Cross Burned on Martin Luther King Jr's Lawn

"I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it."
(Nelson Mandela)

It is Spring, a time when mild temperatures bring homeowners outside to rake up old grass or tend to new flowers poking up their heads.  But no one expects to find what Martin Luther King Jr. found on the front lawn of his new house in April of 1960 -- a burned cross.  Clad in a dark suit, tie and dress shoes, with his little boy standing beside him, Dr. King nonchalantly bent down and pulled out the calling card of the Ku Klux Klan.  Most of us would not do such an act with nonchalance.  However, given what the black civil rights leader how already endured in his young life, it was completely within his character.  

Martin Luther King Jr. received dozens of death threats due to his role as a civil rights leader.  In 1956, Dr. King's Alabama house was bombed, blowing the windows out and damaging the front porch.  King was just relieved to hear that his wife and children were unharmed; speaking to an angry crowd after the bombing, he warned:  "He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword...We must meet hate with love."  In 1958, Dr. King travelled to New York City for a book signing in Harlem where he was stabbed by an assailant and rushed to the hospital.  Death threats were part and parcel of his job:  Dr. King would not be intimidated.

Martin Luther King Jr. knew the world was watching on that day that he found a burned cross on his lawn. If he had shown fear, he would have succumbed to fear.  He would not have sat at a lunch counter and waited for his order to be filled while onlookers spat on him in 1960; he would not have written his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" in 1963 or delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech to a sea of protesters in Washington D.C. in 1963; he would not have marched over the Edmund Pettus Bridge to face a wall of Alabama state troopers on Bloody Sunday in 1965; he would not have faced the bricks, bottles and firecrackers thrown by a jeering crowd as he led a march through an all-white suburb of Chicago in 1966; and he would not have roused the crowd with his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech in 1968, only hours before he was assassinated.

Yes, a burned cross wasn't exactly how Martin Luther King Jr. expected to be welcomed to the neighbourhood back in 1960.  But his response spoke volumes.  

"So do not be overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good."  (Romans 12:21)

Martin Luther King Jr. pulls a burned cross out of his lawn while his little boy stands beside him circa 1960 courtesy i.imgur.com.

Woman with Gas Resistant Pram

"My good friends, this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honour.  I believe it is peace in our time." 
(Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, 1938)

Most of us have heard of the bomb shelters that residents of Britain's big cities used as protection during the Blitz.  Most of us have heard of the gas masks.  But who has heard of the gas resistant prams?  Here is a photo of a woman pushing her baby in a gas resistant pram in 1938, the year that Germany occupied the Sudetenland.  While Prime Minister Chamberlain had proclaimed "Peace in our time" after appeasing Hitler, the general consensus was that war was on the horizon.  And the public wanted to be prepared.  However, the gas resistant pram, which resembled a coffin more than a baby carriage, never really took off.    

Hextable, Kent, England circa 1938 courtesy www.dansdepot.com.

Burst of Joy

"Every time I look at it, I remember the families that weren't reunited...and I think, I'm one of the lucky ones." (Lorrie Storm)



It was St. Patrick's Day 1973.  Four hundred family members, who hadn't seen their loved ones for years, waited expectantly at Travis Air Force Base in California for the landing of a flight from Vietnam.  A group of journalists had been dispatched to cover "Operation Homecoming", the return of 20 POW's, part of an exchange between the North Vietnmanese government and the Americans. One family, the Stirm's, were about to get their father back.  And one photographer, Sal Veder, was about to get his Pulitzer prize-winning photograph.

As Lieutenant Colonel Robert Stirm walked down the steps of the airplane and crossed the tarmac, he watched a beautiful scene:  his wife and children, whom he hadn't seen in almost six years, were rushing towards him.  His teenage daughter, Lorrie, wearing a light blouse and a dark miniskirt, was running so fast she was almost in flight, her siblings not far behind her, her mother bringing up the rear.  According to one witness:  "You could feel the energy and raw emotion in the air."

It was this scene that hat kept the lieutenant alive for five and a half years in the Hanoi Hilton, a concentration camp in Vietnam where he endured gunshot wounds, torture, illness and starvation; where he had eaten sauteed sewer greens and ground pig remains; where he had lived in solitary confinement, his only means of communication being a tapping system like Morse code (each night their last exchange was "Good night and God bless!").  To keep his mind active, Lieutenant Stirm  had recited twice daily the 250 names of his fellow American POWs at the camp.  Today, a total of 591 POWs would be coming home.

Photographer Sal Veder took a flurry of shots on the runway, then hurried inside to the washroom to develop them in a makeshift lab; but the men's room was full, so he moved to the ladies' room.  Within half an hour, he had six viable photos which he wired to the Associated Press.  And within days, the photo, titled "Burst of Joy" was published in newspapers across the United States.  Within the year, Sal Veder was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

Lorrie Stirm and her three siblings were thrilled to have their father back.  For so many other children, their father's never came home from Vietnam.  But Robert Stirm's wife, Loretta, did not feel quite the same.  She had fallen in love with someone else while her husband was in prison.  By 1974, the Stirm's were divorced, the oldest two children living with their father, the youngest two, with their mother.  While Lieutenant Stirm miraculously survived the Hanoi Hilton, he had a harder time surviving the end of his marriage.  All four of his children have a framed copy of "Burst of Joy" hanging in their homes, but Robert wall remains bare.  His marriage remains another casualty of the Vietnam War.

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Raising the Red Flag over the Reichstag

Berlin's Reichstag circa 1920 courtesy blogspot.ca.

As a little boy growing up in the Ukraine during the 1920's, Yevgeny Khaldei dreamed of becoming a photographer.  He made his first camera out of his grandmother's eyeglasses.  In the course of his career, he would take thousands of photographs.  But the most famous one would be taken on the Reichstag rooftop as Berlin burned in the dying days of World War II, one of the most recognizable images in the world.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they had little affection for the Reichstag (German Parliament) building, a symbol of democracy built in 1894.  The same year, a fire broke out in the building and it was closed, never to be reopen.  It was in that same building that a vicious fight ensued between the Soviets and the Nazis in the closing days of the war, part of the Battle of Berlin which would cost the two nations millions of lives.

Back in the Ukraine, photographer Yevgeny Khaldei was working for the Red Army.  He had asked his uncle to fashion a gigantic Soviet flag out of tablecloths.  He packed up the flag, along with his Brownie camera and large flashbulb, and headed for Berlin.  Soviet Mikhail Mini climbed to the top of the Reichstag on the night of April 30, 1945, and planted the Red Flag.  However, it was dark and impossible to take a picture. By the next day, the Nazis had ripped it out.

Reichstag circa 1945 courtesy blogspot.ca.

Khaldei still went ahead with his  plan to capture an image comparable to that of the American marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima.  On May 2, the fighting ended.  Red Army soldiers Kantaria and Yegorev climbed to the top of the Reichstag, this time in daylight, and planted the flag that Khaldei's uncle had made.

Khaldei snapped the photo and promptly developped it.  He did not like the fact that one of the two soldiers was wearing two watches, on on each wrist, a sign of looting.  So he doctored the photo slightly to eliminate the second watch.  At the same time, he added more background smoke to make the image more effective.  On May13, Raising the Flag over the Reichstag was published in the Soviet magazine Ogonjok.  Soon the image was reprinted in hundreds, and eventually, thousands of publications.

Khaldei worked at the Nuremberg trials the following years, capturing images of some of the top Nazis being grilled by the Allies.  He later left the Army and was hired by Pravda magazine in the 1950's.  While he took rolls and rolls of film, he was never able to recapture an image as surreal as the one of May 2, 1945 of the Soviet soldiers raising the red flag on the Reichstag rooftop as Berlin burned.

Raising the Red Flag over the Reichstag courtesy listserve.com.

One Doctor's Miracle

"Everyone in the room went silent, not a sound.  If it were night, you'd only hear the sound of the crickets singing their songs." (Jack Bradley)

Jack Bradley got into photojournalism to travel the world.  He was a combat photographer in Korea and had seen it all.  So it was quite an adjustment when he came back to the United States and had to settle for a job with a small town newspaper in Illinois.  It had been 20 years since he started working for the Journal Star.  He wrote human interest stories, accompanied by pictures taken with his Brownie-like camera with the stereotypical giant flash bulb.  It seemed like his boss gave him the same humdrum assignments day after day, week after week, year after year.  

But all of that changed on what seemed like an average day in February of 1974.  Jack and his colleague were dispatched to a doctor's office in Peoria.  Jack grabbed his camera, his colleague grabbed his notepad and pen (there were no laptops back then) and they headed out the door.  

At the doctor's office, Jack noticed a group of burly men whom he assumed were from the Medical Board. A doctor stood ready for the test to commence.  A nurse stood beside him ready to assist.  And the patient, a 5 year old boy with light brown hair and brown eyes, sat waiting in anticipation.  Jack raised his camera ready to shoot.  The doctor placed a small ear piece in his ear.  The little boys eyes almost popped out of his head: He could hear for the first time in his life!  "No one spoke for several minutes after that doctor pulled that switch."  They had witnessed a miracle.

According to Jack, in his 25 year career as a photographer, this was the "most magnificent photo" he had ever captured.  He didn't need to travel the world to get the scoop -- it happened right in his own backyard.

Harold Whittles hears for the first time courtesy i.imgur.com.

Wait for Me, Daddy!

"From what I understood from the photographer, he was trying to get a picture of how many soldiers there were, but then this kid made the getaway." (Jack Bernard)

It's the most famous photo ever to be taken in Canada during World War II.  It appeared in Life, Time and Newsweek.  It hung in every school in British Columbia during the war.  And it was used to sell Canadian war bonds.  It's called "Wait for Me, Daddy!".

On October 1, 1940, a column of Canadian soldiers marched down Vancouver's Columbia Ave. to the train station.  Their uniforms freshly pressed, their hats tilted on their head at just the right angle, their boots freshly shined, the new recruits were ready for battle.  But one little boy wasn't ready for them to leave.  The white-blond haired boy broke away from his mother's grasp and ran after his father who was part of the column, reaching out his little hand as if to say "Wait for me, Daddy!".  His father responded by reaching out his own hand. His elegantly dressed mother reached out for her son's hand, trying to keep up.  

All the while, photographer Claude Dettloff was snapping photographs of the column of soldiers on Columbia Ave.  Unprepared for the scene to follow, he captured a once in a lifetime moment on film.  His photograph would be published in The Province newspaper,  later to be picked up by several magazines including Reader's Digest.  Dettloff would become famous over the heart-grabbing image of the white-blond haired boy chasing his war-bound father down the street.

                                        

nationalpost.com

The little boy, Warren Bernard, returned to his Vancouver home that autumn day with his mother, Bernice.  His father, Jack, along with the rest of the British Columbia Regiment, boarded a train for Nanaimo where he underwent military training.

Later Jack fought on the battlefields of France and Belgium.  On the home front, Bernice and Warren lived out the war on a modest income in a rented apartment.  Since money was scarce, Bernice agreed to let Warren participate in a war bonds tour in 1943.  Dressed in a smart blue blazer and short grey pants, Warren toured the province with war bonds that featured the famous Dettloff photo.  The young boy, who had to take time off from his schooling at General Wolfe Elementary, delivered the same speech every time, ending with the line:  "Help bring my Daddy home!"  The teary-eyed audience usually responded generously to his plea.  When Jack Bernard returned home in October of 1945, Bernice and Warren were there to meet him, as was Claude Dettloff, ready to photograph the happy reunion.  

The white-haired boy grew up, married in 1964 and in the 1980's, became mayor of Tofino, British Columbia.  A sculpture honouring the moment the Bernard family said goodbye, was recently erected at the corner of 8th Street and Columbia Avenue, the spot where the original photo was taken.  Canada Post has issued a two dollar coin with the famous image.

The reunion between father and son courtesy blogspot.com.

A Prayer in Spring

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest, keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

And make us happy in the darting bird
That suddenly above the bees is heard,
The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,
And off a blossom in mid air stands still.

For this is love and nothing else is love,
The which it is reserved for God above
To sanctify to what far ends He will,
But which it only needs that we fulfill.

Robert Frost

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