Whenever I meander a museum, I look for living history.
I look for people who may have been alive during the time period that’s on display, and I try to listen. I want to know not only what’s on the plaque beside the glass case–I can find that information in any decent history book–but also how this moment in history felt. I want to hear the stories of these men and women so that the tiny details of these times are not forgotten.
At an air and space museum in Alabama, I met a veteran who flew thirty missions as a bombardier on a B-24 Liberator, and I heard how it felt flying in that bulbous glass nose on descent toward target. In an elderly woman’s home in rural Missouri, I heard rhymes that children sang during the 1918 influenza epidemic. And, a while back, I shared a meal with my wife’s great uncle in Virginia, and I listened to his story of the Second World War.
He maintained the radios for the Douglas C-47 Skytrains, first in Africa then in England. In the spring of 1944, he was repairing radio systems for planes whose wings bore the triple white stripes of Operation Overlord. These were the aircraft that would drop nearly 14,000 American, British, and Canadian paratroopers behind German lines five hours before the first boats landed at Utah and Omaha Beaches. Months later, he followed those first troops into France, and he described this scene to me, in his words:
“One scene somehow really brought that war home to me. It was something I saw in France. We were walking the streets of a town there. Almost everything we saw was damaged or just gone, but it was quiet now. And we passed an apartment building. Seven floors, I think it was, and it was split right down the middle, like a meat cleaver had torn right through the middle of it, down to the ground, and left both sides sagging in toward the center. And I looked up and down, and I saw all those apartments ripped open for everyone to see. And there, on the very top floor, I saw something I’ll never forget. There was a bed there on that top floor, hanging by one leg. Beside that bed there was a baby bed, dangling there above that awful mess between those two halves of that building, and the baby bed was empty. Somehow, I always wondered what happened to that baby. I’ll never forget that scene. I still see that baby bed, and I wonder. I still wonder.”
Some stories should simply be remembered.