[rollei_list] Re: Veterans' Day/Armistice Day/Remembrance Day
- From: Marc James Small <marcsmall@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx,rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2008 01:28:19 -0500
At 12:21 AM 11/12/2008, Peter K. wrote:
>Only one in the US. He is 108 or 9. Just read about him in one of the
>magazines.
Peter is speaking of surviving US WWI veterans,
and this depends on how you count
"veteran". They pulled three up at the Atlanta
celebrations today. But do you mean COMBAT
veteran or veteran or someone who, as a kid,
picked up some boxes and helped some soldiers.
When I was a lad, back in the longago, we had a
next-door neighbor whose family included an old,
VERY old, geezer. This was in 1958. We all
looked at him with some measure of distrust. One
day, on Memorial Day, he called us over, and told
us that he remembered the Yankee troops coming
home to his Wisconsin hometown in June, 1865. He
would have been around 98 or 99 at the time. Some folks live a LONG time.
In my own lifetime, I knew well a WWI German
veteran and interviewed possibly a dozen vets of
the Russian Civil War. I have interviewed
several vets from the Spanish-American War and
one from the Boer War, and I spoke at some length
with a Marine Corps vet from Haiti in both 1919
and `1921 -- hell, I tried to send his comments
on to Ben Frank, the former Chief Historian of
the Jarheads, but the both of them died before I
could get contact established. But, then, Ben
probably would not have approved of this guy, who
told me that he only enlisted in the Marine Corps
after he was rejected by the Army and by the Navy.
My grandfather, born in 1880, knew his own
grandfather, born in 1807, well. And I knew my
grandfather, who died in 1977, well. The
generations flow together: I live less than
three miles from the Jeff Davis Corridor where a
number of my relatives wasted two or three years
of their lives in convincing the Revolting
Southrons to cease being so Revolting.
There are times when I do feel a pull towards the
Great Chain of Being! If folks start asking
about, they will find their own nexus with the
past. We are all part of history. EVERY older
person has a story to tell. Stop them and, if
they have the time, ask them their tale. "There
are a million stories in the naked city, and this
is mne." Trust me, this is the truth.
Hell, I was flummoxed a few years back on our
sister List, the Leica Users Group, on a person
who had claimed to have met a grand-daughter of
the brother of the latest recognized Tsar,
Nicholas II. It took me a fair amount of
research to find out that, wow! this was a
proper claim and I was caught beams a-lee, as the Brits say.
Sorry to have rattled on to such an excess. If
someone could assist, mayhaps we could set up a Rolei List BLOG?
Marc
Marc
msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Cha robh bàs fir gun ghràs fir!
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