|
|
|
|
|
Scrapbooking is popular today, with entire stores devoted to items for pursuing
the hobby. As a child, I filled scrapbooks with selected pictures cut from catalogs and magazines, attached with paste made
from flour and water. Later, I specialized in movie star collections. This is my online scrapbook, featuring whatever I fancy.
Quite likely that will not include idolizing movie stars. The first item is, oddly enough, about a scrapbook; a
special collection from the past.
One County's Greatest Generation
Osceola County,
Iowa, occupies only 397 square miles in the Northwest corner of the state. Like towns and cities across the country, this
agricultural community sent its youngsters to fight a war in lands they never expected to see. Barely more than children,
they turned off the tractor or rose from their school desks and headed for the enlistment office. As green as field corn,
they joined friends who'd been stocking shelves at the grocery, pumping gas at the filling station, working as secretaries,
or plugging a probe into a receptacle and saying, "Number, please," at the telephone office. Some had a year or
two of college under their belt; others handed over their law or medical practice to caretakers and signed on for an unknown
duration. An earlier generation of men who once believed they'd fought the war to end all wars squared their shoulders
and held back tears as they put sons and daughters aboard trains and waved them out of sight. Mothers hung small flags in
the window with a star for each member of the family in the service. A Gold Star signified someone had died for his or her
country.
As the war accelerated, Mrs. George Rehms began clipping from the weekly paper any news related to these
young people. She and her husband had two sons in the service. Later put in a scrapbook, the clippings ranged in size from
two inch items about a serviceman home on furlough to a long account from a soldier who spent three terrible years in a prison
camp in Manchuria after being captured at Bataan. Reverend Leo Berger's eloquent eulogy at President Roosevelt's memorial
service joined reports of Bronze Stars, Silver Stars, Purple Hearts, and too many headlines reading: Killed In Action.
The letter-writers rarely complained and often advised Mom not to worry. The most requested items were letters, cigarettes,
candy, and socks. Bursting with what might have been false bravado, J.E. wrote: "Sometimes I have to get down in the
foxhole as the Germans try and lob a few artillery shells. We've got about all the snipers cleaned out of this area now.
The boys don't have much love for snipers. When we locate their position they come out with their hands in the air yelling
comrad. Well, they don't want to come yelling comrad at me. A person can't take any chance with them. The only good
Kraut is a dead Kraut. I don't believe in taking prisoners." Later wounded at Normandy, J.E. received a Purple Heart.
Seaman J.D. wrote to his wife, Iris: "I see by Mom's letter that you were worried by the Jap's claim
of singeing some of our transports and that you went to church and prayed. It's a good thing someone else prayed because
I hope to tell you I prayed. I saw a couple of them go down myself. When we left San Francisco we went to Pearl Harbor and
from there to Eneivetok, thence to Vliihi in the Carolina Islands and as we passed Yap and Truk we had some Jap planes come
over. We got a few of them and the rest of the yellow birds turned tail and ran. We also had a sub attack but our escort destroyers
took care of him in a hurry. From Vliihi we went to Okinawa where our outfit got it. The Jap suicide planes are the real thing,
as I saw it happen. We brought Marines back from Iwo Jima and also 300 Jap prisoners which we left at Guam. I got some Jap
money, will send it later."
During one period, 13 members of the medical unit of the Iowa National Guard
were missing in action in North Africa. They were later found in German and Italian prison camps. Letters from the prisoners
kept townsfolk covertly updated on their whereabouts, condition and, finally, their release.
Photos tell their
own stories: A woman seated next to pictures of her seven sons in uniform. J.C. Penney's two display windows packed with
pictures of men in uniform. A smiling, youthful airman beside a headline announcing he'd been killed in England. On the
day word reached his parents, they received a letter from him saying that he was okay and that Christmas packages were coming
through.
Among the scrapbook's last entries near the end of the war is this letter:
Dear Mrs.
Rehms:
Recently your son, Technical Sergeant Elmer L. Rehms, was decorated with the Air Medal. It was an award
in recognition of courageous service to his combat organization, his fellow American airmen, his country, his
home,
and you. He was cited for meritorious achievement while participating in aerial flights in the Pacific from December 10, 1944
to April 2, 1945. Your son took part in sustained operational flight missions during which hostile contact was probable and
expected. These flights aided considerably in the recent successes in the theatre.
Almost every hour of every
day your son, and the sons of other American mothers, are doing just such things as that here in the Pacific. Theirs is a
real and tangible contribution to victory and to peace. I would like to tell you how genuinely proud I am to have men such
as your son in my command, and how gratified I am to know that young Americans with such courage and resourcefulness are fighting
our country's battles against the Japanese aggressors.
You, Mrs. Rehms, have every reason to share that pride
and
gratification.
Sincerely, George C. Kennedy, General, United States Army,
Commanding.
Veteran George Braaksma returned home and began farming; he and his wife raised nine children. In 1983, he bought Rehms's
two to three thousand loose clippings at her household auction and painstakingly glued the pieces chronologically into a scrapbook.
He offered to let people stop by his house to see the collection. Interest ran high, and the local printing company produced
a short run of copies. They sold out, as did a second printing. This limited edition book is unpretentious; reproduced the
way Braaksma created it, 140 pages, spiral bound and about the size of a U. S. road atlas; its content, however, circles the
globe.
Newspaper Clippings of Osceola County W W II Veterans could be the most
thorough record of one county's participation in any war. Knock on any door across America during World War II and you'd
find someone touched by the battles raging across Africa, Europe, and Asia. But it's unlikely that another collection
like Mrs. Rehms's would be found.
[The letters used in this article were written long before political correctness
became a part of our language. Altering the text to conform to today's standards would tamper with their authenticity.
I have donated a copy of this scrapbook to the library at the World War II Museum in New Orleans. This essay was published
in the antholgy The Harsh And The Heart, 2011]
Scraps Of This And That
Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from
the successful one is a lot of hard work. [Stephen King] Each
of us needs a sense of where we belong. In every family someone should take the responsibility of becoming its historian;
interview the old people, comb the attic, then write up the information and circulate it. When an old person dies, it's
like a library burning.
[Alex Haley]
Don't tell me the
moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
[Anton Chekhov]
Any story twice told is a fiction. [Grace Paley]
There is a change coming in the lives of girls and women, and it is up to us to make it happen. [Alice Munro,
from Lives of Girls and Women]
When someone winks his right eye at you, it means I love you. [Grace,
at age 4]
A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessities of life. [Henry Ward Beecher]
It had
been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural
wonders, coming of themselves like grass.
[Eudora Welty]
Half of writing is deciding what to leave out. [Abigail
Thomas]
To read a book for the first time is to become acquainted with a new friend. To read it a second time
is to meet an old one. [Anonymous]
Books are the carriers
of civilization. Without books history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
[Barbara Tuchman]
A private railroad car is not an acquired
taste. One takes to it immediately.
[Mrs. August Belmont]
Henry David Thoreau In 1849, unable to find a publisher for his first book, A Week on the
Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau paid to have 1000 copies printed. Four years later it
had sold 214 copies. When the publisher sent the remaining copies to Thoreau, he wrote in his journal, "I have now a
library of nearly nine hundred volumes; over seven hundred of which I wrote myself."
No one can
make you feel inferior without your permission. [Eleanor Roosevelt]
I'm convinced that God puts kids in our lives
so we remember to laugh. [Randi O'Keefe]
Grace
(age 5) toyed with a Black Hill's Gold ring on my finger and said, "That's pretty. Where did you get it?"
"My sister gave it to me, a long time ago. When you're a bit older would you like to have it?"
"No; I can get my own."
Grace
has created a language, a sort of baby babble, but it sounds as if she is fluent in a foreign tongue. She explained
its origin. "It's from English Worlud, before English was alive." I believe she's an old soul, a learned soul, in a beautiful young body, here in our lives.
Grace captures love:
Trying
on last year's summer clothes, she said, "I hope I can wear shorts soon because I've really been missing
my knees."
When she saw her favorite skirt and her mother
said it was probably too small, she said, "Yes, but it still has all of my love in it."
When told her new t-shirt should go in the laundry she rubbed the shirt on her
face and said, "Okay, let me get all of my love out of it then." My take on today's informal (and rude) etiquette:
At a restaurant in
Brunswick, Georgia, the young male waiter approached and greeted my husband and me with, "How ya doin', gang?"
I cringed and said, "Well, okay, but I hardly think we're a gang."
He
made a face that suggested he didn't like being reprimanded, but when he returned with out drinks, he called me Ma'am.
I thought I'd made my point.
Alas, from then on it was, "How're you guys
doin,?" or, "Can I get you guys anything else?"
Sigh. The food wasn't
great either.
Grace, age five, to her mother, "Mom, this is the really great thing about
you. You can think about everything. And you're special."
Another time, "Mom; you're as
precious as a ladybug tulip."
Anticipating a visit to Florida, Grace asked her mother, "How long
before Granny and Grandfather's? (big sigh) I have waited ALL YEAR for this."
At her pre-Kindergarten placement
interview the teacher told Grace it was okay to say, "I don't know," if she didn't know an answer. When
asked by her mother what she didn't know, Grace replied, "I pretty much knew everything."
There's something about a guy in a uniform.
Grace says, "Mom, I'm going to invite one special man to
my birthday party in January. Besides school William, of course. I'm going to invite the UPS man Joe."
Now and then I stumble onto books so rich in language that I would read them for the words alone, even if the
subject did not interest me). Jonis Agee's historical novel, The River Wife, stuns me. Reading
some books, I'll pause at a certain phrase, a particular choice of words, and admire them, but Agee's poetic
language is consistent throughout. And the story is spellbinding.
Regarding the hullabaloo about global warning: Everything
in the Universe is subject to change and everything is on schedule. [Anonymous]
I wonder: Did
the post office ever deliver mail without sufficient postage? I don't think so. Why, then, do today's payment envelopes
carry the information that the post office will not deliver mail without postage?
This stinks. At
the 2008 Summer Olympic's Opening Ceremony, a little girl sang (supposedly) the national anthem. Turns out, she was
lip-synching for the real singer, who was not as "pretty" as the one performing. Even before I learned this
I had quit watching the ceremony after a half hour. The performers had an intensity about them that reeked of trying
to show China's power. The players seemed angry, violent. And...they might have cheated in gymnastics,
with girls who were not old enough to compete. Not your finest hour, China.
Grace, age "five and two quarters,"
and now in Kindergarten, announced that she is an expert on everything. Well, not everything, but almost. In
addition, she has "special powers." She would not elaborate on what those powers are.
Could
there be any sweeter music than this?
I love you forever, Granny. I wish I can keep you forever. I can't wait for
you to come here. That's it. From Grace
My granddaughters enjoy receiving mail. In their lifetime, post
office letters will most likely become obsolete and letters might end up as collector's items. So I write
(type) Grace and Sarah each a weekly and their mother saves them. When William is a tad older, I'll add
him to the letter list. One day Grace and Sarah were drawing pictures to mail to us. Grace was worried that, "Does Grandfather
ever get mail?" Anticipating a visit from us later that week, Grace propped her letters to us on the beds where
we sleep.
Grace sent greetings, typed by her mother via e-mail. Happy Thanksgiving Granny and Grandfather.
I love you Granny and Grandfather! (she had instructed her mother to "Put an exclamation point in there.")
Grace said, "Mom, did you have colors when you were a little girl?"
"You mean like crayons?"
"No," and pointing to her shirt, "like colors, not just gray or black."
"Oh, yes, we had
colors when I was little. There were always colors."
"Oh. Well why are some pictures just gray and black?"
Sarah, at age 6, referring to Grandfather, "He's my boy."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|