Nonfiction

Historical documents and true tales. (I cannot tell a lie. Not on this page anyway.)

Flixton: During World War 2 my father flew B-24 missions out of an airfield near the quaint English village of Flixton. Fifty years later I visited this village. The airfield had long since returned to farmland, but shadows remained.
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War Diary: During World War 1 my grandfather served in the 37’th Ohio “Buckeye” Division. Like many veterans he didn’t talk much about his experiences, but he did keep a diary. Years later he decided to throw it away because it included a passage about getting drunk and he didn’t want his grandchildren to read that. Fortunately Grandma interceded. His diary was rather short, but I was able to annotate many entries using information from other sources to document his service.
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Update: Claude Humbert, a man who lives in France, found the footlocker of Major Houts, an officer in my grandfather’s unit. He researched Maj. Houts’ life and made a documentary about the formation, training, and battles the major fought in – all of which my grandfather described in his diary. At one point the documentary quotes from a letter written by “Private Franklin Treece,” my grandfather. You can view the documentary here: https://vimeo.com/126600101

Elkhart County in the World War: My great-great aunt Grace Rockwell was the librarian in Goshen Indiana during World War 1. She kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about how the war affected people in the county. Not front page articles about major battles, but stories about rationing, persecution of conscientious objectors, letters from men and women who were serving in France, the influenza epidemic, and other local issues. (What’s in the scrapbook.)
I donated the scrapbook to the Elkhart County Historical Society who may put it online someday. In the meantime, I digitized the articles into a searchable text document. Some of the articles included photographs, but due to storage limitations the photos are not included. If you’re interested in a particular article, please email me at Steve@Random-Writings.com and I should be able to send you a copy of the article with photographs.
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