Life stories bring history home. They make history REAL.
A couple of guys who were in one of my classes last year served our country in Vietnam. I learned more about the Vietnam War from these military veterans than I had ever known before.
A 90-year-old woman whom I worked with last year lost her mother to tuberculosis when the girl was 7 years old; penicillin, which likely could have saved the mother, had been invented by then, but it was not yet in widespread use. That same nonagenarian worked at the Briggs factory in Evansville during World War II. I learned while writing her story that prior to the war the factory made car bodies — but then converted to manufacturing aircraft wings. Her job was to put lights on the wings of Corsair fighter planes. I knew of “war plants,” but this was the first time I heard firsthand from a Rosie the Riveter.