Family & Fatherhood

Sixty years after their father vanished beneath the Pacific Ocean, his three sons say they’ve solved the mystery of his disappearance

In the afternoons, the boy would shoot baskets.

There, back behind the clapboard house at 31 Mountfort Road, in the Boston suburb of Newton Highlands, the 12-year-old with the basketball was reaching out for his father—wherever he was.

“I’d tell myself, If I can just make five in a row,” he says today, “ then my dad will come home.”

The first shot might have drained right through: swish. Shot two—perhaps a bank off the backboard—could have rattled once on the old steel rim’s front, then dropped through too, the ball making a hollow, echoing punnng as it hit the concrete driveway. Shot three might have been an easy layup. And where to take shot four? A free throw? Another safe bank shot?

Today, when 77-year-old Bruce Abele tells this story of his own past, he still gets a catch in his throat. “You know,” he says, tears welling in his eyes as he walks down the stairs of his rambling Victorian home outside Boston, “I never did hit five straight.”

The news had arrived as a Western Union telegram to Catherine Abele, a 38-year-old wife and mother of three young boys. It began, “The Navy Department deeply regrets to inform you,” then went on to say that Mrs. Abele’s husband, Lieutenant Commander Mannert L. Abele—known to everyone as Jim—was “missing following action in the performance of his duty in and in the service of his country. It is hoped that definitive information in regard to your husband will soon be received.”


And that was it. For six decades, there would be little more: no Navy statements of precise locations, no official chronology of events. Instead, a haze of mystery descended over Jim Abele, skipper of the Navy submarine USS Grunion. With that telegram, his fate and that of his submarine’s 69 other crewmen tumbled into a haunted gray zone between life and death, leaving a boy alone on the driveway behind his house, using a basketball to battle the riddle of his missing father and working to maybe—somehow—save them both.
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