This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show. In the Second World War, the U.S. possessed 164 destroyers. One of those destroyers was the USS Plunkett. James Sullivan's great-uncle John Gallagher served on the Plunkett and, inspired by a story John's brother Eddie would tell, wrote a book on the Plunkett and the men who served on her called Unsinkable Five Men and the Indomitable Run of the USS Plunkett.
Here is James with the story. When I was a kid growing up in Quincy, Massachusetts, just outside Boston, my great-uncle Frank Gallagher used to talk or tell this one story more than any other story from the war. Frank was one of four Gallagher brothers.
There were five in all. Four of them went away to the Second World War. And coincidentally, Frank met two of his brothers on two different occasions over there. On this one occasion, it was just before the Allies went into Anzio.
It was the fourth amphibious landing of the war in the European theater. And Frank, who was a medic in the Army, in the Fifth Army, he was getting ready to go in. And his brother John, who was a water tender or a boiler man in the Navy, but who manned a 20 millimeter gun at General Quarters at his battle stations when they were in combat. He knew that his brother Frank's ship, a destroyer, the USS Plunkett, was in the harbor in Naples. And so Frank stole away from his unit.
They were making preparations to get underway. They were told there was typhus in Naples. They weren't allowed to go in there, but that never stopped Frank. And he made his way into Naples with a five-gallon jerry can, half filled with Italian red wine. And knowing Frank, he was hauling off it on the way in.
He was a little bit glorious with the wine. And he went to the Biscayne, which was the flagship of the task force that would head up to Anzio. And he called up to the sailors on deck. He says, I'm looking for the Plunkett.
Is it out here? And they wouldn't tell him where it was, but they told him it was in the area. And that was all he needed. So Frank, you know, he's walking along. I mean, the docks and the piers in Naples now, they're getting ready for an invasion.
And it's just it's mayhem down there. But he gets down to this little terrace in the seaside neighborhood of Santa Lucia. And he jumps into a bum boat, a little wooden boat manned by an Italian boatman. And he asked the guy to roam out into the harbor. And this guy, you know, who's this American soldier jumping into his boat?
He doesn't want any part of it. And Frank is now, like I said, he's got the wine in him. So he makes this guy row him out.
And the guy does. He rows him out. And Frank is rowed out now among this fleet of ships in Naples Harbor. You've got Mount Vesuvius up to the off one end of the bay. And it's actually coughing smoke now because, you know, it's about to erupt.
It would erupt just a couple of months later. And you've got, you know, dozens of ships getting ready for this invasion. And Frank is now on the lookout for a destroyer. It's a two stack ship.
It's about as long as a football field, plus most of its end zones. And he's he knows that the hull number, the number on the bow of the ship that identifies which destroyer it is. He knows the plunket is 431.
And he's looking for that. And don't you think he found the plunket? So he has the boatman row him up to the fantail, which was because the ship was weighted with about two hundred and sixty five men, plus a dozen officers and all their fuel and everything else. It sat really low in the waters.
The fantail was about four and a half to five feet above the water line. And Frank, with his five gallon can of red wine, manages to climb up onto the fantail. You know, observes no protocol.
Right. You know, you're supposed to go up, you know, ask for permission to come aboard. But Frank's in the army.
He doesn't pay attention to anything. He climbs up. They grab him right away, of course. Coincidentally, the ship is called to general quarters because it's dusk now. And at dawn and at dusk, those were the most perilous times for an allied ship during the war, because that's when the enemy bombers would come in out of the sun and try to get the ship. So they call the ship to general quarters. And Frank, now they've also called the captain down to the to the fantail, because who's this wayward soldier that's just climbed up onto the ship?
They call the captain down. And the captain is Eddie Burke. He's 36 years old, grew up just outside Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, was an all American football player at the U.S.
Naval Academy. And he was a boxer, too. He lost the title boat as a light heavyweight in 1928. So Burke comes down, a real imposing figure, you know, six foot tall, 185 pounds. And he starts laying into Frank, who's all of five foot eight, five foot nine and 150 pounds. And Frank is there getting dressed down.
And one of the sailors that's on the ship, they're all watching, you know, from where they are at their battle stations. One of them is looking at the fantail and he's looking and he's looking and he thinks, that looks like my my brother. And he realizes it's his brother. So he jumps out of his gun tub and he runs back to the the fantail and addresses Captain Burke and says that, in fact, yes, this this man is my brother. So Frank told that story his whole life. And he died at the age of 99 in 2012.
And that story languished a little bit for a couple of years. You know, Frank's nieces and nephews, his children, grandchildren, each of us had heard it so many times, the story of that reunion that, you know, you could have sat us down in front of one of Ken Burns's cameras and we could have told the story the way Frank had. So, you know, after he passed, I was on the verge of a family trip to Italy. My wife and our two kids were we're heading over and we originally had Pompeii on our itinerary.
But when we got down to the logistics of it and realized just how big of a day it would be to to to get to Pompeii, my wife vetoed all that. And all of a sudden there's Anzio and we decided to go to Anzio. And when we decided to go to Anzio, it hit me then. I wonder if any of the men who were still who were on the ship at Anzio are still living.
And that's how this whole thing began, because I jumped on the phone and started calling frantically, almost as if I'd been waiting my whole life to start making these calls. And you've been listening to James Sullivan. By the way, you can pick up James's book, Unsinkable. Five men in the indomitable run of the USS Plunkett in Amazon or any other place where books are sold. When we come back, more of James Sullivan's story of the USS Plunkett, the Battle of Anzio and more here on Our American Story. Folks, if you love the stories we tell about this great country and especially the stories of America's rich past, know that all of our stories about American history, from war to innovation, culture and faith, are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that are good in life. And if you can't get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses.
Go to hillsdale.edu to learn more. And we return to Our American Stories and our story on the USS Plunkett, a Navy destroyer in World War Two. When we last left off, James Sullivan, fresh from a trip to Italy where the Plunkett had served during the war, was making calls to surviving veterans who had served on the ship during the time his great uncle John was on board. Let's continue with the story. I started to think, you know, wouldn't it be miraculous if there were still a man, it's all the way 2016, 70 years after the war's over, wouldn't it be something if I could connect with a man who had been on the Plunkett at Anzio?
And so it began there. The first man that I connected with, they had had reunions, the Plunkett sailors did from 1982 all the way up till 2011. And I found a Web page about that last reunion and there was a man's phone number at the bottom of that page. I phoned that man and the number worked and he was, you know, in his 90s. And I told him that I was trying to connect with someone who had been on the ship at Anzio.
He had not. This man, Ted Mueller, had come on to the Plunkett after Anzio. But he said, you know, there's this one man that lives just outside St. Louis who was on the ship at Anzio, a real nice fellow, and I'm sure he'd talk to you. So he gave me his phone numbers. He had a home phone and a cell number, which I thought was just great. Here's another guy in his 90s, but he's got a cell phone. And I called him one morning, a Saturday morning, and he was at a home show.
And I thought that was great, too. Not only is he carrying a smartphone in his pocket, but he's at a home show. What could he be doing there?
You know, shopping tile for a new backsplash or something? This is a guy that doesn't give up. So I talked to him for some time about the Plunkett. And he began to, you know, some of these old guys, they've got their stories.
And, you know, once you touch that, they begin to talk to you about some of their experience, if they do, in fact, talk about it. So Jim started to talk to me about that. And he said, look, I would love to talk to you more about this, but I'm all right now. Can you give me a call in the morning on my home phone?
I said I would. And then before I let him go, I told him my uncle's name, John J. Gallagher. And there's silence on the other end of the phone. And I know he's rummaging around.
It's 70 years, you know, and there were 300 men on this destroyer. And I'm thinking this silence is he does not want to disappoint me. I began to feel bad because I put him on the spot and I know he didn't want to disappoint. And then I think the calls dropped. And I remember pulling my phone away to look to see if the connection was still live. And it was. And then I heard his voice come back to me.
And in his voice, there was a smile as big as the moon. And he said, Johnny Gallagher was a very good buddy of mine. And so it was at that moment that I realized, you know, this is a story I think I'm going to have to tell. I didn't have a sense of the Plunkett's place in the history of World War Two in the European theater. In the discovery of these men's stories, I bumped into a Navy, some Navy documents toward the end of the war in which different Navy commanders would reference the fact that in the history of the conflict in the European theater, they could not recall a battle so relentless and so savage as the one that Plunkett had endured at Anzio. The Plunkett story was the story of the most harrowing engagement of the U.S. Navy ship in the German Luftwaffe during World War Two, mostly during the amphibious landings in Europe at Salerno in Sicily or before Anzio. The German bombers, the dive bombers, the torpedo bombers, they would sweep in over the roadstead, the anchorage where, you know, the ships with the landing craft would take the men into the beaches. And the Germans were opportunists. And whatever ship came in their sights, that's where they released their stick of bombs.
Most of these engagements, you know, were a matter of just, you know, two or three minutes, sometimes five minutes. But what the Plunkett endured, because the Germans changed strategy in early 1944, they had decided not to conduct these sweeps over the roadsteads, but they were going to begin to focus on a single ship. And for some reason, in the late afternoon light of January 24th, 1944, what the officers in the Navy believes is that they had misidentified the Plunkett as a larger ship, the cruiser, the Brooklyn, because the profiles, when you're looking at them from way up high, are similar.
And so you had a dozen. There were 12 or 14, the accounts are not exact on this, but you had from 12 to 14 German bombers focus on the Plunkett. And they stayed on the ship. They gripped that ship for 25 minutes, which is just an eternity. And so through this this ship, which is as much drama as you can imagine, you had torpedo bombers, you had dive bombers and you had radio controlled bombs coming at the ship from high flying bombers. You know, you had that going on for 25 minutes and you had Captain Burke on the bridge, navigating like a mosquito in the rain, these bombs that were falling on his ships. And meanwhile, dodging torpedoes that were coming at him as the torpedo bombers dropped the eggs from their bellies. And so it was just an incredible spectacle. And what Burke achieved, you know, would earn him the Navy Cross. And what the men on that ship did that day was, well, I call it the most harrowing, but it was it was the most romantic naval episode that I'd ever encountered in my research of ships at war in the European theater.
But you've got in the midst of all this tumult, you've got this one man on the wheel. He was an enlisted man, a seaman. His name was R.L.
Klein. And they called him Skunky because, you know, you miss a shower now and then and you get a nickname in the Navy. And so Skunky got that. And he said that, you know, through that 25 minutes, Burke, you know, it was as noisy as all get out, you know, 27 percent of all the 20 millimeter ammunition fired by the Plunkett's Gunners during the war were fired at Anzio. The five inch guns, you know, they were pounding continuously for for 25 minutes. The ship had a one point one inch gun. And so it was as noisy as all get out. And Burke is striding back and forth on across the bridge from one wing.
You could go outside the bridge on one side of the ship and then go cross it on the other side. And he's on the lookout, you know, with his lookouts for torpedoes. And he's trying to process all of this information in the midst of this battle.
It's almost like an algorithm. He's got so many things to factor. And what Skunky remembered most about Burke was that when he gave an order, it was at conversational volume.
I mean, if ever there were a situation in which, you know, you might you might let some urgency creep into your voice. It was it was this one. But Burke was as unflappable as you'd want in a commander. What Skunky remembers, he says, I can still hear him, you know, hard right, hard left. I mean, that's that's what the Plunkett was doing, you know, in the midst of this battle. Well, Ken Brown was coordinating the ship's gun battery to try to bring down these bombers that were were harassing the ship.
So so that's what Burke was doing. Ken Brown and Captain Burke, these were two men, both Naval Academy graduates who came from different worlds. I mean, Ken grew up in the suburb of Chicago called Glen Ellyn and really had no ambitions for the Navy. As a young man, he came from his father was a royal typewriter salesman.
They were fairly well off. So Ken had his own car. He used to drive the wheels off that thing, he used to say all over, you know, going down to Champaign to watch the high school basketball game. He was trying to wring as much fun and humor out of his life as possible. And you can see that I have pictures of him as a teenager and as a young man. And you can see that, you know, that he was a really well humored guy and, you know, lived for that sort of lifestyle. Burke, on the other hand, was was as grim as his guns, you know, a Navy All-American on the football team. He was the grandson of a coal miner and kind of looked like, you know, a guy who just dug himself out of the mine, rudely forged features and hard bitten. And you don't quite see a smile on Burke's face.
He looked as grim as his guns. And and then you've got Ken, you know, happy go lucky. He's the he's the gunnery officer. And they got off on the wrong foot, those two. And you're listening to James Sullivan tell the story of the USS Plunkett. By the way, he's also telling the story of the Battle of Enzio. And this was no little battle. In movies, we've captured the Pacific and certainly the European theater.
But what gets overlooked often is the African and then the Italian campaigns. More of the story of the USS Plunkett on Our American Story. And we return to our American stories and our story on the USS Plunkett. When we last left off, the Plunkett was engaged in a harrowing battle at Enzio with the German Luftwaffe. And James Sullivan was describing the cast of characters on board this ship fighting for survival.
Let's continue with the story and the look into the lives of these men. Ken was all about a joke and admittedly admitted as much. And Burke was all business. And so those two guys started butting heads as soon as Burke got on the ship in February of 43. And they butt heads all the way to Enzio. And then everything changed between them. My sense is that on Plunkett, these men became galvanized by their experiences at Salerno and on Sicily during those two first two amphibious landings. And they learned how to work together. Whenever Ken Brown talked about what happened to them at Enzio, he was always talking, you know, using metaphors from sports about the teamwork. And he looked at several different men on that ship and would reference the fact that he saved the ship.
And I thought, well, I thought you said the other guy saved the ship. But he credited so many people for having done what Jim Feltz always talked about as his job. You know, we were all just doing our jobs. But Jim was really insistent on that fact, you know, because I think when we look at it, it's just so easy for us to see these men as emissaries of the greatest generation. And we think that there was something superhuman about what they had done. And Jim and Ken especially, you know, would go to great lengths to insist on the fact that what they did on the ship was work. They were doing their job and they did it together.
And I think that the pride that they felt was in their ability to work together as a team, they began to read and understand each other. No one, perhaps more so than Burke, who had to understand what was happening with his four or five inch guns in the midst of battle and his 1.1 inch and the independent organization of the six men on the 20 millimeter guns on the ship's perimeter. So he's anticipating all of that and factoring that in the ship speed. And he knows what he can get out of the men in the engine room. And not only he knows what he can get out of the men in the engine room, but he knows what he can get out of his men who are in the fire room making the steam that's going to drive the ship's engines. And so he was able to conduct or wield that ship almost like a man with a sword. I mean, it all sort of at the end, in my mind, boils down to what Eddie Burke was able to do with his ship on the bridge. And Ken would say the same thing. You know, Ken, who always referred to him as Burke, you know, had the utmost respect for what Burke did.
You know, he would receive the Navy Cross, which may not have been quite enough, you know, when you look at the entirety of what happened during that battle. But it all boiled down for many of them into what Burke was able to do, the way he was able to harness all those disparate men, hundreds of men, to harness, to know their capabilities, to know them intimately, and to wield that, you know, as he went toe to toe with a dozen German bombers. You know, in the Army, you know, those guys that were on the front lines or in the forward ranks, you know, the guys on patrol, walking point, you know, it was a little more hairy for them than for anybody else. In their company, but on a Navy ship, they were all walking point. You know, when a ship was hit, you know, it wasn't just the guys who were topside. In fact, it was probably more perilous for the guys in the fire rooms and the engine rooms below decks who didn't have a chance to get out. So they were all walking point. That's the thing about a destroyer.
It's right out there. It's kind of like the Minuteman behind the Stonewall, the grunt on point in the jungle. You know, and when they got hit, you know, at JALA, the Maddox was hit and 202 men went down. At Salerno, the Rowan was hit by a torpedo, 211 men in office and officers went down. So it was a dangerous enterprise. That battle went on for 25 minutes.
But the ship was hit at Inzeo, a terrible loss of life. And John was in that gun tub, but he survived the blast and he was carried up to the ward room. They had two battle stations, dressing stations. One of them was the ward room, which is where the officers met for dinner. And they had him on a table. It was a doctor, Dr. Wesley Knop was there. And they had a number of men in there.
I don't know exactly how many, but it's likely there was room for five or six men on tables in the ward room. And he had been riddled with shrapnel in the back from the explosion. And one of the ship's gun captains who would have been in one of the five inch gun turrets, the gun mounts. His name was Jim McManus. He was from Fall River, Massachusetts, and he had been wounded. And he came up to try to get some help from the doctor. And the doctor had no time for Jim. It was a triage situation.
And so many of the men were in desperate straits. And Jim got up there and he quickly realized that he wasn't getting any help there. And he recognized Gallagher over on one of the tables. And he had an IV. And Jim could see that he had stuff coming in. He could see, you know, that there was more blood on the floor beneath the stretcher than there was, you know, coming into John. And he says to John, John, what the hell are you doing here?
And he says, John looked at him and he just grinned. And he said, those Germans can't kill me. I'm a tough Irishman. And he was a tough Irishman.
But there wasn't enough blood. And at 0100 that night, Dr. Wesley Knopf lifted his wrist and that was it for John. So the Germans got him in the end, but we haven't forgotten him. You know, each of the men was going to process their experience on the plunket in different ways. I think of Jim Feltz for a year and a half. He bunked in the engineering department in the bunk right below John Gallagher. And he said, you know, we just we became really good friends.
And you get to know somebody. He says, you know, I could identify him by the way he breathed at night. I could identify him by the impression that he made in the springs of the bunk above me. You know, if you put somebody else in that bunk, I don't know.
And it wasn't John Gallagher. So the men had this just this intimate relationship. I mean, they're on this relatively small ship, thrown together in these perilous circumstances. And they develop a camaraderie that you can't replicate outside the circumstances of a war.
When they got into Brooklyn, a third of the men who had been on the plunket requested transfers. Because if you've been on a ship that's been hit, it's almost like bad luck or, you know, they were traumatized. There's no question about that. And I think about the plunket, you know, that word, the invocation of that word has always been holy in the halls of my family.
You know, we would say the word when we were kids. There was an oil portrait of John on the parlor wall of the Victorian home in Boston's Dorchester neighborhood that he had grown up on. There was upstairs in the second floor hallway his purple heart that hung in a small shadow box beside a black and white picture of the ship, on the back of which there were 93 signatures of his shipmates.
He collected their names, their ranks and hometowns. You've got the legacy of all that. This ship is representative of this Herculean effort that we had made as a country back in the 40s. And you're listening to James Sullivan telling the story of the USS Plunket. And by the way, a destroyer, well, any of you who have played Battleship know what a destroyer is. But in real life, my goodness, the responsibility of a destroyer, you can't make it up. They're basically in charge of protecting the convoy, the fleet. No small job and it's why the Germans wanted to get that destroyer in the end.
You get the destroyer, you get the fleet, you get the convoy. The story of the unsinkable USS Plunket here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories and now we bring you the story of Edie Hand, a friend of ours whose life, well, it was shaped by both a lot of love, but as you're about to hear, a whole lot of loss.
Here's Edie. It was a setting in northwest Alabama, just like in a novel. A sister's love for these three young boys, David, Terry, and Phillip. Every afternoon after school, we would get off our school bus and run inside and get us a doodad cookie and head to the barn. I would saddle up my horse. My horse was named Trigger.
And I named it Trigger because of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. David would saddle up his horse named Spotted Cloud because he loved the long ranger in Tonto. And then Phillip, now he saddled up his horse. He had a little Shetland pony and he named his horse Polly because he was in love with our Avon lady. And then there was Phillip. He was just too small to have his own horse, so I would throw him on the back with me.
We would head to the Indian mounds, and on our property we had about 40 acres, and we would get to the top of the mounds, and it was really a wonderful place to lie down, let the horses wander around, and we would start talking about our dreams. Now, David, he was going to be a race car driver. He was a great talker, and he was really funny. He would turn his hat around backwards, and he would get his pocket knife out and start cutting holes in his hat all the time, making them bigger, and pull his pearls through it. And he would pick up a pine cone and start saying, Oh, here comes Ruth Magoo down the road. He has one kid.
No, I believe there's four, maybe five. Ruth had rather large arms, and she had one hanging out the side of the window, and she was smoking a cigar. So we just had a field day with Ruth Magoo. And then there was Phillip. He was really kind of shy, and he felt like he just didn't know how to get involved with people, but he loved music.
And my mother's brothers were singers and songwriters, and we come from the history of the late Elvis Presley of that family on our grandmother's side. So he says, I think I'm just going to grow up and be a songwriter and maybe drink a little whiskey, because that seems to get all the girls coming around. So we said, oh, well, whatever, you know, he was going to do. But I learned from him about seizing moments in life, and he was that way. He tried to seize moments if it was playing football, if he were up to bat for a baseball game. He wanted to be the best he could be, always practicing to be the best and seize every moment of something that could be great, not good.
And then there was Terry. I think I learned the most about life from him. He taught us about courage. He wanted to grow up and become an architect, because our dad's dad was a builder, and he built buildings and homes. And Terry said he was going to grow up and be a big architect.
He wanted to build all kinds of skyscrapers, buildings. And we said, wow, we barely can say the word, but you're going to do this? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was kind of cool to hear everybody share what they were going to do, and they would say, so, Edith, what are you going to do?
Well, I'm going to write about other people, and I'm going to be a movie star. And they went, oh, sure, well, we're going to visit you in your mansion one day, okay? And so we teased each other, and our mother, her name was Sue, but her mother had named her Ripple Sue, so we would call her Rip Dip, which she hated. So when we were on the Indian mounds, and Rip Dip would get really loud, but when she was about the fifth or sixth time, Edith, David, Terry, Phillip, come home and eat. Well, I said, boys, let's get up. It's time to go home. Rip Dip's on her last scream, you know?
So we would know to mount up, get those horses back to the barn to go have dinner. But it was a wonderful way of growing up in these simpler times. But I guess I just didn't realize that what was happening in my life and what I was learning from them, it was my only time that I was going to have with them because they would die young.
David died at the age of 19 in a car accident. I was a senior in college. I was devastated at that particular time in my life. He was my best friend, and he was the most important man in my life.
So it took me a year just to kind of get back into the groove of life. And he was the first one in our family to pass away. Ten years later, my brother Phillip was killed in an automobile accident. I remember what a horrible time it was that my father called me and he said, Your mother and I just can't go. Would you come and identify your brother? I just didn't realize how hard that would be. I drove to North Alabama and identified the body. It was just so hard seeing how life really was. One day you can be with someone, and the next, they're not a part of your life.
You're washing their last load of clothes. Then, I guess to me, the last one, the strongest one, Terry, they found he had an aneurysm in the middle of the brain. And Terry had brain surgery. And I'll never forget the courage that it took the night his neurosurgeon came out and said, I don't know if we can save him. I'm going to have to leave his head open. We're going to try to go back in one more time.
Would you like to see him? I remember my mother was unconsolable, and my father was with her, and I went to be with him. It was like a war zone for me. I'd never seen anything quite like I saw in that room at the UAB hospital.
I'd never seen that kind of pain before. His hands were strapped down, and I remember he said, you have to save me. You have to save me. And I could not save him. And I stayed with him as long as I could, and I prayed. I tried to comfort him. There was no way to comfort him. I went outside, and I said, you have to do something for him, Doc. You have to do something. He said, I'm going to put him in a room.
You can stay with him all night. I don't know that he'll make it, but we're going to try surgery again tomorrow. I remember I didn't think he would make it either, but he went into the surgery. He lost his hearing. He lost his taste. Several things weren't the same.
They sent him home more of a broken man. I didn't think he would live very long, but Terry, watching him fight for life, taught me so much about courage, of how he wanted to live as best he could, that my father built a ramp in his sunken den, that he had built his home with his own two hands on his land. He talked every day or listened to country music. Then he realized when he went back to the doctor that he was going to be losing his speech.
I never saw someone with that much determination. He says, what can I do, Edith? So I fixed an A to Z sign for him, and I said, I'll point at these letters. We'll make it work. So that is the way we communicated.
And he said one day, he said, I am going to lose my voice. Would you promise me that when my time comes, would you come and hold me? And I want you to tell our story one day that the Blackburn boys, that our life would be an encouragement to tell people it's important to be kind to one another, to enjoy the simpler things of life.
It's not all about the money you can make, but it is what we do for one another and how we encourage one another. And I am glad that God allowed me to be able, when I got the call, I wasn't there at that time, to come, and I held him in my arms. Now they're all buried under that big oak tree. And in the loss of these three young boys, it took me a long time. But I know this, no matter what season of life we're in, or what hardship we face, or heartbreak, that there is something beautiful to come out of it if we look for that.
And that has been my saving grace. And you just heard Edie Hand's story, there's not a dry eye in our room. And what a story about remembrance, about family. How he fought for life taught me about life, she said about her brother Terry.
Be kind to one another, enjoy life, it's not all about the money. What a beautiful story. What a sad story. Edie Hand's story, here on Our American Stories. Music
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