He was born on a farm. He grew up there around horses, the cycles of the year and a bunch of brothers. Realistically he was the smart kid in the family graduating at the top of his high school class and going off to college. Which I suspect was also a pretty sedate experience, he was a shy individual and was living with an elderly uncle instead of on campus.
His adult life he spent practicing medicine, mostly in a one man primary care practice. One of his colleagues once described him to me as "One of the last true gentlemen in medicine".
But in between those two stretches of long tireless work, of routine and probably a lot of Friday nights at home, there was a curious interlude. He was a U.S. Army doctor overseas.
He had gone to Med School in an accelerated program designed to turn out, as quickly as possible, much needed Army doctors. Well, even the war effort can only move so fast and at the end of the three year program it was 1946 and the war was over. My dad was sent to Germany where he seems to have been the sole medical provider for a good sized base near Heidelberg. Very few stories of those years have come down to us. It is said he was once near death from pneumonia. He once visited Vienna and was interested in pursuing a career in psychiatry (!). He considered, but sadly decided against, going along on a supply plane during the Berlin Air Lift. He went to visit Woltershof, a tiny village on the banks of the Rhine river that was once our family's home. As an aside, when we visited again in the 1970's somebody there remembered that earlier visit. He bought a Volkswagen and considered having it shipped home.
As to physical remains of that exotic interlude there is little. A detailed inventory of the things he did ship home does record a few surviving artifacts including some nice beer steins he probably got on the cheap. And....there is his foot locker.
I'm pretty sure he left the service as a Captain, so this must have been issued to him at the start of his time in uniform.
Parked up in the attic. The foot locker has become battered and faded over the years. It's just not the sort of thing you even think about carefully preserving, they were built to be tossed about in the holds of troop ships.
I initially thought this was the maker of the foot locker but no, just the company that made the hinges. But it is a fascinating tale in its own right. C.W. Beehler started a metal stamping company in the 1880's but his real passion was excavating fossils!
The actual value of a 1940's foot locker is approximately zero. No, the value of such an item is what it tells you about the history of the owner and his family. Here for instance is a sticker that tells a tale. The style screams 1970s. My grandfather (my dad's father in law) was a Lutheran Brotherhood Insurance agent in Hawley Minnesota until his death from cancer in 1973.
The inside of the foot locker is "decorated". My older brother liked Dentyne chewing gum. My mother - although she would be horrified to admit it today - was a devout Republican at this time of her life. I guess she actually met Nixon once. Nixon Now stamps are from his 1972 campaign and therefore predated Watergate when they could have been interpreted as a demand for immediate impeachment.
One last memento. My brother also worked at the Boys Club on the north side of Minneapolis.
Family memories of this sort are not always carried over from one generation to the next. I'm not even sure that I have the stories from my dad in accurate form. My wife is big on putting tags and such on family artifacts so that the kids would have some idea what the heck things are should we elders both "check out" in one form or another.
So I'm going to print out a copy of this blog post, put it in a protective envelope and attach it to the inside of the foot locker. Hmmm, this is a direction I did not expect a rainy Sunday morning to take.....Greetings Future Generations!
Excellent idea about preserving the story.
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