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Photo brings back memories of veteran

Today’s technology first revived and then verified fading memories of three veterans – a soldier and two sailors. A photo of the Pearl Harbor Memorial popped up on my computer, an email from my nephew in Honolulu on business. Was it true that the house my parents brought me home to from the hospital was bought from a family who lost two sons on the USS Arizona?

Ten minutes of computer time turned fuzzy family folklore into fact. One search gave me a list of the 37 sets of brothers on the Arizona. A second search matched our Ohio address to that of a Howard Keniston, one of the surnames on the list. And a third search yielded a photo of his family tombstone – “Sons Kenneth and Donald, died Dec. 7, 1941, on the USS Arizona.”

Tracking down the story of a Korean War soldier involved my older brother, captain of our high school’s undefeated football team of 1948. His best buddy was Leigh Whitaker, and my brother used to joke, “Thanks to Leigh, I likely led the league in tackles that year.”

Leigh was the play-by-play announcer for home games. Whenever there was a gang tackle on the far side of the field – you couldn’t begin to tell who made the tackle – Leigh’s melodic voice would come crackling over the public address system: “And that was a jarring tackle by Number 66, Johnny ‘Bucky’ Burns.” Leigh was that kind of guy and good friend.

Korea came. My brother joined the Coast Guard, doing duty on a weather ship in the north Atlantic. Leigh enlisted in the Army and went straight to Korea as an Army medic with the 21st Infantry Regiment, 24th Division. He had been in Korea just two weeks when his unit was overwhelmed by a North Korean attack at dawn on July 12, 1950, south of Seoul. Nearly everyone in Leigh’s unit was killed. He was one of five who escaped to a shallow river but soon were captured – and nearly executed.

But Leigh survived. For 37 agonizing months he was marched over frozen ground, given sparse amounts of millet and sorghum, slept on the ground and dropped to 80 pounds, barely keeping himself alive.

And, being the medic, he treated fellow POWs best he could, having to use maggots to clean wounds and curing infections by strapping potatoes to the injured area. His family only knew he was an MIA, missing in action. For three years!

“And that’s another tackle by Burns.” Leigh said he used humor to help keep his sanity and stay alive while a POW. He was a lighthearted guy, but he was also nearly dead, surviving a final brutal death march of 250 miles north to the Chinese border.

The Forgotten War – officially a “military action” – finally ended. I was the first in the family to hear a report over the radio late at night in August of 1953. A final list of returning POWs was being read. “Charles Leigh Whitaker, Ohio.”

I jumped out of bed and ran to tell my sister and parents. Woke ’em up. “Leigh’s coming home,” I said.

A second distant memory about Leigh was that he had married his high school sweetheart and had two children who became the national poster children for muscular dystrophy. By then, I had moved away and lost local links to verify another facet of family folklore.

But in literally seconds I was gazing at a computer photo of Leigh and Joyce with their children, Robbie and Kerrie, being welcomed to the White House by President John F. Kennedy, along with Jerry Lewis and actress Patty Duke, to publicize the 1963 Muscular Dystrophy fundraising drive.

The Keniston brothers, Leigh Whitaker, and my own brother have all passed away. At 76, I realized the urgent need to turn family folklore into fact and share these stories with my children and grandchildren.

What memories do you have that need to be nailed down? Do it now. Nail them down.

Share them with the younger people in your family, your community. Lest we forget. Worse yet, lest they never know.

James F. Burns is a retired professor at the University of Florida and a native of Hamilton County, Ohio.

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