One hundred fifty years ago today, President Abraham Lincoln stood before a crowd of ten to twenty thousand people, gathered in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where the bloodiest battle of the Civil War had raged the previous July. Fifty thousand had died.
On November 11th, 1943, when Veterans Day was called Armistice Day, my grandmother sat down to write her youngest son, my Uncle Frank. She had received two anxious, confessional letters from him, telling her how he got into an argument with a sergeant and was now paying the price in demerits and restrictions.
Frank was no troublemaker. Oh, sure, he was a mischievous kid in high school, fun-loving, and an occasional prankster, but everyone who knew Frank found him warm and charming. In this letter Frank describes an altercation that ensues between him and a sergeant who accuses Frank of not performing his duty. Frank knows he's not at fault and argues back. Well, in the military, that doesn't fly. See what happens.
Letter 11-10-43 Dear Mom We had some more snow here last night and the campus looks beautiful. I’m feeling fine and just wrote out an application for a pass again, but I don’t think I can get it. We had [...]
Less than two years after Pearl Harbor, the lives of every family in America were upended, and that included the lives of those in my former community, West Garfield Park. In my family's relatively small West Side Chicago church, Bethel Lutheran, nearly 100 boys were in the service—and several girls as well. That's 100 families with sons (and some daughters) in harm's way. The anxiety must have been palpable.