The Picture

It was spring and the ice and snow were but a memory. Daddy came home from the service station he owned and announced, “Mrs. McCrary is having a photographer come to her home to take her picture; since he will already be in her home she said we could send one of the children for a picture. Let’s send the youngest.”

In our small town we didn’t have a photographer. The only person I had ever seen taking pictures, besides my brother, was a man who visited our school once a year and took pictures of all the students. So it was an exciting thought.

“Esther will take Mary Helen,” Daddy said. “The photographer will be at Mrs. McCrary’s home next Wednesday at 2:00 P.M.

Mother combed Mary Helen’s hair in pigtails. Then she crisscrossed them on top of her head. Lastly, she placed two little round combs right in front of the pigtails. My little three-year old sister wore an aqua colored taffeta dress Grandmother, an excellent seamstress, had made. With her white Easter shoes on her feet, we were ready to go.

We arrived at a beautiful two-story home. I knocked and was told to come in. Down the stairs walked an elderly woman. It was just like in the movies. She greeted us warmly and asked us to sit down until the picture-taking occurred. The furniture was dark and covered in flowers. A beautiful floral rug lay on the floor. I was in another world for a moment.

In a short while the photographer asked my sister to sit in a certain pose while I waited. He snapped the picture. And we walked back home. It was much later I found out Mrs. McCrary was the mother of the famous Tex McCrary, a WWII correspondent, and later the originator of the phrase, “I like Ike”.

My sister still has the picture.

The Death of a Hero

I just received the news. A hero has passed on…quietly and modestly, as he lived, a believer in God. A hero for us all.

Early on the morning of June 6, 1944 Roberto Martinez, a paratrooper from the 101st Airborne Division, with painted black marks under his eyes, climbed aboard a plane in England. In the dark morning as the airplane took him over the English Channel and into Normandy the Germans opened fire. “It was like Christmas with lights all over the place,” he said. The airplane kept flying until the men jumped out, one after another after another after another. Finally, it was Roberto’s turn.

“I tried to hide my parachute after I jumped. Everything was dark because they dropped us in the early hours and before the landings were to begin. I couldn’t find my cricket, that funny sounding thing that was to be used by the paratroopers to signal one another, but someone approached me and I heard his cricket.”

The invasion of France had just begun. Roberto Martinez along with all the other thousands of Americans began their heroic effort. And now his life’s journey has ended. May he and all the other heroes who kept this country safe from dictators not be forgotten.