Short post today.

I was taking advantage of the New Year to clean up my Zombie Room. The Zombie room is where I write and have all my shelter in place supplies. The walls are filled with pictures and memories from my past as well as my family. One of the pictures is my Dad’s graduation picture which I got form Mom when she was doing one of her downsizings.

The picture was in a cardboard tube and probably had been there since he got in back in 1945. I opened it up and it had two copies of the same picture. I had the right size frame and didn’t think about it as I put both pictures in the same frame and hung it. I’ve looked at it off and on and some people say that they could spot him because it looked like me at that age (18).

Dad had joined the navy at 17 (just like I would later do) and attended boot camp at Camp Sampson in Geneva New York. I wrote a book about it for the family but after Mom died, a bunch of the copies came back to me. I guess some people really didn’t much care about that part of the story.

Part of the cleanup was removing a large scheduling board I put up last year. Dad’s picture had been set aside and was ready to return to the wall. But I also bought a new wooden plaque with the American flag superimposed with dolphins on it. I hung Dad’s picture first and had to punch a pilot hole for the flag plaques.

That’s when disaster struck.

The vibration of putting a hole in the wall knocked Dad’s picture down and the frame busted in a dozen pieces. I believe some adult language was used rather liberally at that moment. After being calmed down, I got on line and ordered a replacement frame. The size I needed in the style I wanted only came in a set of two. So I ordered it anyway thinking maybe I could reframe something else in the future.

The frames arrived today and I started to place the picture into the new frame.

That’s when I discovered something.

One of the pictures had the names and home cities of every man in the company.

How had I not seen this before?

There are guys from his hometown and Western Pennsylvania. But the list also includes young men from Maine and Vermont, Massachusetts and New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island. The Honor Man’s name was Walt Miller from Salisbury Center New York.

Had I not broken the frame, I would have never discovered the second picture with the names on it. This April will mark the 30^th Anniversary of Dad’s passing at the age of 66. He died on April 27. The picture is dated April 28, 1945.