Sometimes we wait too long to talk to those who have roamed the planet longer than anyone else. And when it comes to family, we allow pieces of history to vanish in the painful moments it takes to say goodbye at a funeral.
I was guilty of it with my grandmother on my dad’s side of the family.
Anne O’Donnell was actually the furthest thing from being Irish. She just happened to marry a full-blooded one just prior to the Great Depression. Grandma O’Donnell was actually Polish, and her family, the Lasnowskis, had come to the U.S. in time for her to be the first child among 12 to be born on American soil.
As a young girl she took a job as a cleaning woman because she lacked any real education beyond eighth grade. Sometime during this young time in her life she met my grandfather, Peter.
And she didn’t like him much at first.
“He was cocky,” she told me more than two decades ago as we sat on the porch of my grandparent’s home in upper Michigan.
Looking back I relish that conversation. Grandma O’Donnell was pushing 80 and still living alone. Her only gripe was “it was hard to flip the mattresses on the beds.”
Her husband and my dad’s father had died several years earlier after retiring from the Chicago & North Western Railway where he worked more than four decades as a car man. His knees were shot from the hard work in cold conditions, but his sense of humor was always intact.
That afternoon on the porch grandma shared those dating experiences about the smiling man who loved to fish.
During that era of American communities, ethnic groups didn’t approve of mixing when it came to marriage. It helped that both grandma and grandpa were Catholic, but grandma’s mother was pushing hard for a Polish suitor.
“She wanted me to date this homely Polish guy,” grandma explained. “But he did have a nice car.”
Fortunately for my grandfather, Irish charm and a quick smile won out over some shiny chrome and four wheels.
I almost never knew that story because I hadn’t taken the time to ask about 1920s romance in America. Now that all my grandparents are gone I wish I would have asked more.
We lose something important if we don’t ask and listen to the words of those who have been speaking them the longest. I’m pretty sure our lack of contact with older Americans is driven by this nation’s fascination with youth and new things. Perhaps that’s amplified by our own focus on taking care of business and surviving in a changing world.
Whatever the reasons, I thought hard about it Saturday morning as I attempted to interview a World War II veteran who landed with the U.S. Army at Utah Beach on June 6, 1944.
His name is Leroy Hawkins, and the 92-year-old’s mind is slipping fast. A native of the hill country of northern Alabama and southern Tennessee where his parents were sharecroppers, Leroy never had more than a fourthgrade education. He went from the hills of the South to the battlefields of Europe when he joined the U.S. Army.
Leroy fought hard, saw the horrors of war take close friends and was wounded.
After coming home, he married a girl from Tennessee, and they ultimately moved to Idaho where he worked for farmers in the American Falls and Aberdeen area before landing a job with the Union Pacific Railroad in the 1950s.
His children remembered how Leroy often woke up screaming in the middle of the night. Dreams of killing and dying in foxholes crept into his world without warning.
Yet he never complained, according to his oldest son Connie.
Connie got the first name he hated as a young boy because Leroy had made a pact with an English soldier as they were recovering from their wounds in a London hospital. Both soldiers vowed that if they survived the war and married, they would name their first child after each other. That British soldier’s name was Connie Mitchell. Connie is pretty sure there is a Leroy Mitchell living somewhere in Great Britain.
As far as the details of other war experiences, Connie is a little unsure.
That’s because Leroy didn’t talk about the war when he came home. Like thousands of other members of America’s Greatest Generation, he came home from victory in World War II and went to work trying to make a living and raising a family.
Leroy also realized he was lucky not to be one of the 8,443 American, British and Canadian soldiers whose lives ended in the blood, sand and saltwater during the D-Day invasion. He had been given a shot at life and ran with it.
Now his ability to talk about the past is gone and we’re all poorer for it.
Michael H. O’Donnell is the assistant managing editor of the Idaho State Journal.