Reposting: D-Day and Beyond (Lou's Army Photographs)

In honor of D-Day (June 6th), here is a blog post I wrote earlier after finding a small stack of photos of the US Army liberation of France during World War II.

For D-Day: Untold Stories of the Third Army

June 6th is the anniversary of D-Day, the "beginning of the end" of World War II.  

If you watch the news, you'll see historic video footage of the Allied landing at Normandy, along with interviews of veterans, now in their late 80s or in their 90s, remembering what it was like.  It is good that we can remember, and honor, those members of the Greatest Generation who helped liberate France and the rest of Western Europe from the Nazis, and we are blessed to hear them tell their stories.  

But it's important to remember that not all the stories of war are captured on film and shown on TV and the Internet around the world.  

Some of the stories, captured in letters, newspaper clippings and old photographs, lie forgotten in a shoebox or file folder at an estate sale.  

These priceless stories are in danger of being lost -- unless we rescue them from the trash and get them into the hands of historians who can conserve and study them.

Such was the case of Lou's war photographs and stories.  He had to go into assisted living a couple of years ago, and at his estate sale his family sold me a file folder stuffed with little photos, a few newspaper clippings and other scraps of paper.  They said they didn't want them.  They charged me a dollar.  I took the pictures home and started looking at them.

So who was Lou, and what did he do in the war?  A newspaper clipping from 1968 in the file folder includes an interview in which the reporter asks Lou, by then a well-known local restaurateur, to recount what happened to him after high school:

"World War II and the Army.  We landed at Normandy five days after the initial assault and pushed through to Central Europe.  That was with the Third Army."

So much history in so few words.  

I look at the photos and I can see why the family probably didn't think they were important.  Most of the images are only one inch by about an inch and a half, reduced in size so they could be sent home more economically than a standard-sized photograph.    That's much smaller than this photo appears on your computer screen.

What use are such old, blurry, tiny images to anyone?  You have to understand, dear families of veterans, that somewhere out there, there is a military historian who would jump at the chance to see these pictures, analyze them, and add the tiny details they reveal to the larger narrative of the American experience in World War II. 

You have to remember that we usually think about wars the way that war leaders and official historians write about them. They tell of Patton's Third Army rolling through France like a mighty machine -- it's the stuff of legend.  Lou and his buddies lived this experience, and they took pictures and wrote letters home.  By adding the stories of Lou and countless other regular servicemen and women to the narrative, we get a better, more balanced, more poignant and more human picture of World War II.  And that's valuable to historians, to students and to the rest of us, because it helps us to better understand.

Lou wrote on the back of this picture,
"I am barbecuing meat.
No that's not dirt it's a mustache."

Thanks to the miracle of the desktop flatbed digital scanner and its "crop" function, we can enlarge the tiny photographs and piece together parts of the story of Lou's military service. The backs of the photos bear the stamp of the US Army censor, who approved them for civilian eyes. 

Lou wrote on the backs of some, but not all, of the pictures.  You can imagine him with his fountain pen poised, taking a few minutes to give his parents some context for the photos before he mailed them home from the battlefield.

The back of the photograph...

...and the front.

Let's look at some more of Lou's photographs of Patton's Third Army as it moves through France, from Avranches in lower Normandy to Chalons sur Marne (now called Chalons-en-Champagne) in northeastern France, heading towards the German border.

"Machine gunner & myself near Avranches." 

"Machine gunmen climbing out of turret."

"Digging a gun position."

If you look carefully behind the tire, you can see what appear to be
French children and adults watching the American soldiers.

"40 mm dug in and ready for action." 

Some of the photographs show the French countryside as the troops passed through.

 "Old French farmer chatting with the neighbors."

  
"Picture taken from the truck. Young French girl passing out cider to men in the trucks."

Lou must have been driving when he took pictures as his unit passed through some parts of France.  He simply wrote "bombed buildings"on the back of this picture.  The destruction in the cities and towns was horrific.

Other photos have no writing on the backs.  They don't need words.

Other photos Lou sent home show scenes of life in camp.

"I am holding a Jerry rifle. The coats and hats are captured sheepskins & are they warm."

"C-47s coming in with supplies."

 "This was taken on a 2-day rest. Each of us has a quart of captured cognac. Chadwick is squatting in the middle."

 "I am pinning a good conduct medal on my machine gunner."

Lou also sent pictures home of the soldiers of the Third Army playing baseball.  He made no mention of what the French citizens thought of this odd game.

I searched online to see if I could find any other mention of Lou's military service, but I couldn't.  Other than a few U.S. Census references to places he and his family had lived, I wasn't able to find out anything else about him that wasn't in the file folder from the estate sale, except for one website that had been updated recently.  It listed only his name, the date April 5, 2014, and the words IN MEMORY OF....

Thank you, Lou, for your service, and thank you for saving those war pictures so we could see a bit of your side of the story.  I'll find them a good home with some historians who will add them to the larger story of D-Day and the Liberation of France in 1944-1945.

Frank Serratoni, California Watercolor Artist

Often an estate sale is a good place to find art supplies. And, it turns out, fine art.

Drawing and painting were common pastimes for members of the Greatest Generation; women and men alike took art classes. Sometimes they bought more sketchbooks, boxes of pastels and watercolors, canvases, art pencils and charcoal than they could ever use.

Sometimes they kept their own amateur artworks, which in turn showed up at their estate sale. 

At this morning's estate sale, I spotted a large stack of framed paintings that had obviously been done by someone who'd taken an art class 40 or 50 years ago.  I looked through them: a nicely-done still life showing a pitcher and some fruit; a slanting, doe-eyed, ragged cartoonish child standing next to a trash can in an alley; a gunmetal gray horse-shaped object in a field of various shades of green, straight out of the paint tube.

Tucked away in between the somewhat dubious results of Grandpa's art class, I spotted a large old picture frame that had definitely seen better days. 

The frame was pale distressed wood with an even more-distressed orange burlap center.  The back was a nightmare of crumbling brown paper and twisted hanger wire.

But the painting inside the old frame was definitely not executed in someone's art class.

I'm no art critic, but I didn't have to look long at the image to realize that someone knew what they were doing when they painted this picture. My mother was a very good amateur artist in her time, and she taught me a few things to look for in a good watercolor painting.  

One of the things Mom had said, was that anyone can put color on white paper, but a good watercolor artist knows how to control the color so that the unpainted white paper shows through in the completed image. This artist knew how to control the colors.

Frank Serratoni, the signature said.  

I bought the painting, brought it home, liberated it from the frame (where it was held in place by an aging, crumbling thick piece of corrugated cardboard that had been installed long before the time acid-free paper was readily available) and inspected it more closely.

This artist was no amateur! He was Frank Serratoni (1908-1970).

Frank Serratoni, my online search informed me, was born in Detroit, Michigan, studied art in Chicago, and was a well-known artist in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1940s and 1950s.  In the late 1940s, Serratoni issued a series of twelve hand-colored lithographs of California cityscapes and landscapes, which you can still find for sale online today.

You could buy Serratoni's artworks in iconic San Francisco stores like the City of Paris department store and the Paul Elders bookstore.  And you could find Serratoni's work in at least one place outside The City: there are newspaper ads for Braverman's Furniture Store in San Anselmo in 1950, promoting buying art by Frank Serratoni as a Christmas gift.

"Landscapes of places you've seen, choice of six subjects so familiar you'll recognize the setting at one glance. Nicasio, Los Altos, Navarro River, Woodside, Mt. Diablo, Sonora...." 

I wonder if the painting I found today, originally came from one of those venerable stores? 

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Footnote: In my online searching, I found a blog post about the Grateful Dead that said that Jerry Garcia once lived in a house called The Chateau in Menlo Park, California, that had earlier belonged to Frank Serratoni. 

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Here's a short bio of Frank Serratoni:

http://www.californiawatercolor.com/pages/frank-serratoni-biography

From the New England Kitchen of Heloise Frost

I probably bring too many things made of paper home from estate sales.  But paper is one of the ways we record important things; paper helps tell the story of our lives.

Case in point: a small box of greeting cards I picked up at a sale earlier this year. 

The box is labeled

NEW ENGLAND 

NOTES

with

Traditional Recipes

From the New England Kitchen

of Heloise Frost

 Inside was a set of blank greeting cards. 

And a set of different recipes, one for each card.

You fold a recipe and tuck it into a slot cut into the front of the blank card.

The inside of the card opens to reveal a space to write a personal note.

  
I suspect these cards date back to the early 1950s. That's when a couple of cookbooks were published under the name of Heloise Frost.  One was called Early American Recipes and the other, A World of Good Eating.

I wasn't able to find out anything about Heloise Frost, save that she was a New England author who lived in an 1809 house in New Hampshire. (She was not the same "Heloise" who's famous for writing a syndicated newspaper household advice column, Hints from Heloise.)

The illustrations for Early American Recipes were by another New Englander, artist Barbara Corrigan, and it appears that the designs on my vintage greeting cards were by Corrigan as well.  She was a well-known and respected New England artist, who illustrated books and also drew for the children's magazine Highlights.

Here are some of the recipes from the greeting card set.

I don't have a copy of either of Heloise Frost's cookbooks, but their legacy lives on, online.  Cookbook collector The Culinary Cellar has blogged about her:

http://theculinarycellar.com/a-world-of-food-from-a-1950s-new-england-kitchen/

Copies of Frost's two books are readily available from online sellers, from $5 to $50 and more.

Here's an article on artist Barbara Corrigan:

http://www.thesunchronicle.com/go/ahead-of-her-time/article_3efbb2f6-e901-5ab8-b1b1-f6bf0fa0ed3b.html

Remembering Peggy Fortnum and Paddington Bear

Another legendary children's book illustrator has passed away. Peggy Fortnum, who along with author Michael Bond, first brought Paddington Bear to life in the book series, died recently at the age of 96.  

I hope you were fortunate enough to have read the Paddington books when you were a child. If not, find them and read them today. 

Here's the Guardian's obituary of Peggy Fortnum, with lots of pictures:

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/apr/04/peggy-fortnum-obituary

And here's my original blog post about Paddington, from 2014.

Finding Paddington

Whenever I visit London, the very first thing I do is stop to say hello to an old friend.  

We take the train from Heathrow Airport to Paddington Station, and then I find the statue of Paddington Bear.  I sit with him for a moment while I collect my thoughts, and watch parents bring small children by to pat his nose and take pictures with him.

Statue of Paddington Bear, Paddington Station,
London, England, Europe, The World

I hope you're already familiar with Paddington, the beloved small brown bear from Darkest Peru, portrayed in a series of books by author Michael Bond.  (I won't call them "children's books" because the best children's books are really for grownups too.)  If not, I think you'll enjoy them.

I first met Paddington and his gentle adventures as a child, when my mom read the stories to us aloud.  Mom, a child of the radio drama age, really knew how to read aloud: she took her time, did all the voices, and showed us the pictures as they appeared in the text.  

Mr. Gruber and Paddington share cocoa for their elevenses,
in More About Paddington.  Illustration by Peggy Fortnum.

Bond, a cameraman at the BBC, was inspired to write the first story,A Bear Called Paddington, after he bought a small plush bear left alone on a shelf at Selfridge's department store as a last-minute Christmas present for his wife. His story became the first Paddington book, published in 1958.

The Paddington.com website has archived an interview with Michael Bond, who said:

"The great advantage of having a bear as a central character is that he can combine the innocence of a child with the sophistication of an adult...

"He gets involved in everyday situations. He has a strong sense of right and wrong and doesn't take kindly to the red tape bureaucracy of the sillier rules and regulations with which we humans surround ourselves. As a bear he gets away with things. Paddington is humanised, but he couldn't possibly be 'human'. It just wouldn't work."

The website also notes:

The Paddington books have sold more than thirty-five million copies worldwide and have been translated into over forty languages, including Latin.

In 1997 Michael Bond was awarded an OBE for services to children’s literature. He is still writing and lives in London, not far from Paddington Station where it all began.

Even though the books are loved by millions of children and people who used to be children around the world, many more first met Paddington as a plush toy.  Paddington.com reports:

The very first Paddington bear soft toy was designed in the UK by a lady called Shirley Clarkson. She made it as a Christmas present for her children, Joanna and Jeremy Clarkson (who was to go on to become a world famous motoring journalist). So many people admired Shirley’s Paddington that she started to make some more until her company, Gabrielle Designs and was granted an official licence to sell them in the UK in 1972....

[Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson and Paddington Bear.  Now there's an odd couple, personality-wise.]

...Meanwhile, Paddington’s popularity was beginning to grow outside the UK and in 1975 the US company Eden Toys acquired the licence to make and sell Paddington bears throughout the rest of the world.

There have been dozens of other licensed Paddington items since then.  Every so often I find a plush Paddington Bear at an estate sale, in gently-loved condition. Here's a plush version of Paddington created by Eden Toys:

At another estate sale, I found a boxed set of paperback Paddington books.

Paddington's  appearance has morphed several times over the years, but to my mind the way he originally looked is still the best.  The illustrations by Peggy Fortnum perfectly complement the gentle nature of the original stories.  Here's another example from More About Paddington:

You can see what a very small bear Paddington was:

In this chapter, Paddington has never before experienced Christmas in England, and the Brown family members are concerned that he might try to play Father Christmas by coming down their chimney.

As you may have heard, Paddington has been made into a major motion picture for this holiday season, starring some of Britain's greatest actors (Hugh Bonneville, Peter Capaldi, Julie Walters and Jim Broadbent, for starters) as the humans in the story.  

I think the best way to first experience Paddington is to read the book, or even better, have someone read it to you.  The chapters in the books lend themselves nicely to reading each story a bit at a time.

You don't know someone who would read aloud to you? Here's a link to a nice long audio sample of the inimitable Stephen Fry reading a passage from A Bear Called Paddington:
http://www.learnoutloud.com/Catalog/Literature/European-Classics/A-Bear-Called-Paddington/23142

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Here's a link to the movie section of the official Paddington website: http://www.paddington.com/gb/the-movie/

Paddington has starred in several different versions of his story in the UK.  You can watch some of Paddington's adventures on YouTube.  Stop-motion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cD0rtuWpso&index=18&list=PLWJa48pm3noa-CVm1nZMEZUHcQTH795Pm

And animated:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzxJ3mqIFAE