My brother sent me a link to a video wherein our uncle’s name was mentioned, their story told with the pictures and reels of the day. Wow.
My parents will be celebrating their 60th anniversary this fall and it occurs to me after watching that that we their children need to do what was done back when Mom’s dad turned 90: come armed with cameras and recorders and a list of questions and get them reminiscing for us. I know that Dad’s mom headed her county’s Red Cross knitting for the troops–how did she knit ten hours a day, as her letter said she did, with rheumatoid arthritis? Did it come later?
A nephew once had a school assignment to ask family members to write in his booklet about some memory of some day in history and then mail it to the next person and the next and finally back to him by the end of the school year. Dad wrote that he had been a teenager cutting Christmas trees with the Boy Scouts as a fundraiser and was in the back of a pickup with 49 trees piled high around him when his dad came up the road to their surprise and stopped them: Pearl Harbor had just been bombed!
I remember watching Neil Armstrong on TV walking on the moon in grainy black and white. That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. Later, my dad, my little sister and I got to watch the last of the Apollo flights take off in person, sitting on bleachers in the Florida heat at Cape Kennedy and wondering afterwards how much of the sunburn on our faces might be from the rocket boosters.
What day in history do you remember?