Civil War Veterans Came to School

Civil War Veterans Came to School

Dad and I were reminiscing one afternoon when he was 87, and recovering from a bout of illness at the Togus Veterans Hospital near Augusta, Maine. He was treasuring the times when he was able to hold his infant great-grand children. This particular day it was Patrick and Stephanie’s Henry David, who was 6 months old, but he felt the same joy with every grandchild and great-grandchild. He told me they had taken pictures, and I told him that someday that child would be a grown man who could say, I once sat in the lap of a World War II soldier, and think about that, as by then World War II could be a hundred years in the past. Al reminisced, “When I was in the 5th grade at Tyler Street School (1936) they brought in these men who had served in the Civil War. I don’t remember if they brought anything with them to show, like guns or uniforms, and I don’t remember what stories they told, but I know our teachers made a big deal of telling us that they had served in the Civil War. I never forgot that. The Civil War.”

The Civil War raged from 1861 to 1865, and soldiers who were 20 years of age at the end of the war would have been about 90 years old in 1936.