PDA

View Full Version : OT: vintage item w/ very special meaning



Dewey2007
01-12-2009, 10:07 PM
Since (http://Since) we're all collectors I thought I'd share this non-game used story that I thought was pretty cool.

A Christmas gift like no other

http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site571/2009/0112/20090112_020157_helmet.jpg
CHRIS WESTOVER shows off his father's tank helmet at home in Oakland on Thursday. Westover received the helmet just before Christmas. (DEAN COPPOLA/STAFF)

The World War II helmet arrived last month at Chris Westover's home in Oakland, three days before Christmas. The helmet belonged to his father — the father he doesn't remember.
Oh, Chris had sat on his father's knee, and the father held him proudly, as Chris was an only child. Then the father went off to war and, at 27, was killed in Europe on Oct. 27, 1944.
Chris was 18 months old at the time, so he has no recollection of his father, Edgar L. Westover Jr., who's buried in St. Avoid, France, in an American military cemetery with 10,000 other wartime casualties.
Chris twice has visited his father's grave in northeastern France near the Luxembourg border. The son believed a graveside cross would be his one tangible connection with his father.
But war is unpredictable when deciding upon connect and disconnect. His father didn't come home, but his helmet did 64 years later.
"It's remarkable," said Chris, still somewhat stunned nearly three weeks after receiving the helmet. "It's an amazing thing after 64 years that this thing found its way here."
The helmet was mailed from Luxembourg, near the site where Chris' father and three Army colleagues had driven over a mine, which exploded, killing all four men. How Chris came to possess his father's helmet might qualify as a Christmas miracle.
"It's a kind of gift that you can't replicate," he said Thursday.
Chris, now 65, is an attorney with the San Francisco firm of Cooley Godward Kronish. A law partner, Jodie Bourdet, was doing an Internet search on her ancestry and asked Chris if she could also check on his family tree. He agreed, never believing what she would discover.

Using an ancestry Web site, Bourdet began with Chris' grandfather, Edgar L. Westover Sr., which caught the attention of Claude Bingen, a police officer in Wellenstein, Luxembourg.
Good fortune smiled as Bingen was doing some Internet searching of his own. For his father-in-law, Armand Klinker, had collected World War II artifacts as a 7-year-old in the area where Chris' father died. Klinker, who's still alive in his early 70s, had held onto a helmet with "Westover 7248" — the last four digits of a military serial number — written inside.
Bingen took that name and the four digits and went on the American Battle Monuments Commission Web site. That's where he learned Edgar L. Westover Jr. was part of the 43rd Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron that had fought in the Moselle River region of Luxembourg, near Wellenstein, and now was interred in a French cemetery.
More importantly, the four digits matched Edgar L. Westover Jr.'s serial number. It was, indeed, the father's helmet, which Bingen then wanted to give Chris as a Christmas present.
Holding the helmet for the first time, what did Chris feel?
"Mixed feelings," he said, fighting back tears. "My father probably was wearing it when he was killed. And I was really happy to have it since I have very few mementos of his that my mother had."
His mother, Betty Westover never remarried and raised Chris in Portland, Ore., as a legal secretary. She received military bereavement compensation and had given Chris those mementos. But many of them, including a roll-top desk and some trophies of his father's, were lost when Chris' house burned down in the 1991 Oakland hills fire.
The house was rebuilt, and redesigned, with the aid of Chris' wife, Barbara, an architect. The couple has two sons, Matt, 38, and Jim, 36. Mother and sons were "astonished," according to Chris, when they saw the helmet.
"I don't know where the helmet has been all these years," Chris said. "My guess is that it's been sitting in the corner of an attic or some such place in Luxembourg. Armand must have lived in that same town of Wellenstein, which has 1,400 residents, all his life.
"What's really ironic, our son Jim was born 28 years to the day that my father was killed."
Further irony: Sharon Björnson, of Piedmont, a close friend of Chris and Barbara's, was in the womb when her father lost his life in World War II. And he is buried in the same cemetery as Edgar L. Westover Jr.
Chris is trying to balance having visited his father's grave and then receiving his helmet.
"It's a similar emotional experience," he said, "but a different sensation than I had anticipated. It's a person who never really was a part of my life."
The U.S. Army tanker helmet, a 7 3/8 size, resembles an old-fashioned football helmet that The Gipper might have worn a century ago. It has eight holes on top, straps that once had goggles attached, and side flaps that held ear phones as Chris' father was a radio operator.
"He was in this vehicle which was sent to a little village in France 10 kilometers away," Chris has learned. "A patrol was caught there, and people were going in to get the patrol out. The Army thinks it was an electronically operated mine someone set off, killing everybody in my father's vehicle. I'm not sure if it was a tank, or if he died in Luxembourg or France."
Chris was told by his mother and relatives that his father was a quiet, reserved individual who won trophies at Oregon State fairs for his homemade ice cream. He enjoyed photography, collected stamps and loved to sail. After the war, he was expected to join his father in the burgeoning frozen-food business.
Chris, low-key like his father, doesn't know where he'll keep the helmet, which still sits in the box that was mailed from Luxembourg.
"I don't expect it to be on display," he said, "but it's not something that will get packed away. I expect to look at it from time to time."
Chris and Barbara are now planning on visiting Bingen and Klinker in Luxembourg.
But how did this Christmas gift compare with others in Chris' life?
"It's a topper," he said.