So last Saturday (7 November) my cousin Erin, writing from Lexington, Kentucky, sent me this link. It’s the World War II narrative of my great uncle Eugene Ladd, who apparently went to New Mexico State in Las Cruces for a year before the war. I didn’t know that. In fact, the page contains a lot of detail that I didn’t even think my family knew.
So I forwarded the link to my Dad and brother Randy in Cleveland, Ohio. This prompted a phone call from my Dad reviewing with me the only information he did know about his Uncle Eugene, which was that as a child Eugene was called Whitey for his whitish blonde hair (which my Dad had as a kid, too). “You can see from the picture why they called him Whitey,” my Dad said.
My Dad said that Eugene so wanted to not miss out on “the action” in World War II that he convinced his father, against his mother’s wishes, to sign for him.
He was killed a month short of both the end of the war in Germany and his 20th birthday.
His parents never got over losing him in the war (what parent did?) and because my Dad looked so much like Eugene, he became very close to his grandfather and Ethel and spent every summer of his childhood on the Solano ranch. This is why when my mother was dying, my fathers own cousins called her up to tell her she was the real Gray in the family (my grandmother’s side) because my Dad was a Ladd. And he always was. (My Dad doesn’t dispute this.) My mother loved that because she liked to tell everyone she was an outlaw and not an in-law, but she loved my grandmother’s huge family like they were her own.
Anyway, we all wondered how the New Mexico State website was able to gather so much detail on Eugene and it prompted my brother to go into his basement and dig out Eugene’s war box (the provenance of which had gone from his parents to my grandfather to my Dad’s older brother to my Dad to my brother).
There, incredibly, he found this poem, “Private First Class” by Agnes Carr.
He asked me if I had ever seen it. I had not. But Eugene was truly “called to strife.”
We don’t know where the poem came from. Did a friend give it to my great-grandparents? Did the Army send it to them or maybe it was from the woman who tended Eugene’s grave in Europe until his remains could finally be sent back to the United States? We don’t know.
There’s also no evidence of the poem online or the poet, Agnes Carr except for this page calling her a friend of Emilie Loring and a Boston columnist (the page also includes another Agnes Carr war poem titled “For This Day”) and a site with a photo of Agnes Carr and a title listing her as a “Boston Traveler Poetess.”
This is all coincidental timing as Veteran’s Day is Wednesday and then I’m heading to Las Cruces in a few days with my own in-laws. And then I’ll be visiting my brother and Dad in Cleveland for Thanksgiving.
I have visited Eugene’s grave (next to his parents in our shaggy Mosquero family plot) many times, but I think all this may prompt another visit very soon.
