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| -Short Attention Span Theater- |
| 60 years later, watch returned to vet |
| 2003-08-31 |
| Great story; it’s long so just the first few paragraphs here. The memories came ticking back for Jim Hoel as he held a watch he last remembered wearing on May 17, 1943, the day German soldiers captured him when he scrambled from a Dutch canal after his B-26 Marauder ditched in the water. "It’s just eerie, isn’t it?" Hoel said after his long-lost watch arrived this week at his Evanston home in a package from England. "That was 60 years ago. I’ve sort of got gooseflesh." Peter Cooper, who lives in Kirton, a tiny "one-pub, one-shop" village about 75 miles northeast of London, persuaded a neighbor to give up the watch and tracked down Hoel through some amateur sleuthing. "He didn’t believe it," said Cooper, 56, a truck driver who called to make sure Hoel was the right person before mailing him the watch a week ago. "He was a bit gob-smacked, as we would call it." Hoel, 82, said he had been counting the minutes until he received his old Gallet chronometer, an enlistment present from the Chicago bank where he worked before the war. It didn’t bother him at all that it arrived broken and missing its chain bracelet, a minor detail for a veteran who spent two years in German prison camps after his bomber crash-landed during a doomed raid on a power plant. [ read the rest of the story at the link ] |
| Posted by:Steve White |