The unseen war is preserved in a series of shoebox-sized containers. It’s easy to imagine them in storage at the National Archives & Records Administration facility in College Park, Maryland. One pictures gray cardboard filing boxes stacked to the ceiling in ordered rows, like the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The researcher … More Graphic Images
The internet can be a wonderful place; you search for one thing, you find another. While researching for a man on the MissingMarines roster, I noticed an unusual but familiar name. Pennock “Penn” Bowen was a radio operator with 1/24, and from the sound of his recollections, he might well have been assigned to Company A. … More Eyewitness To Saipan
In the previous post, I mentioned a lesson learned in my graduate program: history does not repeat, it echoes, and historians are responsible for those echoes. We choose how to control them. We emphasize events or omit words in the name of editing, of clarity, or willful distortion. We have to pick what to preserve because we can’t … More The Letters.
As a child, I loved the Fourth of July. It meant loading the blue Plymouth Voyager with beach balls, lawn chairs, sunblock and sand pails, and one of a progression of lovable golden retrievers who would, inevitably, drool all over the back window. Driving four hours (eternity!) to Manchester-By-The-Sea, to be greeted by Uncle Linc’s gruff, … More The Legacy of July 5.
This little painting was saved in a metal box for seventy years. Tucked away with a few old photographs, a few dozen letters, and the odd newspaper clipping. All saved by Margretta Wood, in memory of her son who didn’t come home from the Pacific. I don’t know who did the painting, or who it … More Memento
Gretchen Wood Williams – known to her family as “Big Gretchen,” the younger sister of Lt. Philip Wood and one of the “Dear Girls” to whom he addressed every letter he wrote while in the service, passed away in late August. She had been ill for some time, but the news and realization that she … More Gretchen Wood Williams (1923 – 2014)
