As I go through my grandfather’s pictures, I have so many questions, little mysteries that make my brain itch. Some of the big questions concern his exact whereabouts. Papa made a lot of stops over the course of his 38 months overseas. For the documentary, I would like to stand in some of the places he stood, but his notes are vague. The map I have becomes fuzzy when I zoom in on the locales.
Sure a lot of it was operational security. You don’t want notes about your bases falling into enemy hands. The pictures can be worthless. I particularly likes the ones that are just marked as desert. He crossed about 1600 miles of desert during his expedition. Marking the picture ‘desert’ doesn’t quite narrow it down.
Then there are small mysteries. In one of the pictures, Papa sits atop a 500lb bomb. He points to a chalk message on the bomb which reads, “To Adolph, Jillson” For the longest time I couldn’t figure out why Jillson was written on the bomb. It turns out spending weeks transcribing Papa’s letters to his wife paid off and solved the mystery. Papa had a friend Merton Jillson who sent him a letter, I guess, requesting his name be put on a bomb. Now, I never saw the letter Jillson wrote, that would have been too easy. I only have Papa’s response that he was sending a picture to my Nana, Bea, to show Jillson’s name on the bomb. Papa wanted Nana to make sure Jillson got the picture.
Thank god for Nana for keeping all these letters from Papa. God knows what happened to all the letters Papa received while fighting. Most of the content of his letters to Nana are discussions of what letters he received in that mail call. Or as in the case of the letters I am transcribing, presently, not receiving any mail. Papa hadn’t received a letter in over three weeks and was pissed. He couldn’t write letters if he didn’t know what questions Nana asked in her letters. But having the letters Nana wrote would really complete the conversation they were having via transatlantic mail.
I desperately need to solve the mystery of Lyman Middleditch. All the Google searches I have done on his name reveal the same canned replies. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for heroism and was an Ace for shooting down five enemy aircraft. Pretty darn heroic? But how does that jibe with the picture I have of him walking away from a bunch of fellow officers while stark naked? The other reference I have to Lyman was that he hated the P-40 aircraft, felt it was junk. The only reason Lyman had so much success was because he was such a better pilot than Germans. I need to find out more about this guy. What happened to after the war? What he did with his life? This whole documentary research endeavor is just a breeding ground for questions.
But it’s not just WW2 that puzzles me, it’s also the software I’m currently using to post this blog. As a base layer, I am using WordPress, which started life as blogging software. To make my life easier setting up theblackscorpions.com website, or so I intended, I’m using a them that runs on WordPress called Divi. Divi takes the mystery out of websites. Sure, it does. To cap it all off, I use a subset of Divi called Extra, a dedicated blogging theme of Divi.
The nightmare is real, but minor. First off, the tutorial I use to learn Extra is over 10 years old. I know. I hear you. Find a newer one. This is the tutorial the Divi support website points to. If you know technology at all, ten years is an eternity in software development. Ten years ago, they weren’t talking about AI to build your website. Now, that’s all they talk about. Divi would really like me just to tell Divi’s AI what website I want and let it build it. Pass.
I watch the video and the software they demonstrate looks an awful lot like the software I’m using. I follow the steps and the website kind of looks like the one on the screen. But when I go to add sections like the tutorial tells me, those sections are non existent. The process makes me angry. But I do have something that looks like a website and posts I write can be read. But still, mysteries everywhere. With I’m sure more to come.
