Notes From My Knapsack 6-4-06
Jeff Gill

Markers of the Season

Spring’s end is clearly shown not by the Summer Solstice (coming up in three weeks) or white shoes coming out of the back closet darkness. With the fading and fall of dogwood tree blossoms and trillium flowers on the forest floor, that’s when I stick a fork in springtime.
Now we see stacks of catalpa flowers erupt up all over those trees, a beautiful sight in full bloom. Harder to see are the spectacular canopy blossoms on tulip poplars, a hundred feet or more above us but slowly dropping yellow and orange and pink petals onto the may apples and ferns down at our feet.
And many roadsides across central Ohio are gently fuzzed with small blossoms on locust trees lining woody margins . . . of the cottonwood tree, we will not speak (I’ll just sneeze, again).
Your scribe had the honor to spend part of Memorial Day with combat engineers and medium maintenance soldiers who had seen Guadalcanal and Pelieu in the Pacific, corpsmen and WACs who had crossed Europe under Eisenhower’s command, and a B-17 ball turret gunner who had flown over the thick of it. They, and their wives and families who kept the home front strong, defeated the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan by 1945.
These stories are not in history books as vividly as they are in homes and retirement communities and nursing homes right here in Licking County. First sergeants and captains and warrant officers abound in the stands at their grandkids’ ball fields, and there are quartermaster’s mates steering carts down the grocery aisle who once navigated oceans at the helm of aircraft carriers or in the conning tower of submarines.
But just as I’m hinting to all you readers that it would be worth your while to listen to the stories these folk have to tell, I have a message for those veterans and fellow citizens. Make sure to tell your stories, too.
Some will say, sadly, that they’ve tried and found even among their own family little interest. That may be, but I offer two points in response.
First, my own experience is as a preacher and a storyteller, not to mention a lot of camp programming with young people. I can tell you many, many stories of when I thought I was wasting my time and theirs, because no one seemed to really be paying attention – and sometimes hours later, maybe days, occasionally even years, I’ll hear that story told back to me, word perfect. Just because they haven’t sat with expressions of rapt attention and obvious appreciation doesn’t mean they aren’t hearing it!
And second, if indeed you don’t have an immediate audience, then would you please write it down? Talk into a tape recorder, type on your computer if you have one or drop by the library and let them show you how to make a file.
One of the gentlemen I spoke to last Monday had participated with the Library of Congress Oral History project, but also noted a few stories that hadn’t made it onto the tape; I strongly encouraged him to put those on paper, too. If we don’t tell these stories, who will hear them, and how will they be passed along?
Motts’ Military Museum is just down the road from Licking County, and even closer on the internet (www.mottsmilitarymuseum.org). They are the official home of the Ohio Military Hall of Fame (www.ohioheroes.org), while the seventh class of inductees was honored early last month on the steps of our state capital.
With about twenty new members honored each year, that means about 150 of your fellow Ohioans are part of this select group, whose stories can be read on line, and were heard out loud as part of the ceremony of induction. Ted Keller of the Millersport area may be just barely in Licking County, but he is clearly a hero, and has the paperwork to prove it.
Like many such stories, Ted may say that he was lucky enough to have someone tell his story that ended in a medal citation, and there likely are many who earned no less but ended their wars unseen. To which I say, all the more reason to tell your story and search out others’, and I suggest to anyone a little time at the Ohio Military Hall of Fame website within Motts’, reading the citations we have.
Between Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, you could get a better sense of what we celebrate when the fireworks light up the sky, and who some of the upturned faces around you might be.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story through disciple@voyager.net.