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Technology Stocks : Globalstar Memorial Day Massacre -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (269)	5/29/2000 10:37:00 PM
From: Drew Williams	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543

re: Memorial Day and my father As far as I know, my father never spent a night under fire during World War II. Mostly he was based in the US, although he did get to England around the time of D-Day. Last summer my family travelled to Wisconsin for a family reunion on the occasion of the 60th wedding anniversary of my late father's only remaining sister. About forty of us showed up from all over the world, including all of our expatriots who live in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain. On the last night we were there, all the adults got together to listen to them tell stories of our parents and how they got together, etc. My uncle told one story that I already thought I knew, but I was wrong. About a year before the end of the war, my father, a naval aviator, was landed in Chicago with a planeload of admirals and other VIP's. It was not a pretty landing, as the brakes failed and his airplane (the navy version of the DC-3) finally came to a stop after smashing one of the landing gear into a concrete light fixture next to the runway. My father never spoke of this, but after he died I had found a newspaper article with photographs of my father and the wrecked airplane. Accidents happened, but everyone walked away. So I thought I knew the story. What the newspaper did not say -- and my Uncle Bud did -- was that if my father had not intentionally steered into that concrete fixture, his airplane would most likely have kept going until it smacked into the building just beyond the end of the just completed runway. The building had been scheduled to be demolished before the runway was opened, but the runway had been completed ahead of schedule. The replacement building was not yet ready. What the newspaper also did not say was that the building clearly visible in the photographs was an elementary school filled with kids. According to my Uncle Bud, my father, who also grew up in Chicago, knew that. Had my father not had the presence of mind and courage to risk his and his passengers lives by hitting the concrete fixture, they would all have smashed into a building full of children, most likely causing a significant number of casualties. Dad never told us any version of that story. The stories he did tell were of living off his poker winnings, how he traded milk from Florida for booze from the Bahamas and smuggled it back on military mail flights, and how he flew under a bridge over the Potomac as he tried to get into Washington to make a date with my mother. He said he always slept between clean sheets, too. While I was never ashamed of him -- I am quite certain that had the Navy asked him to do something more dangerous, he would have done it -- I never thought what he had done was particularly important or inspirational until that evening. It was quite a moment finding out that my father was a hero.