E.G.
Sunday November 12th 2006, 9:40 pm
Filed under: Family,History

A few thoughts on yesterday’s post: during WWII, my father was young enough to enlist and be stationed at the Presidio in San Francisco, but the war ended before he could be sent overseas.

He had two older brothers, one a captain serving in the Pacific. The other’s letters home were heavily censored and pieces snipped out, but one letter that got through declared to his mother simply that, six weeks after he got overseas, the war would be over. She dismissed it as a young soldier’s boasting.

My Grandmother Jeppson, meantime, anguished that the war had taken the last of her three sons, headed the local Red Cross effort to knit for the troops; as she put it in a letter I have read, she felt that the harder she knitted, the faster and more likely her sons would somehow arrive safely home (and they did). Hours and hours and hours a day, and how, I do not know; nor do I know at what age her rheumatoid arthritis began and whether it was an issue to her at the time.

But her middle son proved correct in his declaration. He wanted to put a stop to all the killing. He wanted to put a stop to the evil that threatened the world, and felt it had to be done before the Germans’ own efforts became what the Americans had at hand. Oppenheimer had had his group sent to Yale, Harvard, and MIT to learn as much as they could of what they needed to know.

Morris R. Jeppson did what he felt had to be done on the world’s most famously-named airplane. Hoping hard there would not be a second plane, nor any other such flight ever.


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I spent the weekend with my 11-year-old grandson. I talked to Jack about our relatives who had been in WWI and WWII. Those gentlemen fought for us to be able to enjoy the freedoms we enjoyed last weekend.

On the radio I keep hearing mentions that Iraq is less safe now for our reporters than it was a couple of years ago. It reminds a person that there’s something to be said for using overwhelming force in a way that avoids a quagmire.

Comment by Robin 11.13.06 @ 1:43 pm

[…] brothers served, as did […]

Pingback by SpinDyeKnit 10.23.08 @ 2:59 pm

[…] Day has me thinking about my uncle. EG in the title, of course, is for the Enola Gay he flew […]

Pingback by SpinDyeKnit 05.25.09 @ 8:34 pm

[…] got an email that made me very wistful; I had hoped to see him one more time.  I wrote about him here; Time Magazine interviewed him here.  Goodbye, Uncle Richard; we miss you.  Rest in peace, and […]

Pingback by SpinDyeKnit 03.31.10 @ 10:28 pm

[…] there looked like they were putting a good face on things, but with the holiday (an aside: Happy Veteran’s Day. A solemn time and a necessary remembrance) it almost looked more like Thanksgiving in there. Where are all these people coming […]

Pingback by SpinDyeKnit 11.11.11 @ 9:22 pm

You will pardon me — I’m at a loss for words.

Comment by Don Meyer 11.12.11 @ 11:09 am

[…] of them assured her the war would end after he got overseas. He could not tell her he was one of Oppenheimer’s men and would be the physicist on the Enola Gay. So many lives were lost–but so many more, in the end, were […]

Pingback by SpinDyeKnit 11.12.12 @ 12:18 am

[…] I mentioned once about my uncle’s role in WWII. […]

Pingback by SpinDyeKnit 05.25.14 @ 11:09 pm



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