Safeguarding A Community’s Story

I posted a recent essay in recognition of an unsung hero who saved Durham’s beloved Bulls baseball team as a favor to a friend who passed away last fall.

It was not on my radar then but within a month, the Durham Bulls Athletic Park which, in part, resulted from his actions would be celebrating the 20th anniversary since hosting its first game on April 6, 1995.

I had begun to write that post five months earlier but the topic was sensitive and it took me time to not only get the tone and timing right but to research documents to make certain that my memory was accurate.

Seth Godwin reminded us a few days go that “Human Beings are story-making engines, and when confronted with randomness, we make up an egocentric version of what happened and it involves us.”

In fact, this is how legends and other myths evolve over time, often even polluting news stories and official accounts, claiming reporters and editors as victims if they don’t fact-check conclusions drawn from interviews including the use of archives and timelines.

It is akin to a “gentrification” of stories, a term used to describe what happens to neighborhoods and organic commercial districts when they become so hip that the original residents and businesses are forced out, identifies are rewoven and sense of place is lost.

As the owner of the Bulls mused with me while at will call after he had read my account, the story of how Durham almost lost the Bulls and his remarkable and deserved redemption from villain to hero is very complex.

He reminded me that before trying to poach (my word) the Bulls from Durham, the mild-mannered Mayor of Raleigh at the time, Avery Upchurch, had given Durham’s mayor a 30-day ultimatum.

He recalled that Durham’s mayor at the time was Harry Rodenhizer but having recently checked time frames related to the unsung hero post, I was able to clarify that the mayor at the time would have been Chester Jenkins, who also happened to also be the first African-American Mayor of Durham.

Based on the tendency now of some Republicans in Congress to cross lines of decorum to disrespect President Obama in ways unprecedented with other U.S. Presidents, I wondered as I walked to my seat if the fact that Mayor Jenkins was black had somehow empowered that ultimatum.

But in my dealings the issue of race wasn’t Harry’s motivation to run for another term in that office, defeating Jenkins.

He was among tens of thousands of disheartened Durham residents who not knowing what three individuals were doing behind the scenes had felt Durham had been too passive in the fight to retain the Bulls.

We remained friends until his death and he was equally incensed whenever he felt officials had passively failed to rise in defense of the organization I led whenever it seemed to become a lightning rod for resentment due to its role during that period, a small price to pay.

Harry, a fiscal conservative who had sent his children to predominantly black city schools back when nearly all white students were in all white schools, hated injustice of any kind.

It didn’t matter to him when I would explain that once a turnaround such as keeping the Bulls is achieved, it is common for those that took stands to experience some retribution, while others rush to be sycophants as redemption creates a new alignment.

To me, being respected was always more important that being liked or given credit.

But by the time Harry was elected in late 1991 the two unsung heroes I wrote about last month had already rallied enough pressure to send Raleigh officials in retreat including opposition to poaching from state legislators, state tourism related coalitions and local taxpayer groups there.

Harry was greeted in April 1992 by a new ultimatum, this time from the new owner of the Bulls, to “build a new stadium by 1994 or else” but that really wasn’t necessary.

One of the three people in the room back then who had worked behind the scenes to back Raleigh off had also been busy searching for a way to finance a new Durham stadium for the Bulls.

By May 1992, less than eight weeks after the second ultimatum, financing for the new ballpark was approved by the City Council and within five months the Bulls had signed a new lease.

Last year, two local news stories surfaced, with a few weeks of one another, mistakenly crediting an organization with the new stadium that was not in existence at the time.

Although that organization’s formation papers were filed within weeks of the time the stadium being approved, ground had already been broken ground by the time that organization commenced its startup.

I suspect that sources for the story were very uncomfortable to read what had been inferred and may have tried to call or email clarification.

But this is much harder than it sounds, especially when reputations are at stake and particularly with a story this complex.  Unless investigative in nature, even at its best news is but a crude snapshot of the real story behind an event.

I learned during my now-concluded four-decade career leading community organizations to be very careful when using the term “we.”

Humorously, a friend with whom I worked in the 1970s and 1980s at my first two destination marketing organizations would often quip when seeing misattributions or takings of credit:

“It is like having (fill in the blank) in high school.  Those who say they did probably didn’t and those who say they didn’t probably did.

But it is more complicated than exaggerating or downplaying resumes.

Often when telling aspects of the community’s story, good reporters would stop me and stop me when I was rattling off information and ask for clarification of my use of the word “we:”

• “we” meaning you personally?
• “we” meaning your organization and stakeholders?
• Or “we” meaning Durham overall?

I learned to be more careful but sometimes I wouldn’t see how misled they had been until the stories appeared in print and/or over the air.

Those two recent news stories dealing misinterpreting facts from nearly 25 years ago may have resulted from making the wrong inferences from an interviewees use or mistaken use of the word “we” assuming that rather than the editorial “we,” as in Durham, the reference was personal or organizational.

But the errors in those news stories also represent a breakdown in process now increasingly more common in short-staffed newsrooms.

Customarily, rather than leaping to a conclusion if a use of “we” wasn’t clear, newsrooms would not only call back to clarify but they would be sure to conduct a quick scan of their publication’s archives from that period.

That is why it is crucial that these two stories be flagged with clarifications so future stories are not contaminated.

Newsrooms should also be sensitive to the human tendency to unwittingly reweave memories with other fragments of peripheral or later involvement resulting, in the words of Godin, in a far more “egocentric versions.”

According to Harvard researcher Dr. Daniel Gilbert in his book and blog entitled Stumbling on Happiness, our memory doesn’t actually retrieve information.

Memory is rewoven or fabricated from the bits of data scooped up by our personal NSA.  This is why it is so important for organizations, especially any type of community organization, to appoint a staff archivist.

Unless corrections to those two recent news accounts are made, those rewoven versions will contaminate news reports for many decades to come, even contemporary histories, until such time that deeper historical analysis comes to bear.

This is why it is crucial for destination marketing organizations such as where I made my career to take seriously their role not only to tell a community’s story but to have the courage to stand up as that story’s guardian by calling or emailing reporters and editors with clarifications, even corrections.

This includes the responsibility to question other community organizations whenever they are tempted to provide egocentric accounts of the past.

A sense of historical accuracy and the importance of delving into archives is crucial to telling a community’s story in the present.

Understanding how easy it is to be credited with things you didn’t do or in which you only played a minor role may also be why I find myself often in retirement leaving breadcrumbs with many of these essays that hopefully provide broader context to those accounts.

I know it is disappointing to those who trade on information to curry favor or perpetuate perceived wounds or settle old scores but I have purposely not linked to those mistaken accounts or sources.

Instead, I have alerted others who can give them a gentle heads up.  “There but for the grace of God go I.

So, as Annie paraphrased to Crash at the end of the movie Bull Durham from a quote attributed to Walt Whitman in 1888, “…baseball is our game: I connect it with our national character.”

Or appropriate to how quickly legends become repurposed, “Man, that ball got out of here in a hurry.”

Happy 25 to DBAP!

Looking Back To Detect the Future

One of the signature artifacts of Durham, North Carolina’s past that has been lost during the eight decades of neglect since a local history museum was first proposed is a calliope.

Beginning less than a decade after the Civil War ended here 150 years ago next month, this musical instrument sat atop the now repurposed Old Bull Building and simulated the sound of a bull at each factory shift change and other special occasions.

I grew up on a cattle ranch in the Rockies so when I first read about this famous calliope, I had no trouble imagining the sound it played (click here to hear a bull.)  It celebrated Bull Durham tobacco and the “Bull City” it was soon to make world famous.

It is important to remember that in 1870 as plans were being laid to erect the Old Bull Building, now a National Historic Landmark, Durham was already very different than the rest of North Carolina.

At the time, Governor W.W. Holden was standing up against gangs of Ku Klux Klan riders who were marauding through nearby counties committing public murders and whippings while intimidating officials from doing anything about it.

Several counties were declared to be in a state of insurrection and state militia were deployed.

These gangs of terrorists were targeting “blacks who did not know their place” and whites who advocated for the rights of blacks.  In fact, maybe the sound of a Bull blaring from Durham was meant to ward them off.

Seriously, this is when Durham residents began talking privately about formation of a separate county which got its unique shape when several pieces of land were lopped off during passage of the controversial 1881 bill in the legislature, enabling voter approval.

But Durham’s industrialists and merchants were divided on another issue, bonds to build graded schools.  Republicans were opposed, arguing that education by families and in private and parochial schools was enough.

Opponents sued to overturn voter approval so voters approved the bonds again while proponents started a “moonlight school” for factory workers.

Artifacts such as the now lost “bull calliope” will be crucial to a fully-functional Museum of Durham History, should officials ever make it the priority public opinion polls have shown for decades.

The compelling essay entitled “Looking at Artifacts, Thinking About History,” notes that artifacts reflect and symbolize changes.  Had the old calliope survived, it would today serve as a clarion reminder that Durham is different, and proud of it.

There are people who dismiss the past by claiming they only want to think about the future.  This is the kind of thinking or lack of thinking that leads quickly to a surrender of sense of place in so many communities.

It is by understanding the patterns of the past that we see into the future.  It is why a class in historical analysis should be required as a prerequisite in business schools for one on strategic thinking and/or strategy making.

With each passing day, Durham loses more and more of its history in exchange for mainstream culture that can be found anywhere.

For those still puzzled about why we should care and in need of lists to check, below are just a few reasons a Museum of Durham History, stocked with both artifacts and the latest technology, is crucial:

• Story Telling. It will give children, students, newcomers and relocating executives a place to get in touch with Durham’s story. People who grasp that stories are more inclined to be engaged as activists, volunteers and philanthropy.
• Synergy. It will augment Durham’s historic sites by providing exhibition space to stir interest in those locations, making them more sustainable. It will complement rather than undermine other cultural facilities and programming.
• Preservation. It will be a vigilant testimony to what makes the community distinct and unique and insulate its character and personality from the pressures of development and “generica.”
• Future Generations. As a repository of innovations and artifacts, it will inspire future generations to build on the temporal qualities that make Durham, well, Durham…creative, entrepreneurial, caring, innovative, accepting, etc.

Maybe it is because I am something of an artifact myself, that this has now become so clear (smile.)

When Equal Just Isn’t Fair

Mentioned often in these posts is that I was born and spent my early years on an ancestral ranch in the Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho, the only son of an only son, a fifth generation Idaho rancher and sixth generation westerner.

But while delving into why that all came to an end, I’ve formed strong opinions about familial succession and distribution of estates.  Fairness often doesn’t mean equal.

More than 100 years ago next month, my great grandparents and grandparents migrated from both sides of the Idaho-Utah line and upper Cache Valley to that nook, about a half a century before I was born, so that their children would have access to land.

Accessible land in Cache Valley and Bear River Valley, part of a 7,500 acre watershed linking three states had already become difficult to find or too expensive.

So the family hitched up four wagons with teams of four horses each, along with a white-top buggy pulled by two horses, several saddle horses, and a hundred head of cattle and headed off on the 15-day, 200-mile trip north.

Between Spring and Snow Creeks, a mile west of the Henry’s Fork River, my great grandparents bought a ranch and homesteaded another while my grandparents and three of my grandfather’s siblings homesteaded others.

Within a decade, my grandparents began buying these parcels up as my grandfather’s siblings decided to turn to other pursuits or ranch somewhere else.

My great-grandfather had remarried two years after my great-grandmother died during the 1918 Great Influenza Epidemic, and inherited a step-family in the process.

As he neared the end of his life in 1936, he appointed my grandfather executor of his estate. But nine years earlier, my great grandfather and his second wife had begun selling parts of his land to my grandparents beginning with what we called the “Hole In The Ground” place.

A third was paid up front in cash with my grandparents paying off the remainder including interest of 7% by supplying half of the annual harvest each year after expenses and taxes.

Having to resolve issues among siblings and step-relations as well as having to buy and reassemble much of the ancestral holdings nearly crushed my grandfather’s spirit for ranching.

It also deepened his reticence for conflict resolution when it involved family.

Due to my grandfather’s health, after that my dad ran the ranch beginning in his teens and well into the 1940s.  After finally being permitted to serve in WWII, he returned to my mom and the ranch in July 1946.

Dad had been able to mechanize the ranch before he left and over the objections of my grandfather to meet the steep production quotas levied as a crucial part of the war effort.

He and mom continued to modernize the ranch after dad returned based on my grandparents commitment for them to inherit the ranch when they were gone.  This included leveraging tens of thousands of dollars of investment in new equipment and buildings.

But in the late 1950s, one of my dad’s three sisters began pressuring my grandfather for “her” share of the ranch, although she had never been much for that way of life or invested any time or effort other than growing up there.

My grandfather backed out of his commitment to his only son and daughter-in-law, inexplicably not even facilitating its affordable sale to them as his father had done three decades earlier for him.

Before her death in January, I took the opportunity during a Thanksgiving visit to ask my mom something more to the story: how she and dad came to the difficult decision to pick up and start a new life elsewhere, leaving those ancestral lands, friends and a generational way of life.

His dad wouldn’t even compensate them for their investment in the ranch because he had not been in favor of modernization in the first place.

Within a year or so, he would sell the ranch leaving it for my grandmother to distribute the estate after he died in the 1964.

I idolized my grandfather, who from the day I was born would travel up from my their house in Saint Anthony to the ranch each day to pal around with me doing chores.

I had only glimpses of how stubborn he could be, second-guessing my dad’s decisions, even insisting on raking hay with a team of horses, while dad and I idled along across the meadow behind him with a tractor and bailer.

It was probably as much that my parents knew they would never be able to run the ranch as they wanted as it was the distribution of the estate that was the final straw.

Relatives were often critical of their decision to leave, including those who stood to gain as well as other branches.

In hindsight, my grandfather could have handled things in many different ways.

As I have seen done here in Durham, even without selling it to my parents he could have granted shares in the ranch to each of his children but a greater share to my parents indexed for the sweat, tears and risks they had in operating it while growing the value of the other shares.

This is an instance where insisting that all shares be equal isn’t really fair.

My parents may have been too young to see or propose alternatives, but in the end, I think they wanted a new start, one where they could call their own shots.

They may have already had inklings that even though I loved the ranch and the history, my inclinations were not toward ranching, nor were those of my two younger sisters.

After leasing a place and being ripped off by a broker, they showed even more resilience by refusing to file bankruptcy and taking on entirely new lines of work, not only paying off the debt but going on to successful careers.

In our last in-person visit, my mom reiterated how much my dad had dearly loved ranching and he was very good at it.  But our parents were clearly more intent on propelling their three children further into the middle class.

Though frequently nostalgic for the ranch, my parents didn’t pine nor did they hold grudges.  Throughout their lives and our time growing up, visits with grandparents and aunts and uncles continued as though nothing had happened.

Memories of ancestral lands and my ranching heritage are romanticized for me now.  Somehow things worked out for the best for everyone involved.

But parents who are facing distribution of estates and businesses need to think very carefully about how to accomplish this, especially if some children are predisposed to the family business and willing to do and invest what it takes to sustain and grow it.

As my dad would often repeat while also applying it to doctors and bankers, “Don’t trust lawyers.”

For me, I have it easy.  Just one kid, and a pretty great kid at that who doesn’t have an entitlement bone in her body.

A Clear Difference

Maybe not in Salt Lake City which I visited over the weekend, but according to Gallup, Utah, is six points more conservative than North Carolina, where I live.

Yet last week the state legislature in Utah voted to bar discrimination against people who are LGBT, something done by individual cities such as Durham, NC but recently voted down in Charlotte, the state’s largest city.

Utah is slightly less liberal or moderate than my native Idaho, just slightly more moderate than North Carolina and more than four points less liberal but the measure passed by nearly 7-to-1 in the House of Representatives and nearly 5-to-1 in the Senate.

Yet it is unthinkable that the legislature in North Carolina, which does not mirror the state’s population when it comes to ideology, could ever reach a similar compromise as that in Utah.

I suspected the Utah law would pass when last month, during a visit to the Pacific Northwest, I saw three Mormon leaders announce the church’s support on the news, quite a turn-around from 2008.

By its actions, North Carolina’s legislature appears to be controlled by “regressives.”

Conservatives want to tap the breaks on progress, while regressives want to take society in reverse.  Nearly all regressives are conservative but only a tiny percentage of conservatives are regressives.

Here, we just happened to put them in charge.

Mormons know a thing or two about regressives too.  The church was founded as restorationist, meaning a return to the original Christian church.

From time to time, regressives have taken a toll, such as during a period in the 1850s known as the “Mormon Reformation.”

It was during this period that at least two of my ancestors who had crossed the Rockies for sanctuary against persecution and discrimination were sanctioned and forced by regressives to be re-baptized for questioning local church officials regarding civil decisions.

North Carolina, too, knows a thing or two about regressives from its past.

The state was ambivalent about the Civil War, with many areas outspoken against slavery and pro-Union until surrounded by secessionist states and threatened with economic isolation and retribution.

Next month, festivities in Durham will mark 150 years since the surrender here effectively ended the Civil War.  Within five years of the war’s end, Durham was known for Bull Durham tobacco adding warehouses to factories, and within a few years, even telephones.

But in 1870, many other parts of North Carolina had turned instead to regressives, joining the KKK which was centered one county over from Durham, while across the nation the Bull City was forging a progressive view of the Tar Heel state as the New South.

The KKK was revived at the turn of the century when a North Carolina clergyman published a book entitled The Clansman, soon adapted to film as The Birth of a Nation, and reinvigorated old racial stereotypes from slavery.

Corruption doomed that incarnation of the KKK, but a landmark Supreme Court decision in 1954 sowed the seeds of its re-emergence by 1960 among descendants of earlier regressives, fueled by rhetoric from a Raleigh TV newscaster soon-to-be U.S. Senator.

This history and more is available in a new documentary entitled Klansville, USA released this past January on the acclaimed PBS series, American Experience, and based in part on the excellent book by David Cunningham.

It is now also available via website or by streaming via Netflix.

By 1960 a few years after Durham became a center for the Civil Rights movement, descendants of earlier regressives resurrected the KKK in North Carolina vowing to stack the state legislature by playing on the fears of rural North Carolinians.

During the 1950’s Durham was busy helping to develop Research Triangle Park here, but it was also a training site for students conducting civil rights protests across the state.

Every few months, I drive up to the parking lot of Durham County Memorial Stadium to drop off e-waste such as old batteries and irreparable electric gizmos, or anything with an electric motor or charge cord.

Erected in 1959, four years after the Supreme Court desegregated public schools, the stadium was built for Durham’s “whites-only” high schools, a lasting monument to segregated schools at the very time legal action and protests were allowing black students to transfer to previously all white schools.

Desegregation such as this set off a resurgence of regressives and a third resurrection of the KKK.  One of those appearing on the documentary in footage filmed before his passing in 2005 is C.P. Ellis.

Ellis owned a Texaco station in Durham when during the early 1960s he joined the KKK and became the Exalted Cyclops for the clan here.  Membership surged across the state as school officials implemented policies to racially balance the schools.

Instead, whites, most of whom were poor, fled to private and parochial schools reducing public school enrollment in Durham by 40% during the 1960s.

The flight was even worse across the state and in less progressive communities such as Raleigh where the KKK had been instrumental in selection of a police chief in the 1920s, 5,000 KKK members rallied just months after a progressive had been governor from 1961-1965.

In the 1970s, the courts ruled that schools here must be racially rebalanced.  A committee to effect that change brought Exalted Cyclops Ellis together with Ann Atwater, a civil rights activist.

Together they each did something rare, even today. As documented in the acclaimed book, Best of Enemies by Osha Gray Davidson, they listened to each other and a friendship formed.

Regressives in North Carolina today don’t wear hoods and robes and only occasionally burn crosses, but their influence is still felt.  Helms used racially charged campaign advertising to win close reelections well into the mid-1990s.

You can hear echoes of regressives in myths perpetuated around water coolers to scare newcomers from living in progressive communities such as Durham or if they do to put their children in private or parochial schools.

Regressives are most visible behind the actions of the state legislature, abetted by peers to read only the misleading titles and subtitles on bills they submit, virtually erasing any memory of North Carolina being known as the New South.

The LGBT anti-discrimination legislation passed in Utah is a contrast and evidence of what it means to be conservative without being regressive.

North Carolina’s regressives ban the use of phrases like “climate change” in reports and meddle in local affairs, while hypocritically accusing the federal government of political correctness and meddling in state affairs.

The LGBT legislation in Utah steps forward not only in that area but pairs it with provisions granting the right of people to express religious beliefs in the workplace.

North Carolina will weather this renewed regression but it will take decades to mend all of the damage it has done including to the state’s reputation and psyche.

In the meantime, let’s just not blame their actions on true conservatives.

Unearthing A Disappointment

My father served in WWII but the minimal details he would share, beginning less than a decade later in my preschool years, were minimal and self-deprecating.

Now six decades after those early queries and 14 years since his passing, I’m learning the full story as I sift through letters he wrote to those back home as well as military records and photos he brought back.

Over the last year, as she neared the end of her life, my mother filled in some gaps.

They had been married for nearly 36 years and divorced for 35 when she died.  But as the song goes, in her last few months she began to “love deeper and speak sweeter and give the forgiveness she had been denying.”

When they met in 1942, my dad had been running his parents ancestral ranch since he was 14, while at the same time going on to graduate from high school.

My grandfather had what they thought was a heart attack while serving as the executor of my great grandfather’s estate while juggling the wishes of siblings who much earlier had left ranching and especially those of his dad’s second wife and her family.

When my dad turned age 18 in late 1941, you couldn’t register for the draft until age 21.  At that time the country was turning down enlistments for males needed to sustain agricultural production.

A few months later, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the age for registration was lowered to 18 ending voluntary enlistment altogether.  Dad argued with his father to sell off the livestock and let feed crops go fallow but both his father and the local draft board felt differently.

He was an only son and the only person who could keep the ranch running.  In 1943, news reports clearly noted that state and county war boards of the agricultural department could defer those in agriculture even though when no deferment was sought.

Ranches and farms were required to meet quotas for output, and if they failed, ranchers and farmers were reassigned to a job on another ranch or farm.

America placed agricultural production at the top of wartime needs which, to the consternation of my grandfather but delight of my dad, also resulted in the rapid spread of mechanized technology.

Things changed for my dad four days before his 21st birthday when word came that his cousin and best friend who was a year older than him had been killed in action over Italy when the B-26 bomber in which he was flying as tail gunner was hit and exploded trying to cut a German Army supply route.

It took five months of pleading before my grandfather and local county boards agreed to let my dad join the U.S. Army.  He and mom quickly traveled over the Centennials to Bozeman on April 30th to elope, a little more than two weeks after the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Nine days later, dad was ordered to report to Fort Douglas on the day the German Army’s surrender became effective.

But hostilities were far from over, just as they continued for several weeks after Lee surrendered his army to Grant, before the Civil War effectively ended 121 miles south of Appomattox, 150 years ago next month in Durham, North Carolina

In Europe, pockets of hostility continued into September, about the time my dad was finishing Infantry training at Camp Roberts and shipping out to join the 35th Tank Battalion as a Cavalry trooper.

In March, when dad finally convinced officials to let him serve, the 35th Tank Battalion had crossed the Rhine at Oppenheim, south of Mainz, and rushed across central and southern Germany liberating part of Buchenwald and Dachau before refitting in Bavaria.

As dad was in training to joint the 35th, it was pushing on into Czechoslovakia to the Russian line before pulling back into Bavaria.  Mysteriously, less than five months after dad joined the unit, General Patton, who had been pushing to back the Russians off died in a mysterious auto accident.

Official surrenders notwithstanding, it was chaos when my dad joined his unit.  Patton had left large area of Germany unsecured in the rush across Germany where small units continued to fight.  Scores of towns were skirted or destroyed leaving no civilian governance.

Tens of thousands of Germans were being expelled from other countries clogging the roads with refugees with no place to go, while thousands of freed prisoners including slave laborers were trying to make their way home.

Thousands of Nazis were fleeing south into the mountains of Bavaria seeking sanctuary in Austria and transit out of Europe, many to South America, many into the United States.

Planning had only just begun to morph the 35th Tank Battalion into the 35th Constabulary but that would take months and months yet as well as retraining.

In the interim, dad is shown in photos clearing concentration camps, and supporting armored tanks and tank killers as they cleared pockets of resistance as well as flying patrol in light aircraft to intercept fleeing Nazis.

He writes of also spending days astride horses that had been liberated from Nazis while searching forests for those fleeing as well as pockets of resistance that hadn’t yet surrendered or didn’t believe the war was over including isolated but lethal Tiger Tanks.

His last few months were spent serving as a military policeman while vetting civilian law enforcement for a return to duty.  On July 28, 1946 he was discharged from the Army at Fort Lewis, Washington and returned to the ranch and my mom.

As I was growing up, he would answer questions as I went through the trunk with his uniform, while carefully handling the side arm a German officer has given him while surrendering and a handmade knife with an antler handle a Russian POW had given him as he boarded a train for home.

I used a small backpack from his infantry days while I was going through Cub Scouts and never grew tired of going through a yellow plastic cigarette container filled with souvenir coins from different countries given to him by people he helped get back home.

Like I said, he was either tightlipped or self-deprecating about his enlistment, maybe to disguise his disappointment, possible out of respect for those such as Edward Bowman who gave his life.

Only from these fragments of evidence such as letters, documents and photographs and piecing them together by researching context from back then do I know his role.

Now his grandsons, granddaughter and great-grandsons and great-granddaughters will as well.

Recently on Netflix, I stumbled onto the third installment of the Saints and Soldiers franchise of films released last summer.  They are produced by two BYU graduates who founded Rocky Mountain based Go Films along with other acclaimed films.

The moralistic stories set in WWII that can be watched by families with children.  There is always a soldier from the Idaho or Utah area and the first two actually dealt with American soldiers who had served a Mormon mission in Germany and encounter converts fighting for the other side.

The one I watched last week is entitled “The Void,” which was released last summer.  The backdrop deals with the pockets of resistance after the war such as my dad encountered as well as attitudes about race among American soldiers before and after the war that also reminded me of my dad.

Sometimes, even fiction can provide a glimpse of contents when digging into the archeology of family.

I thought of this again during morning walks through Fort Douglas while wondering if I might be crossing paths dad had walked there after reporting for duty or those of a great-great grandfather, a Union cavalry trooper, bivouacked there while it was being built.

In the future, I will delve my father’s complicated relationship with his father and lessons I’ve learned from them regarding succession and equitable distribution of assets to children.