Christmas Ornaments and My Real Project

a poll for subscribers

I was thinking about writing about Christmas ornaments and memory, especially about a small set of ornaments and a village that my parents had when they were small and treasured enough that they survived over 100 years.

The Santa was Mom’s. The silver and red ornaments were Dad’s, as was the village.

Before I started researching, though, I realized this brought up the problem I hadn’t resolved—what do subscribers to this newsletter sign up for? These ornaments have nothing to do with Hyde Park.

The thing is, Hyde Park history is entertaining for me, but my real project is my history of how World War II transformed my parents and my parents’ world. It’s the details large and small of life in 20th Century America, particularly rural upstate New York. I’ve been building back up to finishing the last two chapters and sending it out into the world so I’ll be spending less time on Hyde Park and more on the book.

I’m thinking the book needs its own substack as the book will have a wider audience (I hope) that really won’t care about Hyde Park. What I don’t know is whether those posts should also be here. I’ll keep doing my Herald articles, of course, but I know the newsletter, if it stays Hyde Park only, will be more infrequent. That might not be a bad thing of course. If the majority of people want it separate, and some are interested in both, you can subscribe to both and there won’t be any more email than you get now. There’s only so much time in a day!

Most of the readers are coming through social media posts. It’s easy for them to choose the topic to click on and they won’t care where a post is. It’s the subscribers I wonder about. So, I’ll post my first chapter below the poll—it’s short!—so you can understand a bit more about the book. The list of chapters is here: https://patricia-morse.com/the-things-they-left-unsaid/

So, here’s the poll:

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The Things They Left Unsaid

Chapter One: The Beginning at the End

I was over 50 years old before it dawned on me that the most important events of my life happened before I was born. The journey to that realization started as my father was dying. With oxygen getting to his brain intermittently through clogged arteries, there wasn’t much that we could share when I went to visit, but he could recall past events. I told him I was working on an archive of all the papers, photos, and memories that Mom and he had saved. I bought a cheap tape recorder—way too cheap for the purpose but it didn’t matter. He didn’t like it, so I held it out of sight. I made the worst recordings in the world. He did like to sit with me as I asked him to tell me stories of the past. Since it was mostly to give us an activity to share, I didn’t bother to come up with interview questions. He’d been telling and retelling a repertoire of amusing stories about his time in the service ever since the 1970s when he had started going to reunions of his old Army unit. I thought that’s what I’d hear.

I was painfully naïve. I had assumed those stories captured his experience. He’d been an Army engineer. I thought he’d been repairing roads somewhere. As a result, I was puzzled when he repeated with some concern, “I won’t tell you about the bad stuff.” And I thought to myself, bad stuff? As I learned, he had seen some very bad stuff indeed.

Dad died not long afterward. I continued working on my archival project with Mom, who spent some summers with me before she died. One spring, driving up from Florida to Chicago, she wanted to stop off in Georgia to visit one of Dad’s old Army buddies, T.C. Moore, and his wife, Mildred. They were good friends. I brought along my laughable tape recorder, thinking I’d add his memories to the archive. I sat in the living room with T.C. while Mildred and Mom sat in the kitchen nearby. I think, because I was safe as a friend’s daughter and because he wanted attention to be paid to his friends who could no longer speak for themselves, he was more willing to talk openly with me than Dad had been. T.C. didn’t need to protect me.

Dad had a funny story about arriving at the front for the first time that also appeared in the division history. Since the story seemed fairly common, I thought T.C. might have a version of it to break the ice. I asked him, “how did you know you were near the front?” He replied thoughtfully, “I guess it was when we started to see the body parts in trees.” I had had no idea. But neither had Mildred or Mom. They can be heard in the background on my tapes exclaiming to each other, “had you ever heard that?” “no, I had no idea.” I realized that I had accidentally broken through 60 years of silence.

As I searched for more information about Dad’s unit, I discovered that the silence wasn’t just the men who had been there. I was having a hard time finding out what their unit had actually done—I couldn’t find the 325th Combat Engineers, nor their regimental combat team, nor their division, nor even the Seventh Army. I knew that they had fought in the Vosges Mountains. I’d pick up “complete” histories of World War II and look in the index. Nope, no entry for the Vosges Mountains. No entry for the Seventh Army. It was puzzling. I went to reunions. I went on battlefield tours. I read memoirs.

And then, new books started to come out. I discovered that the U.S. Army itself, which had written official histories about all the other Armies soon after the war, had not written the history of the Seventh Army until the mid-1990s. There was a larger silence than Dad’s that had been written into history.  

I still hadn’t grasped what I didn’t understand about Dad until I read the letters. I had known there were letters. I had accidentally found them one sunny summer day when I was 21, sitting on the front porch, helping Mom sort through some boxes that had been in the basement untouched for thirty years. I lifted the lid of a shoe box filled with envelopes, slipped a paper out of its envelope, and read the greeting, “Dearest…” Mom leapt across the porch and snatched the box from my hands.

One day, after Dad had died, Mom walked out of her room and handed the box to me. She’d organized the letters by date. She, who was so private, wanted Dad’s story, her story, to be known. I opened the first one up. I literally didn’t recognize the handwriting. I don’t think I’d ever gotten a letter from my father. If he wrote something, he printed it in that precise printing that engineers learn for blueprints. More than the handwriting, I didn’t recognize the words—they spoke of his feelings, his worries, his struggles. I didn’t know this person at all. This boy, who one day would be my father, was an utter stranger to me. The letters began before the war, when he was in college, and I began to realize something about the transformation that Mom and Dad had lived through.

I think for Mom my project was a way to process her grief. With time I realized the scope of her losses. She had lost her husband of 56 years, but long before, she had lost the boy she had fallen in love with. She had lost the town that she had grown up in. And, for a while, after the war, she had lost herself.

It was Dad’s story, but it was also Mom’s. Her letters didn’t survive, so I began investigating after her death. I realized that the war had swept over everything they had grown up with, transforming the fabric of their lives into something unrecognizable. The war—the long build up and aftermath--had turned Margaret Youngs and Gordon Morse into the people I knew as Mom and Dad, the people who had lived in profound silence.

These are the lives I’ve reconstructed through documents, photos, letters, and research. It felt wrong to refer to these people with other possibilities and other lives as Mom and Dad, but it also felt wrong to call my Mom and Dad by their given names when I recount the things we shared. When they told me things, it was always filtered through our relationship and edited by the tricks of memory across the decades of silence. And so I have called them both. The people I’ve met through research are Margaret and Gordon. The people who talked to me are Mom and Dad.

Whenever I mentioned my project to others, it became clear that I wasn’t the only one who had grown up in silent homes. Person after person told me that they had no idea what their father, their grandfather, their mother had experienced during the war. I eventually realized that it wasn’t enough to make an archive. I had to find the words, not just for Mom and Dad, but for the others whose story was left unsaid.

Thanks for being here!