The secretary had been at my parents' house since my grandmother died in 1981. They had left some of my grandma's things in the drawers and then had added their own items...yearbooks, a Rand McNally map book, and a scrapbook my mom had made on the assassination of President Kennedy. My mom was crazy about JFK, and when he was killed, she must have been devastated because she cut out and pasted everything printed in the newspaper about his death. I had looked at it a couple of times when I was a kid, but it was A LOT of news and not many pictures, and I was quickly bored.
When my dad died, I inherited the secretary and the items in it. It didn't seem right to remove them after 30 and 60 years in one place, and so everything was where it had been left when I opened the drawers a few weeks ago looking for whatever it was I needed at the time.
I saw the scrapbook again and, curious to see it as an adult, I took it out. It's a handsome, leather bound scrapbook. John Kennedy is poised regally on the front, framed in gold leaf, the Stars and Stripes behind him. I opened the cover. The first things in it are entire sections of the paper from November 22, 1964, the year anniversary of Kennedy's death. There is (was) a postcard of the grave site and three photographs of it wrapped in a work order (more on that later), and a copy of a comparison between Kennedy and Lincoln and the weird coincidences of their presidencies and assassinations. Lots of tidbits and clippings of the anniversary inside the cover, as if, like we all do, Mom meant to add them later and just never did.
I turned the page and found the articles on the visit to Dallas from Nov. 22, 1963. Glowing reports of how Jackie has captured the heart of Texas and how the president is courting supporters. Pictures of the Kennedys and the Connallys together...The photo on the next page takes up the entire space. It's the one of the Secret Service agent climbing over the back of the convertible. The headline on the facing page reads,
"President Shot To Death By Sniper; Johnson Receives Bipartisan Pledge; Red Sympathizer Charged As Killer."
And then page after page of clippings and articles from the next several days of shock and mourning.
I read some of them, much of what I had already read in one way or another over the years, and decided to have a look at the postcard. It said, "Dear Son..." and went on to talk about a trip to D.C. and the visit to Arlington and where the writer was staying. It closed with, "Love, Mother and Dad." The recipient was a man named Gnadinger who lived in the 40218 zip code. The date was 1964. Curious. I had no idea how my mom got her hands on this, but I knew a Gnadinger from St. X, so I called her to ask if they might be related.
Turned out that the recipient had the same name as her husband's cousin, and his dad was still alive, so she promised to check into it.
Well, a few days later, I got an email, that the card WAS from her husband's Uncle Norb to his son when Norb and his wife were on vacation to Washington D.C.! What a coincidence! Kyle and Norb's great-nephew are in the same grade at St. X and are both in the play. Small world! I was glad to get that settled, but it didn't explain how my mom got the postcard. They didn't live near each other. They didn't go to the same church. They didn't work at the same place. HOW in the world did my mom get a postcard from the great-uncle of a boy Kyle knows from school just shy of 50 years since the postcard was written?
This was a mystery, and I had to solve it. I asked my aunts if they knew any Gnadingers or had any idea how Mom would have gotten the postcard. No and none were the answers. I sent an email back to my friend giving her detailed information on my mom and where she worked in 1964 and her maiden name...anything to make the connection. I figured the postcard probably came from the recipient to Mom when he or his wife realized how much Mom loved Kennedy, but we just couldn't figure it out. I went ahead and mailed the postcard onto my friend for her to give to her husband's uncle. It belonged to them more than me, and I thought it might jog some memories.
Finally, I asked my friend where Norb worked. She said Tube Turns. My grandma worked there during WW2, but that was 20 years PRIOR to this postcard. Then I thought I remembered that one of my mom's brothers also worked there. I called my aunt back, and sure enough, my Uncle Jim worked at Tube Turns for many years. He was a machinist.
I called Uncle Jim.
"Uncle Jim," I said, "did you know anybody at Tube Turns named Norb Gnadinger?"
"Yeah I sure did," he replied. "He was a good friend! We used to bowl together..."
And so it went.
Uncle Jim reminisced about Norb for several minutes, and I told him the story of the postcard. Thing was, Uncle Jim really didn't remember anything about the postcard. I emailed my friend again. "Ask Uncle Norb if he remembers giving the postcard to Jim Portman."
I got an email back yesterday from my friend. This was Norb's reply:
"When Helen and I returned home from Washington, D.C., the JFK grave-site postcard was still safe in the house. Jim Portman and I were very close friends for many years. We did bowl on Tube Turns teams together. He and I shared quite similar averages around 160 – 170 and we enjoyed bowling together. If I’m not mistaken, Jim had his schooling at St Patrick’s on 18th Street (?) (Sharron's input: It was actually St. George). Jim’s main job at Tube Turns was the equivalent Machinist trade in the Laboratory Destruct Stress-Testing Dept. This means that as a machinist, he would make a test sample of aluminum or steel on a Lathe and then this sample was pulled apart on the testing machine and the resistance result numbers, if they were satisfactory to our customers, would accompany the materials as we forged various items for our customers. Of course, we also filed this information in our archives. (sorry I’m so wordy)
Every time I would leave my office to check out something in the mfg. shop, I usually visited with Jim and his co-workers. I know that I talked to him about our visit to the JFK grave-site because that was still of interest to everyone. Jim seemed interested in some way about the photo on the postcard and I offered to give it to him. I thought at the time that he just wanted the card to get an idea of what the Presidents grave-site looked like – as I described it to him – and also told him all about Arlington Cemetery and the ceremony carried out at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (at that time). I don’t believe that we discussed this item again."
Uncle Jim then came home and gave the postcard to my mom, who put it into her scrapbook. It was just a nice gesture at the time, but I'm sure she was thrilled. Something fairly insignificant to him, but here we were, 50 years later, reconnecting dots and remembering old friends!
I called Uncle Jim to share the email, and Uncle Jim said again what a really nice guy Norb was. He said, "He was a real leader! Any time there was an event, Norb was the emcee." He organized monthly breakfasts of the men once they retired and was just an all-around "great man. Please tell him I said hello!"
Tonight, while writing this, I got the scrapbook out again and looked through it. This time I paid more attention to the photographs I had always assumed my mom took when she finally made it to Arlington a few years later. I would still think that she was the photographer save for one small detail. They were wrapped in a piece of paper I had never looked at closely before. At the top, it says, "Tube Turns A Division of Chemetron Corporation." It's a copy of a work order from 1961 that was pulled out of a ledger and folded around three photographs of President Kennedy's grave.
I'll bet dollars to donuts, they were taken by Norb.
Life has come full-circle. How very, very cool.
