethers. Arley was now a single woman, and both Laura and June had spent years on their own, and they made a lively team of gal-pals.

From the late 1940s through the mid-1960s, Glenn continued to be able to coordinate the logistics of his two-part career, inasmuch as his military postings remained local. This was easier to arrange than it might otherwise have been the case because he transferred from the Reserves to the California National Guard. The change took place in January, 1951 when he was offered, and accepted, command of the 3rd Battalion, 111th Armored Cavalry Regiment of that branch of the service. In the early part of his tenure, the unit was stationed in Van Nuys. In 1952, the regiment relocated to a new armory in Burbank. (By coincidence, this is just across the freeway from Valhalla Memorial Park in North Hollywood, where Thelma Ritter Welch would ultimately be laid to rest.)

In 1953, Glenn assumed command of Combat Command C -- to later be known as a brigade -- of the 40th Armored Division, rising to full colonel with the assignment. During the next several years he held a variety of assignments culminating in his promotion to brigadier general in 1961.

In 1965, the race riots in Watts flared, prompting the Los Angeles Chief of Police to call in the National Guard, an order expanded twenty-four hours later by the lieutenant governor. The 40th Armored Division was one of those put into action. Martial law was declared. At peak deployment, nearly 14,000 Guard troopers from various units, including some from northern California, were involved. The violence was quelled. Glenn emerged from the incident looking good, given credit for handling his role well, with a great many people understanding that if he and the other commanders had been less competent, the situation might have escalated to something even more frightening. (By contrast, Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown became the target of criticism due to his absence from the state and lack of a timely summoning of the troops.) Without planning to do so, Glenn had put his name in the public eye and set the stage for a major career opportunity.

Glenn retired from the Guard in the latter half of 1966, leaving as a brigadier general. He had been a civilian only four months when he accepted the appointment by California’s new governor, Ronald Reagan, to be the state’s adjutant general. That is to say, Glenn, promoted now to the rank of major general (and with a pay grade equal to a lieutenant general in the federal military), became the top man in the California National Guard. He would remain in this position until, or shortly before, Reagan left office in January, 1975.

Glenn came to his new, high-profile post at a time when the Vietnam War was becoming increasingly unpopular, and peace protests increasingly common. Posterity credits the activists of the 1960s as serving the cause of morality and social conscience, but there is no doubt that some of the marches, flag-burnings, and sit-ins of the era included a worrisome amount of violence and vandalism. Glenn was a “firm hand” to deal with such behavior. He had little tolerance for the protesters’ attitudes; indeed, it would seem he saw any declarations of a moral stance as a subterfuge meant to conceal less savory motives. He saw the protesters as unpatriotic, or even as outright criminals. He was infamously quoted in a 1969 article in Time magazine, characterizing his “opposition” thusly: “The avowed mission of these anarchists and revolutionaries is to bring America to its knees, to destroy our present system of government, to defeat ‘the establishment’ at every turn, and to replace this with absolutely nothing but irresponsibility, a drug culture, and permissiveness.” To those who disagreed with him, Glenn was a spokesman of the Old Guard, taking a position at odds with the zeitgeist. Those capable of an objective assessment credit him with being a proactive leader who was instrumental in crafting and implementing many innovations to help the government cope with not only civil disturbances, but the chaotic conditions associated with disasters such as earthquakes, wildfires, and mudslides.

Glenn’s responsibilities meant a move away from Northridge, where he and June had been residing for many years, and into a new milieu, away from old contacts. This may have been a factor in the development of a bond with his secretary, Maxine Myra Adler. At the end of 1969, after twenty-nine years of marriage, Glenn divorced June Jones. He married Maxine 11 June 1970 in Las Vegas -- essentially as early a date as they could legally have been joined.

Maxine, a daughter of Polish immigrants Jack Levitt and Frances Lidskin (both names are rendered here in their Americanized versions), had been born Maxine Myra Levitt 7 May 1935 in Chicago, Cook County, IL. Raised in Chicago, she had then become a Californian. At about age twenty she had married Albert Lee Adler, also originally from Chicago. They had briefly divorced, then remarried in 1962, then gone through a final divorce in 1968.

The decision to cast off June and marry Maxine must have been a stunning blow to Glenn’s mother, who had enjoyed such a close bond with June. Any observations Arley actually made are not available, though; by the time the event occurred, Arley was in a rest home, fading away. The change was more than just a substitution of one woman for another. The union gave to Glenn something he had never had with June -- fatherhood. His new status began immediately, in that he was instantly a stepfather to Maxine’s daughter, who had been born in the late 1950s. It would not be long until the family increased with the birth of a son. In some senses, he was a miracle baby. Now in his late fifties, Glenn surely had long since been reconciled to having no descendants. Maxine, for her part, had not been sure she would ever get to be a mother again. She had endured a miscarriage early in her relationship with Albert, and then in 1965 had lost a baby at the age of sixteen hours. The new pregnancy had its scary moments, too, culminating with a premature delivery. The baby weighed only a little more than three and a half pounds at birth. Fortunately, he went on to thrive.

When the stint in Sacramento was done, Glenn and Maxine went back to the San Fernando Valley. His military career had come to its final and complete end. He was recognized with a federal rank of major general, and a state rank of lieutenant general. As for his law firm, there was no need to bring that part of his life to such a complete halt. It was no problem to adjust his workload as it suited him. The option existed to limit his involvement to serving as an advisor and emeritus partner while letting his younger associates handle all the case load, if he so wished. One of the people upon whom he depended was Carl J. Lane, who had joined the firm some fifteen years earlier.

Glenn at his retirement “photo op” in the governor’s quarters. Glenn is standing next to Governor Reagan. The woman is Maxine Myra Levitt Adler Ames. The teenager is Maxine’s daughter -- Glenn’s step-daughter. The little boy is the couple’s son. The man on the left is unidentified.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States. He offered Glenn a job in his administration. This was quite an honor, but Glenn decided it would be one he would have to decline. To accept would have meant relocating to Washington, DC, uprooting the household, forcing his son to change schools, and once again neglecting his business. The simple fact was, the timing was wrong. Glenn was due to turn sixty-eight scarcely two months after Reagan was to be inaugerated. He had earned some quiet, stress-free time. Moreover, he had his health to think of. Having been a heavy smoker and regular cocktail-hour drinker for his entire adult life, his lifestyle habits were catching up with him. (He finally quit smoking later in the 1980s when his doctor assured him that if he didn’t, his body would not take the additional abuse and he would die.)

Glenn passed away at a Valley Presbyterian Hospital in Van Nuys 2 October 1990. His remains were interred with full military honors at the California National Guard Cemetery, 950 W. Sepulveda Blvd., West Los Angeles.

Despite being so much younger than Glenn, Maxine only survived him by a little more than three years, passing away 26 January 1994 in Los Angeles County. She was interred with Glenn at the California National Guard Cemetery.

After the divorce from Glenn, June Jones Ames lingered in the Sacramento area, dwelling for many years in the suburb of Fair Oaks. She had the company of her mother until 1985, inasmuch as Laura lived to be ninety-eight years old. June inherited the tendency for longevity, and did not pass away until 22 March 2006. Some of the final phase of her life was spent in convalescent care in Sacramento, with death itself occurring at Mercy General Hospital.

Descendants of Glenn Charles Ames with Maxine Myra Levitt

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