How a Delta Phi Helped a WWII Brother Find His Way Home
Undergraduate Sarah Richter wrote the following essay which was published in the July/August issue of The Pennsylvania Gazette...War RemainsThomas Adams Calvert was coming home.
His name was Donald Skelton. He was 85 years old. I had never met him before, but I listened patiently to his frail voice across miles of phone line, knowing that I had no magical words to wipe away his suffering. So I told him everything, from the beginning: how in the world I had come to possess a portrait of his brother, smile suspended in chipping, brittle paint, a flash of life captured only months before he died as a soldier in World War II.
It was an unlikely story. My Uncle Vinson had gone to my grandfather’s former jewelry store, on Lincoln Avenue in Miami, to investigate some family history. The new owners mentioned in passing that he must have left something up in the attic. Perhaps we wanted it back.
They led Vinson upstairs. There he found them: young men in uniform—foot soldiers, pilots, sailors, generals—70 portraits, each a foot and a half long and 10 inches wide, all in the same muted palette of flesh tones and dappled light. Almost all were smiling. When the owner laughed that his wife thought the paintings were haunted, my uncle took them without hesitation.
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