This is the 6th Day of Christmas, which is enforced only because Splash does not want to be accused of wasting this curious week between holidays. In order to preserve early drinking by retaining this as a “holiday” edition, Management has informed us that a simple reference to Six Geese A’ Laying will suffice to retain holiday rules.

Here it is: “Six Geese.” Of course that led to something else. One of the rare privileges of moving is actually seeing some of the stuff that normally rests peacefully in shadowed corners of all the garages that follow us through life. On rare occasions, you have to actually pick stuff up and look at it.

There is a little wistful sadness in that, since it turns out we are- or were- the last of the family junk custodians in our line. Our chain-of-custody mostly goes back to Great Grandfather’s time, since they presumably had the largest basement in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania.

We wound up with the last garage in this accumulation. A divorce ruptured the chain of custody, and another garage intervened. There was some satisfaction in acquiring The Farm to hold things when the folks passed a decade ago, and it was with some bemusement we realized that whole pile had reached its end of our period of custody and only some of it could be passed on.

The grand-boys didn’t want to be burdened, understandably so. So this is the end of this part of the Pennsylvania and Michigan Piles. Another pile of stuff some years ago was centered on Great Grandfather (1851-1926) whose travel account of a 1903 trip to Europe was transformed from his small notebooks and stacks of pictures and cards into digits. As it turns out, there was another pile. And it was in the stacks right here.

The revelation occurred yesterday morning. The bookshelves and closets were re-stacked. It was time to start organizing the stuff on the shelves. On the bottom of one pile, possibly from New Jersey via Detroit, was a thick sheaf of photo-quality papers, maybe 18 inches by 24. They had not been examined- “looked at” – since the artist himself saved and collated them.

Dad was an artist with gifts. Plural gifts. He transformed them into a career in what was called “Industrial Design” after the War. It was a process that winnowed the artistically gifted who had additional talents into managing other artists to design automobiles with fins and flare.

But he kept some of that talent locked away. Not that it was sensitive, though we wonder who that Helen woman might have been. The pictures of her in the stack are before the time he met Mom, so that matter may have had a poignant quality he wanted to save. The other pictures are ones he selected for retention. They obviously came from notebooks he carried all his young life.

The renderings discovered yesterday were something he had commissioned in the 1960s to represent a part of his life he considered special. That is why we include it today. The Salts have enjoyed some of the old images collected from the vast machine then at war. Artist Bill’s cohort was being prepared to support the land invasion of the Home Islands of Japan. That didn’t happen, and the rest of his life did.

So here is a letter from 1944 to the sixth-through-twelfth days of Christmas, 2022:

U.S. Naval Air Station Bunker Hill, Indiana

3 -28- 1944
Dear Mother,

How are you?

Today is a fine day. Rather windy, but the sun is shining making it warm. I noticed a robin this morning while marching out to the line. I was surprised as there are few birds around except for sparrows in the rafters of the hangar.
3- 29- 44
I was unable to finish this effort yesterday, so I am trying once again. The time is 07:15, and I am sitting at a table in the ready room on the line. A steady drizzle is now in progress and the visibility is poor, so nothing will be flying for a while.
Didn’t see no robins this morning. Received your fat letter yesterday, thank you. I might note that sister Tiny’s husband Dick is a 1st Lt., not a 2nd Lt.

Two days ago, I was asked to relieve a man tending the coffee in the officer’s room for a few minutes. I took the opportunity to jot down a couple of heads. They were engaged in a game of cards, so they wouldn’t sit still. I caught the above right head fairly well. When the weather turns warmer I will make a few sketches of the buildings. Now I am spending most of my leisure hours over in the gym.
This sure is a swell vacation. Work half a day, three square meals, all sorts of recreation facilities near at hand, and no mental strain, not to say getting paid for it too.
“It is better to have come and gone than not to have come at all.”    Bill
___________________
Here are the some of the other ones he saved:

We will try to put these together in an approachable chronological manner at some point, but at the moment we are a little in shock at finding them at all, curated as the man who drew them did. We will turn our attention to a New Year (and how to celebrate it) on the morrow.

We might need the “Hard Boiled Hat,” the one we know as the Hard Hat, that “Doc” Bullard later invented to keep things from denting our heads.

Copyright 2022 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com