Once he was gone, so many stark and surreal decisions had to be made. His house was a wreck. I had known that much was coming, having to wade through all that mess. His office was cluttered with years and years of papers. He never threw anything away. And it was often difficult to determine what was garbage and what was something that needed to be saved. But there were also so many surprises, like the daily journals he kept for decades upon decades. There were more formal memoirs he had typed and gone over. There was a World War II diary, a tiny little booklet inside a Ziploc. There were tokens treasured throughout the years, some of which I still don't understand. He had a rock collection, but he never labeled any of the rocks, so I didn't know their significance. There were cartoon figurines, dozens and dozens of loose photographs, and albums so carefully assembled by Mother after she retired. There were letters from relatives and friends, some of whom I did not know. And it went on and on, the detritus of a lifetime. And what does a survivor do with all this ocean of stuff!
I adored my daddy. He was always my fall-back, my go-to, my guide through the minefield. We had a special friendship, a mutual admiration and respect for each other. All my life I was simply a big-time Daddy's girl. It wasn't easy to wade through all the remnants of his days on this earth, especially not right then, when his death was still such an open wound. With the help of my SO we hauled off bags and bags of throw-away. Some of the things that ended up in the fire pit at my SO's place, were sentimentally valuable. Some of those things wound up there unintentionally. I didn't know what they were -- trip logs from the many many cruises and car trips my parents went on, photos of long-forgotten places. I foolishly thought I could get it all down to one box. One small storage bin, something more manageable than this whole house full of nostalgia. Those weeks of cleaning house were a huge struggle. I was looking for important things, but how to tell exactly what that was or might be. I was looking for legacy. I ended up with several boxes, and more than one bin. I ended up with priceless photographs, pages of memoirs, and treasures that have found special places in my life now. But I know I also know that I inadvertently threw some of those treasures away.
And then there was his World War uniform. Hanging inside a heavy garment bag in the office closet. I knew it was there. It wasn't a huge surprise. I had come upon it many times in my girlhood, when it didn't mean much to me. Everybody's dad had fought in the War. It was still pretty fresh in the 50s and 60s. Daddy's best friend had lost both his legs in the War, in the Battle of the Hurtgen Forest. Another friend had a deformed hand, a wound received when his unit invaded Italy at Salerno. When asked what he did in the War, Daddy always said he was "footman." I didn't know what that meant, but it satisfied me and I repeated it many times. But the truth is, he was in a unit of the Army Air Corp that repaired B-24 bombers damaged in combat. He never fired his weapon in battle, but his squadron was frequently under bombardment. Statistics I have read say that it took 25 men in support units to enable a single fighting man to do the actual business of dispatching the enemy. Daddy was one of those 25.
At first he worked in the sheet metal factory, repairing flak holes in bomber skins. Then he was in the propeller unit, repairing bent up props that had crash-landed or been otherwise shot up. He packed parachutes for a time, a job that probably seemed small and inconsequential but that saved so many lives. Then one day, about halfway through the war, the CO of Daddy's unit asked in desperation "Does anybody around here know how to type?" Before the War Daddy had worked for Western Union. He had typed, in kind of hunt and peck fashion, a few telegraph communiques. He raised his hand in answer to his CO's query, and became the squadron typist. He got pretty good at it, and was promoted to corporal, the youngest man in his squadron. They called him "Baby," which was the same thing he was called at home, so it felt normal to him. In fact, the whole experience of war was pretty good, his coming of age years, and his memories of those days attested to that. Which was why he kept his uniform so neat and clean in that garment bag for 67 years. He had gotten married in that uniform, because it was the only suit of clothing he had that fit him after the war, and lots of servicemen got married in theirs, too, in that year of a hundred million weddings -- 1946.
There it was, still hanging in his closet, same as it had been when I was a kid. But what to do with it now?
A dozen years before I had met and befriended a man who had been a fighter pilot in the War. He had helped me with research I was doing on a novel. We had met several times for lunch, and I had visited him and his wife at their home. He had shown me a foot locker filled with his War memorabilia. There were invaluable things in that foot locker, 50-caliber shell casings fired from the guns of his plane, a fighter pilot's oxygen map, a survival kit, a Nazi flag he had captured, and on and on and on. I had said to him, "Jack, this stuff should be in a museum." And he had answered that was a decision that would have to be made by his heirs.
Heirs indeed. Now, I was having to make that decision. Daddy's uniform, the big leftover keepsake of my father's war, should also be in a museum. It was pristine, looked the same as it had when he last took it off and hung it in the closet. No moth holes. No ragged places. No rusty spots. It was still olive drab, with all the appliques neatly sewn on where they should be. It was museum-quality. I started calling around. I really had no idea where to even begin. I spent several days on it, and finally, lo and behold, someone returned my call. A man who ran the local museum in the town where Daddy had spent the last 18 years of his life. They were collecting things for a military exhibit. He did not have an Army Air Corp uniform. He was excited by the uniform and wondered if I had other things that could be added, any letters, diary entries, could I write a little something about his service in the War. Of course, I could. That's what I am, a writer, and I had listened to Daddy's War Stories all my life. I had escorted him, and even hosted, one of his Squadron Reunions. I started going through his memorabilia with an eye towards what might make a more interesting exhibit in a museum.This past Monday, January 27, 2014, almost exactly one year after he died, Daddy's museum exhibit opened. He isn't the only soldier honored there, but he is one of them, and his is the first thing you see when you enter the front doors. I almost could feel him smiling at me when I looked at it there, on opening day.
