Tag: lake norden

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Forever Close to Home

By John Andrews

You could always hear his voice above the crowd.

Every Fourth of July, hundreds of people come to Memorial Park in Lake Norden to cap off the city’s Independence Day celebration with an amateur baseball game and fireworks. It’s a popular time for school and family reunions, so people who grew up in Lake Norden often find their way back. The ball game is a good time to catch up if you missed the pork barbecue the night before, so there’s a constant buzz of conversation humming throughout the park as the game is played.

Mel Antonen

Mel Antonen’s voice always stood out. He’d grown up in a house right across the street from the ballpark and did every job imaginable as his father, Ray, managed the Lake Norden Lakers: groundskeeping, announcing, scorekeeping and, eventually, playing. It was small town baseball that launched him on his career as a journalist covering Major League Baseball for USA Today, Sports Illustrated and, most recently, Sirius Radio and Mid-Atlantic Sports Network in Washington, D.C. But no matter what major league city he found himself in, or what superstar he was interviewing, his thoughts were never far from Lake Norden. He came back on the Fourth of July as often as he could; it pained him to miss even a single year. He sometimes regaled friends with stories from his reporting, but more often than not they relived their own days on the diamond or reminisced about the colorful characters they all remembered. He stayed connected to Lake Norden, and in doing so became a mentor to many of us who grew up there.

Antonen died on January 30 at age 64. For 383 days, he battled a rare autoimmune disease called hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH) that became compounded by COVID-19 and lymphoma, a combination so unlikely that doctors told him he was probably the only person in world battling all three at once.

Antonen on the mound in Lake Norden.

As a kid growing up in Lake Norden, I loved it when Mel came home because I felt like it gave me an inside connection to the world of professional baseball. I’d ask about my perennially hapless Chicago Cubs, and he’d share some nugget he’d gotten at the winter meetings or through interviews. We’d talk about new ideas for exhibits inside the South Dakota Amateur Baseball Hall of Fame, which Ray was instrumental in bringing to Lake Norden and which remained a passion project for Mel.

Our relationship changed in the summer of 2007. I had finished school and was trying to figure out if more education was in my future or if I needed to find a job. With a wife and two kids, my sensibilities pulled me toward employment, so I brought my resume and a few writing samples to the South Dakota Magazine office.

Bernie Hunhoff told me they didn’t have a need for a writer, but there was a marketing position open and that he’d review my materials and get back to me. About a week later he called and offered me the job.

I knew that I probably wasn’t cut out for marketing, but this was South Dakota Magazine. I honestly didn’t know what to do. I needed advice. So I called Mel, who told me as politely as he possibly could that I would be an idiot if I didn’t take it. The marketing thing fizzled out, as I had suspected, but nearly 14 years later I’m still here, and I have Mel to thank, at least in part. I know he was there for others, too.

Suddenly I was working with Mel, which never felt quite right. Me, editing the guy who’d spent two decades at USA Today? I wasn’t sure about that.

He was always emailing me with story ideas. Even though his job took him to major league baseball parks around the country and interviews with the sport’s leading stars, he never stopped thinking about the next South Dakota baseball story he wanted to write.

The first major feature of his that I edited was about six longtime amateur baseball managers in South Dakota, and the dedication that it takes from them to keep a team going. We headlined it”Love for the Game” because it really seemed to capture the passion they all had for small-town baseball, but looking back I think it clearly reflected the passion of the writer just as much.

Brothers Rusty (left) and Mel Antonen as Lake Norden Lakers.

He worked through his illness, not only for his regular job on the East Coast but on pieces for South Dakota Magazine. Just last fall he finished a story that had long been discussed around Lake Norden but never written down. I’d grown up hearing about the time the great pitcher Satchel Paige came to Lake Norden on a barnstorming tour. The whole town was abuzz for the game, but it quickly turned to anxiousness when the time for the first pitch arrived and Satchel was nowhere to be found. Turns out that Satchel ran into two boys (one of whom happens to be my cousin) and they all went fishing together south of town. The rest of the story is in our September/October 2020 issue.

Sometimes Mel would email just to reminisce about playing baseball in Lake Norden. One day we got on the subject of the state amateur tournament. He told me he hit a double in his first state tournament at-bat in Madison.”I could hear Danny Olson’s play-by-play voice when I got to the plate. My knees were shaking,” he said. “I also remember striking out three or four times versus Dave Gassman of Canova in the quarterfinal game.”

Then there was the year the hometown Lakers lost to Eureka 6-5 in the semifinal game.”The game ended when manager Dale Jacobsen had our best base stealer, Mike Murphy, try to steal second with two outs in the ninth inning. He was out on a close call, and Jake argued and argued, following the umpire all the way to his car. Jake was still arguing as the umpire was taking off his equipment and putting it into the trunk.

“Chad Lavin, Steve Brown and I were pick-up players from Bryant’s Legion team. I didn’t play, but I’ll never forget the sinking feeling that goes with a season that ended like that.”

One day, he wrote to tell me about an amazing South Dakota connection he’d experienced in Washington, D.C.”I have been going to breakfast at a dive bar on the Hill for a long time,” he said.”The other day, I was there meeting a friend. The friend was late, and I ended up talking to one of the waitresses about baseball. She started talking about how her dad played ‘amateur baseball,’ but didn’t tell me where.

“‘You wouldn’t know where,’ she said.

Antonen and his son Emmett at the South Dakota Amateur Baseball Hall of Fame in Lake Norden.

“But we continued to talk. I found out she was from Arlington, and her dad was Hall of Fame pitcher Chuck Petersen. She’s donated money to the Hall. Her dad and my dad were close friends, teammates, rivals.

“I would have never continued the conversation had she not said, ‘amateur baseball,’ which is, in my mind, is a phrase that you only hear in South Dakota.”

And, for much of the last year, there were health updates.”Survived one near death disease and COVID-19 is next to be knocked out,” he wrote last April 23 with the hashtag #finntough, ever proud of his Finnish heritage.

“I am in hospital, but I am feeling fixed and should be able to go home today,” he wrote a month later, while double checking details of the Satchel Paige story.

“Still battling HLH, but we hope to have it in remission by the end of November,” he said in the last message I ever received from him three months ago. But in the end the diseases proved too much for even a tough old Finlander from Lake Norden.

One of my favorite stories about Mel came from an interview he did with Cal Ripken, Jr., the longtime shortstop of the Baltimore Orioles and the holder of baseball’s longest consecutive games played record at 2,632. Mel asked Ripken about playing in Baltimore and what made it different from other major markets like New York and Boston. Did he ever think about playing somewhere else?”Mel,” Ripken said,”you just don’t understand what it’s like to play baseball in a small town.”

Mel knew it better than the Iron Man ever would have realized. It’s what brought him back every Fourth of July. He stayed connected to Lake Norden and to South Dakota, the people and the stories, and we’re all richer for it.

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Finding the Small Town in Sioux Falls

By John Andrews

I’m always surprised by what I find in Sioux Falls. It’s long been South Dakota’s largest city, at nearly 180,000 people and growing steadily. I’ve lived in South Dakota all of my life, and taken hundreds of trips to Sioux Falls, and still there are neighborhoods and business districts that I have yet to explore.

I spent several days in the big city earlier this year working on a story called”Off the Beaten Streets of Sioux Falls,” which appeared in our March/April 2019 issue. So many trips seem to be spent in stores and restaurants along the”main drags” (41st Street, Louise Avenue, Minnesota Avenue, to name a few). We hoped to highlight interesting places that visitors (and maybe even some residents) might not know about. Imagine my surprise when I walked into once such gem and was instantly transported from the epitome of urban South Dakota to my small-town childhood.

Rosie’s Cafe on Madison Street is a throwback to the Main Street diners that served as important gathering places in small towns across the state. I sat at the counter and ate a hot beef combination with a cup of coffee and a piece of cherry pie for dessert, and felt like I was sitting inside the Andrews Cafe on Main Street of Lake Norden.

My dad’s sisters ran our hometown cafe for nearly 60 years. It began as the Antonen Cafe in 1946. When my aunt, Irene Antonen, died in 1981, her sister, Vi Andrews, became the owner and operated it until her retirement in 1992. Another sister, Jane Espland, took over until the mid-2000s.

It’s the Andrews Cafe under Vi and Jane that I remember most. I’d go with Dad and sit at the cafe’s long counter and listen to the town’s elders talk about their crops and how we could use a little more (or a little less) rain. All of the Andrews cousins worked there at some point, starting out as dishwashers and working our way up to waiters and waitresses.

The cafe was a big part of all of our lives, and as it turned out, Rosie’s Cafe was a big part of Rosie Warner’s life, too. Rosie is semi-retired. Her daughter, Beckie Mettler, assumed day-to-day operations in 2015, but like most small business owners, Rosie still shows up and takes orders, refills coffee, cooks hamburgers and banters with the regulars.

Her parents owned the cafe in Oldham in the 1950s. Rosie took her mother’s tried-and-true recipes along when she moved to Sioux Falls in 1966 and opened her own cafe in 1984. The menu has hardly changed in 35 years.”We give you the comfort of home,” Mettler explained,”and you don’t find that very often anymore.”

I’ve been thinking about Rosie’s and our own family cafe quite a bit recently. My aunt Vi passed away in May at age 91, so when the family gathered it led to a lot of reminiscing. For several years, the South Dakota Old Time Fiddlers held a concert in Lake Norden as a fundraiser for the South Dakota Amateur Baseball Hall of Fame. Vi often kept the cafe open late so that after the show, the fiddlers could come by for coffee and a bite to eat. She was also an excellent accordion player, and after-concert jam sessions sometimes happened right in the dining room.

At the funeral, the pastor mentioned that Vi would also open the cafe on Thanksgiving so the old bachelors in town who had no family could enjoy a holiday meal. That’s something you’d only find in a small town, I thought. But I bet you could find it in the biggest South Dakota cities, too — if you know where to look.

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Love for the Game

By Mel Antonen

The Canova Gang plays under the lights at the ballpark in Canova. Photo by Christian Begeman.

As a kid in Hamlin County, Burt Tulson was marked for baseball success. He belted rocks with a bat, took batting practice at the granary and played night games under the only yard light on the family farm.

He chased foul balls for a nickel at Lake Norden Lakers games and in school he wrote an essay about how he wanted to be in the big leagues and build baseball fields.

Tulson wasn’t one of the handful of South Dakota-born big-leaguers, but in a state where town-team baseball is the closest thing to a common religion, Tulson has been a deacon of the diamond.

We are in South Dakota’s 82nd season of amateur baseball, and Tulson, 67, has been a manager almost half of those seasons. He’s in his 40th year of running the Lake Norden Lakers, and that makes him the dean of managers in the state.

Tulson has good company. Of approximately 75 managers, he is one of five with 30 years of experience leading an amateur baseball team.

The Canova Gang’s Dave Gassman and Kirk Sorensen of the Vermillion Red Sox are each in their 37th seasons. Paul Martin of the Akron (Iowa) Rebels and Fred Obermeier of Clark are each at 33. The Dell Rapids Mudcats’ Jim Wilber, who also managed Redfield and his hometown Miller, is at 31.

“Managers are the most important ingredient we have in keeping amateur baseball alive,” says Dale Weber of Salem, president of the South Dakota Amateur Baseball Association.”The average fan has no idea how much work a manager does outside the white lines.”

A manager does more than write lineups an hour before the game. They oversee the team finances, and sometimes foot the bill for expenses out of their own pocket. They buy equipment and uniforms, schedule games and organize ticket-takers, concession stand operators, umpires and announcers. Managers are groundskeepers — mowing, chopping weeds and preparing the field — and they fix everything from drinking fountains to bathroom light sockets.

“We have this notion that our ball fields should look like Yankee Stadium,” Wilber says.

The morning after a game there’s ballpark cleanup and calling newspapers and radio stations with game highlights.

Overall, town-team baseball is doing well, but there is a slow decline in teams, and that’s related, in part, to the difficulty in finding managers, says Herb Sundall of Kennebec, the association’s secretary-treasurer:”It’s not that there isn’t enough players or money. It’s that managers are hard to find.”

So, why do managers manage? Managers on the three-decades list don’t like attention and quickly credit spouses, children and townspeople for the success of a program. But managing gets in their blood, and they love it because of the competition, camaraderie and community. And, they don’t want to see baseball fade away.

Gassman says retirement isn’t an option.”Baseball is all we have left in Canova. I’m a die-hard. I’m not going to let baseball die as long as I am around.”

Except for Obermeier, who never played baseball, each manager followed a familiar path: They finished daily chores quickly so they could play baseball. They joined youth leagues, played American Legion and were drafted to play on the town team. After a couple of decades, they were handed keys to the equipment shed.

The Fireballing Manager

Dave Gassman’s dad, Bernard, was a manager in Epiphany. As a kid, Gassman tagged along and chased foul balls for a nickel and then spent his money on ice-cold pop at the concession stand, a taste that he’ll never forget.

Dave Gassman is interviewed after his team won the state championship in 2009.

Today Gassman, a farmer who owns the Canova Service Center, follows in his dad’s footsteps in Canova, his 37th season. He also managed one year in Scotland, the year he earned four state tournament wins as a pitcher and Scotland beat Renner 7-5 for the Class B title. Gassman has managed for so long, players might not remember that he was a pitcher, arguably the best in state history, with 376 wins and 5,595 strikeouts, both state records.

In 1966, as a Legion player, he pitched five innings of relief for Canova against Aberdeen in a state tournament semifinal game, allowing the Gang to use ace Lee Goldammer in the championship. Goldammer tossed a one-hitter in a 3-1 win against Woonsocket, giving Canova its first state title.

It was the first of four titles for Gassman. In addition to Scotland, the Gang won in 1979 and again in 2009 when Gassman got to share the experience with his son, Garrett, a left-handed batting catcher.

This year, in addition to Garrett, there are three other Gassmans on the team, including Dave’s nephews, Tucker and Gavin, all who either pitch or play infield.

Scout in Disguise

Burt Tulson and his sister, Pauline, had four places to play ball on the farm between Bryant and Lake Norden.

Burt Tulson.

They played with a plastic bat and ball on the front lawn. The second field had a granary as a backstop so they could hit balls toward the road. The third field was big enough for a game with the neighbors and the fourth was under the yard light, where players had to keep the ball inside the base paths or it was an out.

“That game taught us how to bunt,” Tulson says.”We had to play that game because there was only one yard light on the farm. I learned a level swing and bat control. It was like using a hammer. If you swing too hard, you miss the nail. It was important to be in control.”

His parents, Glenn and Fern, brought him to Lakers games in the late 1950s. He wore Lakers blue for the first time in 1966.

As a player, Tulson was a pitcher, but he injured his right shoulder in a motorcycle accident and moved to first base. He was a line-drive hitter with a lifetime average of .362 and 60 home runs. Tulson and business partner Frank Andrews, a longtime volunteer ticket-taker, were the contractors who built the amateur baseball Hall of Fame in Lake Norden.

He started managing the team in 1976 and earned his 700th career win in 2012. He’s managed the Lakers in 28 of their 39 state tournament appearances.

Tulson’s an accomplished manager, but one night, during the late 1990s, he used an off-the-wall scouting trip to see if he could break the Lakers’ late-season slump. A few days before a game in Huron, Tulson told his team he would be gone and that pitcher Paul Raasch would manage.

A smattering of fans attended, including one sitting alone at the top of the grandstand in Huron. The fan had enormous hair and wore a trench coat with big shades — a bit odd considering it was 90 degrees and muggy.

The Lakers’ players recognized the fan as Tulson, who was trying to watch his team from a different perspective.

During warm-ups at the Lakers’ next game, Tulson was asking about the Huron game, as if he wasn’t there. The players played along, but eventually they cracked and told him they knew where he was.

“It was hilarious,” Raasch said.”We played pretty good the rest of the year. We won the district and a couple games in the state tourney.”

Baseball and Healing

Kirk Sorensen, who farms west of Vermillion, has been a Red Sox fan his entire life. As a kid, he’d visit his grandma, Jessie Jensen, on summer Sundays and walk six blocks to see a game. He chased foul balls and hung numbers on the scoreboard.

Kirk Sorensen guided the Vermillion Red Sox to state championships in 2003, 2004 and 2006.

He was a catcher with speed, but an elbow injury moved him to first base. His resume includes a six-hit game and a season where he had 11 triples.

Sorensen, who also plays bass guitar in a country band, is the only manager to win state titles in Class A and B.

At times, baseball was therapeutic for Sorensen. When his first wife, Teresa, died in June of 1997, he thought about quitting as a manager. Then, a week after her funeral, he was at home as the Red Sox were playing. He decided to go to the game.

“It was a beautiful evening, so I put on my uniform and went to the game,” he says.”It allowed me to forget for a few minutes. The support of the baseball community meant everything to me. It got me through a tough time. It was so good. I’ll never forget it.”

The Bizarre Champs

Paul Martin grew up on a farm and played high school baseball in Westfield, Iowa. The year after his graduation, he formed a baseball team because he didn’t want to play fast-pitch softball.

Paul Martin.

He had a choice to play in a league in northwest Iowa or join South Dakota’s association. (Akron is just across the Big Sioux River, 18 miles east of Vermillion. Larchwood, Iowa, Wynot, Neb. and Crofton, Neb., are the three other out-of-state teams that play in South Dakota’s association.)

Starting a team from scratch isn’t easy. For several years, Martin, a former catcher, paid expenses himself and recruited players minutes before games.”There were times we had to pull dads out of the crowd to complete a lineup,” he says.”It took about 15 years to get going.”

These days, things are easier. There are plenty of players and Akron has a wonderful field.

The Rebels started in the early 1980s and have had their share of history-making moments.

In a 2008 game vs. Elk Point, they turned two around-the-horn triple plays — from third to second to first — meaning the Rebels had a feat that’s only been accomplished once in thousands of Major League games.

But the Rebels’ defining moment came in 2005, when they won a district title against Larchwood in bizarre fashion to make their first state tournament.

Larchwood was beating the Rebels 13-4 when rain stopped the game. The delay lasted two days because of wet grounds and other conflicts. When the game resumed, the Rebels rallied and won 17-16.

“It was an insane celebration because so many times, we were just one game away from going,” Martin says.”I’ll never forget it. We had a big dog pile of players on the mound.”

Rush of Memories

Fred Obermeier, who grew up raising Black Angus on a ranch near Clark, started a baseball team, too. He didn’t grow up playing baseball, but he loved the sport, and he was umpiring games as a sophomore in high school.

Clark’s Fred Obermeier (in blue) started a team from scratch.

In the spring of 1983, a group of players asked if he’d manage a baseball team, and the Clark Cubs were born.

Eventually, the team’s nickname became the Traders, in honor of Obermeier’s cousin, Chess, who trades corn options on the Chicago Board of Trade and supports the team with checks from the Windy City.”If we need uniforms or anything like that, he always helps,” Obermeier says.

As a manager, Obermeier played only when there weren’t enough players.”I didn’t have any talent,” he says.”I have been in two games and gotten one at-bat. I struck out. But, I love the game.”

There were good and bad times. In 1995, they went winless. In 1985, Claremont beat Clark 9-2 in the Class B title game. That game is stamped in Obermeier’s mind forever.

“I was nervous because I had not been to that level before and I was pretty new,” Obermeier says.”It was nerve-wracking.”

But while managers say the sting of losing big games never goes away, the hurt softens. The runner-up trophy stands on a shelf in Obermeier’s home, a snapshot of what amateur baseball is all about.

“Every time I look at that trophy, it brings back a lot of good memories,” Obermeier says.

Patience is the Key

Jim Wilber, who brokers farm land in Sioux Falls but grew up in Miller working in his dad’s feed and seed business, is in his 15th season as a manager for the Dell Rapids Mudcats, but his resume also includes 15 state tournaments for Miller and Redfield. He was a right-handed pitcher who also played all four infield positions.

Jim Wilber’s Dell Rapids Mudcats share the spotlight with Dell Rapids PBR, but the Mudcats finished on top in 2008.

Wilber’s state title was a long time coming.

The Mudcats beat Wynot for the championship in 2008, something they weren’t sure would ever come. After losing twice to cross-town rival Dell Rapids PBR in the state finals, the Mudcats blew an 11-6 lead in the eighth inning, only to come back and win 15-13.

“The lasting image was a strange combination of relief and euphoria,” Wilber says.”The Mudcats weren’t blessed with the best of luck during the final weekends of previous state tourneys. When Wynot rallied, the mood of our team was, ëHere we go again.”’

Wilber says the passion for baseball is unique:”It is the same in the Pony Hills, James Valley or Corn Belt League. Hometown pride has a lot to do with it. Attendance isn’t great at every home game, but the community keeps track of how their town team is doing. And playing in the state tournament is just plain fun.”

About the Author: Mel Antonen is a Lake Norden native. He is a pre-game co-host for MASN-TV, which covers the Washington Nationals and Baltimore Orioles, does baseball analysis on Sirius XM radio and writes for SI.com. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Lisa, and son, Emmett.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2013 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Finns Celebrate St. Urho

By John Andrews

The Irish have St. Patrick and the Finns have St. Urho, who was feted in small town glory Saturday on the streets of Lake Norden.

The annual St. Urho’s Day parade was small, but Lake Norden’s Finns participated with zeal, donning the traditional royal purple and Nile green and affixing Finnish flags to wagons and tractors.

The legend of St. Urho is traced to a businessman in Minnesota who is said to have concocted the story in 1956 when a coworker chided him about the lack of saints in Finnish culture. He created St. Urho, whose miracle was casting the grasshoppers from his country’s grape crop by using his booming voice, obtained by drinking sour milk and eating fish soup.”Hein‰sirkka, hein‰sirkka, mene t‰‰lt‰ hiiteen!” he shouted, which roughly translates to,”Grasshopper, grasshopper, go to Hell!”

The celebration originated in Lake Norden decades ago when two local Finns placed a sign in the window of the cafe advertising a St. Urho’s Day parade the upcoming weekend. Then they drove around town, honking the car horn. It has slowly grown to the dozen or so entries that paraded around town on Saturday.

After the parade, everyone gathered the community center for a potluck of Finnish delicacies. I begged off, because even though I’m willing to try almost anything, I still have qualms about fish head stew. Instead, I snatched a couple pieces of chocolate still lying on Main Street in the parade’s aftermath and headed for home, wondering what crop could be saved by a hero who ate Hershey’s bars and drank coffee. This might be the start of a new legend …

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A World War I Primer

By John Andrews

All of the men and women who served in World War I are gone, and the only people today who can tell their stories are the friends and family members who had the foresight to interview veterans of the Great War before it was too late. World War I was the focus of last month’s Dakota Conference at Augustana College in Sioux Falls. Presenters told fascinating tales of South Dakotans who were on the front lines.

Marian Cramer is a Hamlin County historian known for her work at the Laura Ingalls Wilder homestead in De Smet. But in the 1970s, she interviewed a handful of World War I veterans from Bryant, De Smet and Willow Lake. One of her subjects was Fred Huizenga, whom Cramer found living in a car as an old man in Willow Lake. Huizenga was only 16 when the United States entered the war in 1917, so he was turned away when he tried to enlist. He spent time as a wrestler with a traveling carnival, but the next year he made his way into the Army. He became a military policeman, and after the war, as he escorted former prisoners back to Germany, he happened upon a man with a tiny black mustache speaking on a street corner. Adolf Hitler was then a leader in the National Socialist German Workers Party. “He seemed so dangerous,” Huizenga remembered.

After Cramer’s interview with Huizenga, the town of Willow Lake decided to take better care of their veteran. Leaders installed a bed and television inside the American Legion hall, where he lived during summers on furlough from the State Veterans Home in Hot Springs.

Albin Bergstrom was a farmer from De Smet. He trained as an infantryman at Camp Pike and served at Chateau Thierry. Bergstrom served on burial detail. He told Cramer that sometimes they fell behind, so they simply covered dead bodies with a light dusting of dirt and left one boot exposed so a follow-up detail would know they hadn’t been properly buried yet.

Alvin Kangas of Lake Norden talked about his great uncle, Pfc. Arvid Tormanen, who served in France with the 30th Division, 118 Machine Gun Company. Tormanen was gassed at La Haie in October 1918, and his company was the first to attack the Hindenburg rail line. Before one particularly dangerous mission, Tormanen’s platoon leader said,”I’ll meet you in heaven, hell or Hoboken.” Only five soldiers, including Tormanen, survived. He lived west of Lake Norden for the rest of his life.

Fred Christopherson was city editor of the Sioux Falls Press when he enlisted in February 1918. He trained as a bomber pilot, but the armistice was signed before he saw action. He saw great victory parades in London and overheard English women with two different perspectives on American involvement.”These Americans will be insufferable now,” one said.”They’ll think they won the war.” A second woman seemed more appreciative.”Thank God for you Americans,” she said.”You won the war.”

Surely there are other stories like these that can be gleaned from letters and artifacts, probably tucked away inside trunks in an attic or basement. Since their authors are long gone, it’s up to us to find them.