Memorial Day secrets and honor

Kasey Cox

I have always loved Hamilton-Gibson’s short-play festival, but this spring I am especially honored to be in a play about a local couple during World War II. Rob and Pam Kathcart penned this play capturing a slice of her grandparents’ lives in 1945. To inform myself about clothing and hairstyles of the era, and to inspire my amateur thespian abilities, I have been renting movies depicting the men and women of Brokaw’s appropriately named “greatest generation.”

Nothing, however, put me more in touch with the effects of the war than the book I’ve just read – Lucinda Franks’ memoir, “My Father’s Secret War”. Franks is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, but she never intended to research and write a book on World War II, or the Holocaust, or post-traumatic disorder in veterans and survivors, or the activities of various international intelligence organizations. Although her book eloquently touches on all these wide-sweeping issues, the story started when “Cindy” Franks helped her aging father sort through old boxes. She found a Nazi uniform and currency from several different countries.

Tom Franks, like many men, like many soldiers, like many of his generation, was taciturn. He didn’t speak much about the war; in fact, he didn’t speak with his family about much at all, except when he angrily voiced his opinions about his young Lucinda’s radical politics during the ‘60’s and ‘70’s. Even after Lucinda confronted her father with the uniform, he revealed little. Tom Franks never used the word “spy” to describe himself, even as his journalist daughter, fortunately just as stubborn as her father, coaxed the stories from him.

I think of my mom’s father, Bart Davis, who never mentioned fear or pain when his grandchildren asked him to tell us about his experiences in the war. He shared “funny” stories, about being in a foxhole, peeing in his helmet, and dumping on his head when the shelling started again. But Cornelius Ryan interviewed my grandfather for his well-known book on D-Day, “The Longest Day.” In the two pages dedicated to that interview, Ryan quoted my grandfather about seeing body parts flying, about his own wounds, I remember trying to tell my “Gump” (my baby word for “grandpa” that stuck, as these nicknames do) about how proud I was that he was in this famous book. His comment, accompanied by a slight frown, was that Ryan had “only used the ‘bloody’ parts I told him about.”

Through several years of painstaking research, mailing away for obscure first-person accounts and only recently-opened archives, Lucinda Franks was able to figure out where her father had been over many months of World War II. She pieced historical data together with her father’s letters home, and used this information to quiz him into admitting his role in many covert operations. In the process, Lucinda learned why her father played his cards so close to his chest, why her parents’ marriage had failed, what memories alcohol helped her father to quell. She took her father to the Holocaust Museum to have his testimony recorded, and she helped preserve parts of history that have been silenced for more than fifty years. More importantly, she learned to love her father again. And respect him for who he was, before and after the war.

The firecrackers and bunting are in the grocery stores again; Memorial Day is just around the corner. Come see the Hamilton-Gibson plays on May 18, 19, and 20. Read a great book about World War II, and learn something new about its many faces, or revisit and appreciate again stories you already know. Talk with your parents and grandparents, the folks at the Laurels and Country Terrace. History still lives all around us, right here in Tioga County. We can still learn, not just about international events, but about ourselves.