I was the assistant creative director of advertising for a department store in St. Louis Missouri when an airplane carrying the governor of Missouri slammed into the earth. I designed an ad that recognized that event, and his death; the text was appropriately subdued, as the store was not interested in making sales, but acknowledging tragedy. I remember that day, and the days that followed it because I lived in those days. There are days coming up that we will recognize and memorialize — days that few alive actually lived through, but of which many should be reminded.
My eldest daughter — my grandchild delivery device — once asked me if I wanted to see some of the historic sites of her state. She lives near, and once lived in, Morristown New Jersey, which is famous for, among other things, George Washington’s winter headquarters in 1777. She has read some things I have written about this country’s history and thought that I might want to touch the history of Morristown. I told her “yes,” but history does not adhere to me. I read it, live it, record it and forget it. I am a child of the 60s, and I do not remember them. Until I read about them. I lived in St. Louis, Missouri for many years, and took my two young children to play in the fountains across the street from the Old Courthouse, where, in 1847, Dred Scott sued for his freedom from slavery. In all the time I lived 11 blocks from that historic structure, I never entered it (though I photographed a wedding couple in front of it).
I was born in the historic city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, named for William Pitt, the First Earl of Chatham (a fact that I don’t remember learning when I lived there). I have been on the grounds of Fort Pitt, in Point State Park, but I do not think I have ever been in the museum there. According to the John Heinz website, “(t)he strategic location of the fort — at the Forks of the Ohio River — helped to shape the course of American and world history.”
The copy director of the St. Louis advertising department had a mother who was a nurse on D-Day. The director said that her mother went ashore on D-Day, and had other stories of her time at war. I do not claim to know if this is true, but the war nurses’ daughter was a graduate of one of the most respected schools of journalism: I believe her. She told me that she was trying to record her mother’s memories of that time and those days. I don’t know how much she captured before her mother’s death, but I hope that her two daughters will be able to read of their grandmother’s contributions to the war effort. Tom Brokaw, broadcaster and writer, coined the term “The Greatest Generation” to describe the people born between 1901 and 1924, whose men went to fight World War II. There were more than men who waded into the waters of history and washed the blood of war from weary bodies, but we must rightly remember the great masses of men who lived and died in that time.
As for my three children, they are grateful that their father did not go to war, and may not know the full nature of the sacrifice that is required of those who do. June 6th, 2014 will mark the 70th anniversary of D-Day, a great and bloody gash in the history of World War II, and we should spend some part of that day in memoriam.