During the past week of the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge, I was supposed to cover the topic of Strength. I’ve been on vacation, and I’ve worked on it, but it’s not finished and at this point it’s past the challenge due date which means few people will read it. I wrote about my husband’s great-grandmother, Sima, who was an incredibly strong woman and endured a series of horrible events during her lifetime. I want people to read her story and I want to do justice by her in writing it, so I’ve chosen to postpone it until September when we cover Adversity.
I promised to write every week of the challenge though, so I do have a quick, exciting post to share. I’ve written a couple of blog posts about my grandfather’s WWII diary, and how we believed it was lost or misplaced by the Westbrook Historical Society (you can read about it here and here). Guess what? I FOUND IT!!!!!! I found the whole, damn, wonderful book!
My mom invited me up to spend a day of my vacation with her so we could have a “girls’ day” and look for his journal together. She figured we'd cover more ground with the two of us looking, and she kept saying that she had "a good feeling” we were going to find it that day. I hoped that we’d find a couple of pages I didn’t have. I doubted we’d find the entire thing, but Mom’s 6th sense was right! It was there all along, but none of the volunteers realized it, and I missed it both times I went there too. It didn’t look the way I thought it would. I pictured a 3” binder with “The WWII Diary of Philip LaViolet” written in his distinctive, blocky handwriting on the spine. Instead, it was in a much larger binder that contained things besides his diary. We went through nearly all of the binders in the Phil LaViolet Military Collection before I removed this massive one titled “Lest We Forget” on the spine from the shelf, and gasped when I saw the cover. I passed this book over the two other times I visited the historical society, assuming it contained one of his many projects memorializing Westbrook veterans. When Mom saw it, she told me “lest we forget,” is a phrase he used often when talking about the war.
The additions we found include all of 1944, January 1, 1945 – January 21, 1945, February 1945, a story he wrote about foxholes, a daily bulletin from October 1945, November 1945, missing entries from January 1946, and all his entries from February 1946. 1944 was interesting. Unlike the majority of the diary which is written with daily entries, 1944 was written narrative style. Perhaps he meant to continue this style throughout the rest of the book and ran out of steam, reverting to his daily entries? Maybe he wrote it from memory? Without his physical, handwritten journal to reference, I’ll never know. The first part is an absolute treasure! He wrote with great warmth and humor about his commanding officer, nicknamed “Bugs.” The missing pages from January 1945 include his voyage to Hawaii for amphibious assault training, and his first impressions of the islands.
Besides the actual entries, his diary is full of pictures, articles, handwritten notes, and souvenirs, like this paper with his name and address written in Korean.
The funniest page I found was one he wrote about Hotel Street, the prostitution district in Hawaii. It wasn’t a journal entry, but something he added when he was compiling the diary for the historical society. He talked about the street itself, the madame, Jean O’Hara, and gave some pretty funny definitions of sexual terms. He added things into the diary for historical context, just as I'm doing. I took a picture of the page, but I’m not adding it here because my mother would tell me I’m inappropriate and probably murder me. She was like, “Don’t include this in the copy you print out for the historical society!!!!” and I was like, “Mom, this page is literally in the copy he gave to the historical society! They already have it!”
Some of his additions such as this one and pictures of dead Japanese soldiers created a unique problem for me since I’m transcribing and compiling the diary for my family. Do I add this stuff or not? It’s not part of the actual day-to-day diary. If it was, I wouldn’t change it. Other than correcting spelling mistakes and editing a few awkward phrases for clarity, I haven’t altered the actual diary at all. He made the choice to include these additions in the binder though, so part of me felt wrong leaving them out. I debated an especially long time over the dead soldier pictures. I came up with a solution that will honor my grandfather and the spirit of his diary while making it accessible for my cousins’ children. I’m creating a folder for all the pictures I haven’t used and adding it to the thumb drive with the diary. That way my family can make the choice for themselves. In the case of Hotel Street, I’ll probably write up a historical blurb about it and Jean O’Hara and add it to the diary, but put the picture with Grampy’s definitions in the folder.
I can’t express how excited, relieved, and thankful I feel now that we’ve finally found his diary. I had faith it would turn up eventually, but I certainly didn’t expect to find it last Tuesday. Now I have to get busy writing! With all the new pages I have to type, the historical snippets I have to research and write, and pictures I have to edit, I’m going to be plenty busy if I want to get this out in time for Christmas!
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