Author: Donald Guenther
Uploaded: 10/25/2013

By the time I came along mom didn’t talk much about our hero. He’d been dead for 10 years. The memories were too painful for her to recall.

Mom’s older sister Louise died at 16 and the death hit grandma hard. She left to live in Portland with relatives to recover. Mom at 8 was told by her dad she was now the woman of the house. Mom started crying and said Louise knew how to cook but she didn’t know anything. Her dad assured her he’d help. Mom had a brother a year younger than she was, Dick. Dick’s friendship had been her life saver. I believe Mom never bonded to her mother, she bonded to her dad and brother Dick.

Life on the farm was lonely for mom and she dreamed of having many children. I am not sure but can only guess Dick felt the same way. Dick was sensitive, enjoyed water colors and writing poetry. I’m attaching a poem he wrote in 1929 at the age of 12. The water colors are brilliant and the poem insightful.

Mom married dad and Dick married a young woman named Eddy. Dick fell in love with Eddy when he was 22 years old and she 16. Eddy had health problems when she was 14 and could not have children. Dick’s capacity for love overlooked being able to have children if he could share life with Eddy.

Four years later when World War 2 broke out Dick felt he should enlist. Hitler needed to be stopped. Someone in the family had to go. Dick said he couldn’t kill a person face to face so he went into the air force and became a bombardier. He wrote home often. Returning from a bombing mission his plane was shot down and he died in the Mediterranean. Eddy and mom hoped until the end of the war he had survived after being declared missing in action. He never returned. Mom grieved every year for him at a grave she had made without his body.

What kind of man would marry a woman who could give him no children? What kind of man would give his life for us on his own accord without being drafted? A kind-hearted man, mom’s brother, Uncle Dick.

This is the story too painful to be remembered, yet the memory of Uncle Dick lives on.

Delsman, Richard J.
Service Number: 735284
Service Name: US Air Force
Rank: 2LT (Second Lieutenant)
MIA: 11/24/1943

Read by Jereme Guenther