{"id":5222,"date":"2024-05-27T19:47:33","date_gmt":"2024-05-28T02:47:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=5222"},"modified":"2024-05-27T19:47:33","modified_gmt":"2024-05-28T02:47:33","slug":"a-memorial-day-salute","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=5222","title":{"rendered":"A Memorial Day Salute…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Robert<\/a>\u2026to Robert Williams, Jr. of Necedah, Wisconsin, who gave his life for his country in 1944. I\u2019ve mentioned him before<\/a> and will mention him again; he was my mother\u2019s high-school sweetheart, and had he returned from the War, I am pretty sure they would have married\u2014and I would not now exist. Does this bother me? <\/p>\n

Don\u2019t be silly. Love and honor matter<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know a great deal about Bobby Williams. My mother did not talk about him. I\u2019m pretty sure she moved to Chicago from Wisconsin in 1945 once she knew Bobby was never coming back. I knew nothing more until Craig Williams, one of Bobby\u2019s grand-nephews, contacted me in 2020, and explained how he died during the \"Victoria<\/a>war: His Navy torpedo bomber crashed into the Pacific on March 9, 1944. Craig sent me a number of photos, including the Navy\u2019s 21-gun salute at his funeral (below) and one of my mother when she was 17, in her prom dress for the Necedah High School Senior Prom. (At right.)<\/p>\n

In a slightly weird coincidence, both Bobby and my father were radio operators during the War, Bobby on a torpedo bomber in the Pacific, and my Army father first in Italy and later North Africa.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure how much more I can say. WWII was a horrible thing. The best I can say about it is that after VJ Day, people understood that the world might not survive another World War. So far so good. I still worry sometimes.<\/p>\n

Alas, millions of good people like Bobby Williams had to die to put that lesson across. I honor all of them, and always will. But Bobby Williams loved my mother until his last breath, for which I honor him, and also hold him in tremendously high esteem. He looks like the kind of guy I could hang out with, trade stories, and knock back a couple of glasses of wine with over dinner. Knowing that I can never meet him doesn\u2019t in any way change my honor or my esteem.<\/p>\n

Or\u2026who knows? He\u2019s on my prayer list. Maybe \u201cnever\u201d is too strong a word.<\/p>\n

Yup.<\/p>\n

\"Robert<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2026to Robert Williams, Jr. of Necedah, Wisconsin, who gave his life for his country in 1944. I\u2019ve mentioned him before and will mention him again; he was my mother\u2019s high-school sweetheart, and had he returned from the War, I am pretty sure they would have married\u2014and I would not now exist. Does this bother me? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-noneoftheabove"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5222"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5222\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5223,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5222\/revisions\/5223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}