Memorial Day Memories

(Elm Grove, Wisconsin)

 

    Memorial Day was Monday, but I've been having trouble writing about it, because I have such bittersweet memories this year. The 2008 political campaign has really excited me as an American (and as a reporter), because I have never seen the public so engaged in the process in my lifetime. But Memorial Day was especially hard this year after my dad passed away. Our family home of 47 years is being sold. The house is right on the Memorial Day parade route and has been the scene of family parties for decades. This was the final one!

 

    
The Elm Grove parade is, I suspect, like many across America. Small town; lots of veterans; lots of grandparents and babies; lots of everything in between. It's "Americana" and very heartwarming and colorful.

 

    More than anything, I was fixated on the veterans in this year's parade, many of them of the World War II era, as was my dad. They are dying at a rate of more than a thousand a week. Like World War I vets, they will eventually be gone. But we must always hold them in our individual and collective national memory. As Tom Brokaw characterized them, they are "The Greatest Generation" that bailed us out of the Great Depression, saved us in World War II, and then built the most vibrant and generous democracy the world has ever known.

 

    Ed Rolland was a lander on Normandy Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944. I asked him what being recognized in this parade more than 60 years later meant to him. "Oh this is great," he said, sounding a bit choked up. Thousands of people, young and old, waved American flags as his car passed by. Many shouted, "Thank you!" There were vets from Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and other conflicts in the parade as well.

 

    A bit about my dad, before I go. First, he loved this parade and the annual party with neighbors and friends. He was the gentlest and most generous man I've ever known - both father and friend. "Doc" was a senior at Campion Jesuit High School in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, the day that Pearl Harbor was attacked. Like many in his class, he would never formally finish high school. "They mailed me my diploma," he once told me. My Grandfather Curtis was a doctor, and my dad was planning on medical school, too. Now, the nation needed thousands of doctors for the war. So he left high school early, took a few basic undergraduate courses in biology and chemistry at Marquette University, and was promptly enrolled in Marquette Medical School with classes year round. There were no such things as spring break or summer recess. The nation was at war. He was a fully-trained and licensed physician at the amazingly young age of 22 and was commissioned a medical officer in the United States Navy in 1947.

 

    The war, thank God, was over by then; but the military still needed all those doctors to treat the thousands of wounded and disabled who came home. Dad was stationed in the Navy at Bremerton, Washington. Eventually he was discharged, came back to Milwaukee, got married and started a family, and began a medical practice. Then the Korean War broke out; and he was called back to active duty, serving at the Great Lakes Naval base in Chicago and commuting for years, while holding a "night time medical practice" in Milwaukee. In 1990 he began working for the Defense Department again, this time as a civilian. He worked 17 years doing military physicals on young recruits at the Military Entrance Processing Service (MEPS). He died a week shy of his 83rd birthday and was still a practicing physician of 60 years at the time of his death. To his family, he was a loving husband, father and grandfather; and we will miss him until the end of time.

 

    
Today's column is dedicated to the memory of Lt. William C. Curtis, M.D. (USN), December 27, 1924, to December 21, 2008, and all those he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with as part of "the Greatest Generation."

As "Papa" would always say, "God Bless!"

 

    

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