Lyle Eesley

Lyle Eesley was born August 13, 1914, in Grove City, Ohio — the seventh of Charles Leonard and Lillie Dale Chenoweth Eesley’s ten children. He died on July 25, 1942, at age 27, in the Cabanatuan Prison Camp on Luzon in the Philippines, where the Imperial Japanese Army had concentrated American and Filipino prisoners of war captured during the fall of the Philippines.

That his name appears in the 1985 Eesley Family History with the bare facts and that place name — “died July 25, 1942, Cabanatuan Prison Camp, Luzon, Philippines” — is itself the family’s record of what happened. Cabanatuan was the largest of the Japanese camps in the Philippines; the men who arrived there in mid-1942 had survived the Bataan Death March. The death rate in the first six months was catastrophic.

What the rest of the family’s wartime then looks like in light of this

Lyle’s death is the date that reshapes the Stella story. Cousin Roberta’s 2019 reconstruction — “she may have joined the scene after Lyle died” — turns out to put Stella’s arrival in the Eesley household within months of Lyle’s death in the Philippines.

The shape of it: Charles Leonard’s son was killed in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in the summer of 1942. The U.S. government in the same months was rounding up Japanese-Americans on the West Coast and putting them in camps. Charles Leonard, a few months after losing his son in one war camp, brought a Chinese-American teenager — whose appearance was the sole reason she was at risk of ending up in the other one — across the country and into his house in Bexley, Ohio.

That refusal — to let the loss of his son turn him into someone who would inflict a related loss on someone else — is the act that the next two generations remembered. Stella stayed in the house through the 1950s. The family gathered around her in the photographs that became this archive. Charles Leonard fell into depression when she finally left.

Lyle has no surviving children in the family register; his line ends at this entry. He is the brother whose absence the next generation lived around.

Sources: Mary Eesley Bean, Eesley Family History, March 1985, p. 8; cousin Roberta’s 2019 oral note; the historical record of the Cabanatuan POW camp.