This is the first LO I have done with pictures of my dad. I did it for the black and white challenge and the January Challenge. The added color is gold. Some of the charms scanned more of a silver but in real life they look gold. <BR><BR>The journaling is from one of my editorials:<BR><BR>I Found My Father in a Small Wooden Box<BR><BR>I recently discovered my father.<BR><BR>The discovery came from mementos saved more than forty years in a small wooden box.<BR><BR>Just as a small child is surprised every time the clown jumps out<BR><BR>of a jack-in-the-box, every time I open his box I am surprised by<BR><BR>the many things I learn about my father. <BR><BR>Unlike most people I did not have the opportunity to get to know or even meet my father as he was killed in an automobile accident a few months before my birth. He and my mother were married less than a year and she knew very little of his boyhood or teenage years and not a lot about his life before meeting her.<BR><BR>Then came the box. <BR><BR>My aunt, his sister Cappy, discovered the box as she packed to move. She found the small, hand tooled wooden box he had acquired in Sicily during World War II and had used to hold his mementos as she cleared decades of keepsakes from a closet. It is full of treasures.<BR><BR>Many of the items date to his days as a glider pilot in the Army Air Corps. Others are from his years in high school and college. I regret there was nothing of his cross-country ride on a Harley after the war. <BR><BR>I had always known that he had been a member of the band when he was in high school and had been told that I had inherited my musical talent from him as did my daughter Andrea. <BR><BR>I did not know that he had starred in his senior class play at Collins High School. The handbill tucked into the box announced that the play “is worth many good picture shows.” Now we know were my daughter Sarah gets her acting talent.<BR><BR>I never knew that he graduated from Beckley College, or that he had once owned a horse who would "run as long as he had breath in his body." <BR><BR>He sold the horse for $50, an enormous sum of money during the Depression.<BR><BR>I have learned that he also enjoyed writing letters and had many pen pals both in the United States and all over the world.<BR><BR>He was also superstitious, believing that odd days on the calendar and odd numbers were lucky for him, especially the number seven. In his diary he noted January 19 as the birthday of his hero, General Lee. The year was 1937. I can find all of these traits in my daughter Robin and she named her oldest son Robert Edward Lee.<BR><BR>We shared a passion for reading and writing and both loved quite walks in the woods. His diary notes many "peaceful" Sunday afternoon walks in the wood with the dogs. <BR><BR>One entry in the diary tells of his crush on a girl who had sent him a Valentine. "It was cute, but the writing on the back was cuter. Suddenly I became Tom Sawyer again." Yes, my father was an All-American boy.<BR><BR>He had fears just as I do. One entry in the worn green diary states his relief when a TB test returned negative.<BR><BR>I knew that he had served in World War II and have his medals and one of his uniform jackets. Reading his military record with the names Sicily, Naples Foggia, Rome Arno, Normandy, Northern France, Rhineland, Ardennes and Central Europe made it seem real. These were the battles and campaigns that were such a large part of the European Field of World War II. <BR><BR>He missed home and family during the two years he was overseas. He wrote poetry describing what he imigined was happening at his Grandma's house at the same moment he was preparing to go on another mission over Sicily. He longed for one of her homemade biscuits.<BR><BR>There are a few pictures in the box. Several of a girl friend of his youth in Beckley and others made from his glider when he was in training in Waco, TX. One in particular shows him with a deep tan. He even wrote a comment about it on the back. I can now look at my youngest, Emily and know that she shares that part of him with her deep bronze tan from the summer sun. <BR><BR>I discovered he had a passion for Spanish and used phrases from that language in much of his writing. He wrote about one day visiting the Latin America nations. Tucked into some other papers was a small clipping from a newspaper. It is yellow with age and contains only two lines that must have been used as filler in the paper. According to this scrap of paper that he had torn from a paper at that time there was one general to every 123 soldiers in the Mexican army. Now I wonder if he dreamed of fighting as a soldier of fortune and becoming a high-ranking officer working for a foreign government.<BR><BR>I had often wondered about his view of religion. My questions were answered in entrees written after the death of his baby sister who lived only an hour after birth. "We buried Little Caroll Natlie today at Coal City. Cap just about cried her head off. But all babies go to heaven so I don't worry much."<BR><BR>I also learned that I come by my tendency to be a pack rat honestly. Included in his treasures were some old buttons, a switch blade, a German swastika arm band, a hand bill in Italian that he had saved from a batch he had thrown from his glider, and an old insurance payment book that he had used to keep records of the serial numbers of his guns, purchases and the money he had in the bank. There is also an entry that explains why he kept such an odd assortment of items.<BR><BR>"Old match covers, a glider bolt, two old tow rings, two old wire splicers and a bag full of other worthless items, these are my treasures, worth not a cent to any man but me and to me each is worth the time spent in gathering them for each has an association of some time or place long forgotten except when recalled by my plundering through my bag. Then it is that I relive, and a colored pebble becomes a living picture, a desert sunset in all its beauty is sun again." <BR><BR>And through a box long forgotten, a man dead for more than forty years lives again in the mind and heart of his daughter.<BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR>