When a story says Wow!

In every project, if I've asked the right questions, I hear a story that says wow! (And I don't use exclamation points easily.)
I felt that when I started the memoirs of a Major General in the Air Force with this story that I felt more than anything illustrated this man's lifelong values of — honesty, honor, integrity, patriotism, dedication, commitment and loyalty.


Harry was just four or so when the first of these values, loyalty, was put to a test. It was a time when families ate what they raised and what they grew. Young Harry already was a part of the family’s food production, having the responsibility of feeding the chickens, including his favorite, Old Dick, a rooster.
“He was really a pet, but in those days people would buy live fowl for the table and butcher it. I thought I was going to keep Old Dick,” he said. “I’d go out and feed him and pet him.”
The family gathered for Thanksgiving 1914 in Detroit, where his father, an Army master sergeant, than was stationed at Fort Wayne. The table was filled with the bounty for the meal and the family, including young Harry, ate happily.
“Yeah, that was Old Dick,” someone said, matter of fact.
Down went Harry’s fork. His mouth fell up and his head hung down. “That was when I didn’t like chicken anymore,” he said in 1998. “Eighty-five years later I still don’t like chicken. It got to be a habit, I guess.”
Until the day he died on September 18, 2001, Harry would not eat eggs, chicken, turkey or any other kind of fowl. If the extended family had a Thanksgiving turkey, a ham or red meat dish was cooked for him.
Of his lifelong swearing off of chicken, Harry said, “It’s not loyalty. It’s stupidity.” The reality is the story says a lot about his loyalty, steadfastness and conviction. It’s about never wavering against absolute dedication to something that he believes in.
The story of his experience in World War II will be told later, but his loyalty was tested again when he flew back from Australia after surviving the harrowing experience of Bataan during World War II. True, he’d had a few months to recover from the near starvation conditions that dropped his weight from 220 to 140 pounds, but his loyalty to Old Dick was still somewhere in the crevices of his heart, mind and stomach.
It was Thanksgiving time when he made the trip by air back to the States. And as is tradition wherever the troops are, an all out effort was made to feed them in a manner they would have experienced back on the Home Front. “They always had Thanksgiving for the troops,” Harry recalled.
Because of the course of the journey back to the United States, Harry was in the unusual position of two Thanksgiving meals, not just one. “We had to go from island to island across the Pacific. We had Thanksgiving in Fiji and then we crossed the International Dateline on the next plane and had another Thanksgiving,” he said.
Did he enjoy it after being in such dire circumstances for so long? “As far as I could like it. They always have turkey,” he said, quickly adding: “Of course, they also have ham and plenty of vegetables and pie.”

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