WWII memorial

On Sat, 19 Jun 2004 20:54:35 GMT, "slenon"
wrote:

And I'll bet the great
majority of the wayne p. baileys would not trade all the engraved marble
in the world for the above situation...memorials aren't much good to the
memorialized, but if we must have them, IMO, a jeff is damned sight
better memorial to a wayne p. bailey than some monogrammed marble...
TC,

While descendants may normally good things and may speak volumns about the
men and women who carried the guns and built the planes, oral histories
don't always get handed down in a timely or accurate manner. Three
generations and the memories are largely gone. It's good to have both the
living and the granite memorials. I know a limited amount of my father's
PTO naval history, my mother's Nurse Cadet Corps service, slightly more
about my step-father's NA& ETO AAF history, and quite a bit about my
father-in-law's ETO Army history. My children have little concern for such
history. Should they have children, they'll hand nothing down of that
time. This project is not only a memorial but a belated attempt to document
the scope of citizen involvement in winning WWII.

I thought about the way that line sounded, both as I wrote it, and
afterward, but that's how it came out. To clarify, I think the static
memorials are fine, but are not, at least to me, the most "telling"
memorial. To me, the "best" (if it need be labeled) memorial, be it to
soldiers or civilians, during war or peace, is the living kind. That
said, I wholeheartedly understand and support the desire to see the
"granite" kind, too, and that includes those to all of those who were in
service, whenever, wherever, regardless of the politics surrounding what
got them there.

I have no idea how old your kids are, but I'd offer that if they are
under 20-30, what their interest in family history is now may very well
change at 25-30+, and/or, it might skip a generation, and so, anything
you can get down now might just become treasured one day (which is not
exactly a grand revelation, but...).

TC,
R