I love storytelling. Especially vivid oral histories like my father’s tales of World War II and his travels to the Aleutians where hands froze to metal rails, and about Shore Patrol in Morocco, and flying home-made kites from the fantail of his destroyer, and the same destroyer having a running gun battle with German tanks on the short cliffs of North Africa, and the days he floated in the Mediterranean Sea after his destroyer was sunk by a torpedo plane, and leave time in New York when my mom rode the Orange Blossom Special up the coastline for a brief tryst in a port-side hotel nine months before I was born. And the tales of watching race cars run on the beach at Daytona before there were oval tracks.
Intricate stories told with colorful detail to complement the aging black and white photos in his photo album. He never denied my requests to hear the stories day or weeks later. When I was older I wondered why he never seemed to tire of telling the stories. I was much older, with children, photos, and stories of my own before I understood his patience.
I was months old before he saw me, his first born. He’d been reported missing in action while floating in an oily sea only to be found days later gangrenous from swallowing the poisonous water littered with the remains of his ship and shipmates. My mother thought for weeks she’d be a widow and I’d never know my father.
He’d survived the battles, returned to the war and arrived home safe at the end, his future and family intact. Now he would sit in his chair, first born in his lap thumbing through photos in the albums, just happy to be able to tell the stories. He rarely talked of his friends who died or complained of missing my first year. He was always happy just be there, to tell the stories.
Today’s photos are far from being as significant as my father’s tales. I spent several hours this morning shooting Ohio State University football fans at the airport on their way to the championship game Sunday night in Arizona. More than 16,000 Buckeye fans were expected to move through the airport today. Almost all were dressed in OSU scarlet and gray with a scattering of black sweat shirts and jackets carrying the OSU logo.
It was easy to find photos in the long lines of scarlet clothing, Buckeye necklaces, and helium filled balloons. Finding the smaller details were a little more difficult. My photographic choices were TSA workers struggling with the overload of a full DC10 charter at 8 in the morning, including one fan who used a pom-pom as an additional ID tag on the luggage. A small detail in a day long story of fan adoration and dedication.
I’m not sure how many details I now remember from my father’s stories. The broad strokes are there, sometimes refreshed with memories from mentally thumbing again through the album with so many of the photos now removed. The album was circulated among his surviving war buddies who kept some images for themselves. He gave away some to his destroyed ship’s historian. A few just disappeared. The album now sits almost empty in my brother’s collection of family memorabilia, a tattered record of stories told just for the telling, having survived, just for the telling.
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