{"id":8520,"date":"2016-06-27T22:25:58","date_gmt":"2016-06-28T02:25:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/?p=8520"},"modified":"2019-05-15T13:51:19","modified_gmt":"2019-05-15T17:51:19","slug":"someone-elses-memories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/?p=8520","title":{"rendered":"Someone else’s memories"},"content":{"rendered":"

By accident, I just found online seven\u00a0photos of Dad from World War II that I didn’t even know existed.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0caption for the featured photo above is “Burtonwood – Flying control personnel – 1 May 1943 Cpl Schnellinger, ‘Nice chap’.”<\/p>\n

Yep, my dad really was a nice chap. Everyone who knew him would have said that.<\/p>\n

Those few words “Nice chap” made me think about how\u00a0Dad doesn’t just live in my memory, or in the stories that my sisters and I share.<\/p>\n

He is part of other people’s\u00a0memories, too. People\u00a0I never knew, but who spent three years with him in war time.<\/p>\n

These photos were posted on a site called the American Air Museum in Britain<\/a>. The photos on the site were mostly donated by people who served, or their survivors.<\/p>\n

Sgt. Raymond W. Zimmerman apparently served with Dad at Burtonwood, and his photos were posted on this site.<\/p>\n

\"DAD<\/p>\n

That’s Dad on the left, Zimmerman in the middle, and\u00a0Sgt. Gordon C. Stockinger on the right.<\/p>\n

Dad was an air traffic controller, and\u00a0his photos from the war include<\/a> lots of wrecked planes. But Zimmerman’s\u00a0photos capture ordinary life – at work, or just doing ordinary things like ironing his uniform:<\/p>\n

\"DAD<\/p>\n

That sort of task had to be\u00a0a little strange for\u00a0a farm boy, but he was a dutiful kind of guy, so he did his ironing\u00a0with the same easy smile as he did everything else.<\/p>\n

It makes me so happy to think of all the people in the war who benefited from that smile.<\/p>\n

\"DAD<\/p>\n

Here he is with a\u00a0buddy, identified as just Cpl. Hoffman.<\/p>\n

And here he is out on the airfield, April 20, 1943, doing …. something, with Zimmerman and another guy named\u00a0Ray, whose last name is spelled\u00a0Ponezek in this caption:<\/p>\n

\"DAD<\/p>\n

And spelled Ponczeke in this caption, from a July 1943 photo:<\/p>\n

\"DAD<\/p>\n

Just a couple of guys in the middle of the war. At an airfield with many thousands of servicemen and women.<\/p>\n

I don’t remember hearing\u00a0Dad talk about Zimmerman and the other guys in the photos,\u00a0though he probably did. I don’t know if any of them are still alive.<\/p>\n

But someone remembers them. And they remembered Dad.<\/p>\n

We are all linked by being part of someone else’s memories.<\/p>\n

Today’s penny is a 2014. That’s the year that Aldon Ferguson<\/a>, a historian, joined the American Air Museum site, and he is the one who posted the Zimmerman photos.<\/p>\n

Ferguson also has his own site for the RAF Burtonwood Association<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By accident, I just found online seven\u00a0photos of Dad from World War II that I didn’t even know existed. The\u00a0caption for the featured photo above is “Burtonwood – Flying control personnel – 1 May 1943 Cpl Schnellinger, ‘Nice chap’.” Yep, my dad really was a nice chap. Everyone who knew him would have said that. … read more Someone else’s memories<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8521,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[319],"tags":[36,1029,8,154,156,1025],"class_list":["post-8520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inheritance","tag-36","tag-burtonwood","tag-dad","tag-memory","tag-photography","tag-world-war-ii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8520"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8520\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8533,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8520\/revisions\/8533"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}