No News is No news

Sadly not much to report right now. Everybody and everything has gone quiet. It's time to spin up a few more of those plates on the sticks.

I just watched a documentary on PBS called "Last Best Hope" in which a former USAAF P-47 pilot returned to Belgium, and which featured some of the surviving members of the "Comete" escape line, which apparently returned 700 allied airmen to England, although the line itself lost around the same number of people to the Gestapo.

This is the PBS Website link to the documentary. The film was was produced by Rendez-Vous Film LLC, who also created a related Website

What struck me was the personal testimonies of a couple of elderly Belgian ladies (who obviously weren't old in 1944) - one of whom said (in translation and my paraphrase) "It is the duty of the old to make sure the young remember when times weren't so easy".

It seems trite looking at the words on the page but hearing an old lady who reminded me of my late mother saying something like that, and looking at the German newsreel footage of people being rounded up in Brussels and packed into a train makes the sentence something of an understatement.

So anyway, watching that film renewed my commitment to see some more of the Jalopy project come together, for the same reason. We shouldn't forget.

As November 11th comes round again (and being British for me it's Armistice Day or Remembrance Day - for those in my adopted land it's Veterans' Day) we should remember the words of Laurence Binyon

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

The People We Encounter

Did I say something about new people? I was talking about England with one of my new co-workers the other day and she mentioned she'd been, among other places, to Norwich because her father-in-law was in the Air force during the war. If I'd been sitting down I'd have sat up straight and done all the "oh yes?" things, but I was standing up - so straightening up and saying "oh yes?" seemed reasonable. Oh yes, he was a tail gunner in a B-17 flying with the 100th Bomb Group from Thorpe Abbots, Norfolk.

So tonight I googled him and found three separate images of the man, a couple of images of one of the B-17s he flew on, and 20 individual references to him on the 100th BG website at www.100thbg.com Not only this, but there is also a video clip (I say clip, it's an interview lasting 67 minutes) now deposited at the Library of Congress as part of their Veterans History Project

To quote my departmental head, more when I know more...

Don't Give Up The Day Job

Don't get discouraged by the fact that another month has passed and I appear to have done relatively little. I'm not discouraged at all. The move to the Satellite Residence in Kansas City has its positive and negative points:

Negative points

• Apart from the personal stuff, which goes without saying, I am separated from a lot of my research material a lot of the time - which can be a drag if I'm watching a posting on one of the many interesting bulletin boards and think "I know the answer to that!" and find I can do nothing about it because my books and a few files are at the Main Residence in Pittsburg. This is very frustrating to the inner and outer librarian. I know I could bring them up here but I don't want to do that. I've split the collection bringing a few paperbacks of the moment and some of the comfort-reading novels, and that's enough.

Positive points

• Apart from the obvious Job And Money, which also go without saying, although I would say that both the job *and* the money are still very much on the positive side of the attitudinal balance-sheet right now.
• Having my very own high-speed internet link makes blogging a lot easier.
• Living in a larger metropolitan area increases the chance of meeting people who might be able to point me in new and interesting research directions (related to the Jalopy project and possibly to one or two others)

Meanwhile
Michael Parrish and I have had a little correspondence and he thinks he might have some further photos which might just be of interest to me. Actually they're ALL of interest to me but there might be some specific items which sound very exciting.