Wednesday, March 05, 2014

December 1, 1945

In all the office renovations, I found a pile of old pictures I've never seen before. Thankfully, whoever took this picture labeled it and gave a date - December 1, 1941, at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C. The man in the darker uniform is my father, and the woman to his right  is one of his lifelong friends, Betty White, while the next woman to his right is Annette Davis, another lifelong friend. They all grew up together in the army, dated, married other people, but through the years stayed in touch. The man to my dad's left, who didn't make it into the picture, is Jack Featherstone, another boyhood buddy, who was killed in WW II in Europe. My dad served in the Philippines, where he was born.  His VPI roommate was killed on the beaches of Normany. What's amazing about this picture is that all these young cadets, West Pointers and VPI, would enlist in the military right after Pearl Harbor, which was just days away, and they don't know what's coming.

Do any of us? 

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