Veterans’ memories sought for posterity

Veterans’ memories sought for posterity

By Steve Wideman

Raymond Van Heuklon opened his eyes and smiled as the sound of big band music filled his hospital room.

After years of being at war and surviving the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the big band era had been a happy time in the 84-year-old man’s life.

I told him he could dance with the angels, said Van Heuklon’s sister, Jean Gurnee, who persuaded hospital staff to play the music.

Ten minutes later, on Oct. 11, Van Heuklon died of complications from diabetes and other illnesses.

Gone with Van Heuklon, as with many of the 1,200 World War II veterans across the nation who die each day, were memories only he possessed from being a part of an event that galvanized the United States’ resolve in a time of war.

As the nation commemorates the 63rd anniversary of the attack that launched the United States into World War II, efforts to record the experiences of local WWII veterans are being renewed by organizers of a planned veterans museum near Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

We would love to have gotten Raymond’s story. The World War II veterans are dying so fast it’s a shame we can’t capture all their stories, said Robert Stephenson, a board member of the Military Veterans Museum of Northeast Wisconsin Foundation and the son of 84-year-old Clyde Stephenson of Appleton, one of the area’s few remaining Pearl Harbor survivors.

The museum group, which plans to construct a veterans museum near the Experimental Aircraft Association grounds south of Oshkosh, will use Appleton high school students to interview aging Fox Cities veterans as the first step in producing a DVD archive of veterans in war and peace.

To hear veterans tell their stories is going to be huge as far as the students’ opportunity to learn, Robert Stephenson said. We will work the DVD archive into our new museum one way or the other.

Jean Gurnee said her brother, who was stationed at Pearl Harbor with the Army on Dec. 7, 1941, often told her the story of seeing an apparently dead Japanese pilot slumped at the controls of his damaged warplane as it swooped low over his head before crashing.

Otherwise he never talked much about the war, but Raymond was so proud of being a veteran he even gave money for construction of the National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., Gurnee said. It’s important for someone to record the histories of these veterans. If people were never in the service, they can never know what these soldiers went through.

Marine Corps veteran Clyde Stephenson, who still clearly recalls the red sun on the wings of Japanese planes as they dove toward Battleship Row at Pearl Harbor, said today’s technology presents a unique opportunity to record history from the horse’s mouth.

Just think how it would be if we could listen to the voice of someone who fought in the Civil War or World War I describe, firsthand, their experiences, he said.

Stephenson was stationed aboard the battleship USS California, although he was not on the ship when it was sunk in the Dec. 7 attack.

Stephenson and other Marines grabbed rifles and shot at the intruding planes.

It’s something you don’t forget very quickly, he said. People should know what the veterans went through. With today’s modern recording equipment it should be a good thing, but they had better hurry up to get the World War II veterans. We’re a dwindling number.

Joel Edler, technical program coordinator for Appleton’s three public high schools, said school officials are identifying students to participate in filming veterans’ comments.

Edler said students from television media classes will do the actual filming, while students in the district’s military history classes will conduct the interviews, each scheduled to last 90 minutes to two hours.

The World War II veterans are a priority for us, Edler said.

Edler said students would capture the raw footage, which would be sent to a Milwaukee firm and condensed into a 15-minute mini-documentary with images of the war added from Library of Congress archives.

The local archiving effort will dovetail with a similar, ongoing program at St. Norbert College in De Pere.

In July U.S. Rep. Mark Green, R-Green Bay, announced his Veterans History Project, which uses local Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) students to interview returning veterans who served in the war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The videos will be stored at the Military Veterans Museum.

History is being written at a frantic pace, and I applaud Representative Green’s effort to capture that history and bring it to life for future generations, Bob Stephenson said.