This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here on this show, including your story.
Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. They're some of our favorites. Up next, a story from Robert Froelich. Robert is the author of Aimless Life, Awesome God, and a regular contributor to this show. Today Robert shares with us the story of a man who impacted him profoundly.
Take it away, Robert. Bill Helm was born in 1892, the son of a tavern owner in Berlin, Germany. He learned his trade as a tool and die maker, and married Elspeth Schultz.
In 1927, they came by ship to America with their daughter, Ursula. Wilhelm Bissner became William Burtner. His German friends called him Willy, and everybody else called him Bill. When he first came to the United States, Bill worked as a mason's helper while he learned the English language.
Then he went to work at his trade. Long Island, New York, was a hotbed in the early days of aviation, and he saw it all. He knew many of the pioneers in that field. He worked for Sversky and for Sikorsky, the early developers of the helicopter. He also worked for Republic Aircraft and Chance Vought Aircraft. In 1933, Bill went to work for Edo Aircraft in College Point, New York. Bill was involved in the design and fabrication of floats for various aircraft, including some for Charles Lindbergh and Admiral Berg. I remember he had two model airplanes proudly displayed on the mantle in his College Point home. One was a solid aluminum model of Lindbergh's plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, and the other was a Chance Vought F4U, the iconic gull-winged navy warplane.
World War II created a huge demand for military aircraft floats. As Assistant Division Superintendent, Bill headed up a fabrication shop. According to one College Point residence, he hired, quote, every German toolmaker and machinist he could find, including my father's, and as a result, put food on the table for my family. I'm proud of my father.
I'm proud of my table for my family, unquote. Bill put all his skills to work revamping tool designs and manufacturing processes to make the production faster and more safe. In 1943, he won a National Safety Ace Award for one of his designs. After the war, Bill retired to his 100-acre retreat in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. Living in a house he had built himself, he and Elspeth took me with them in 1947. He had a small machine shop there and planned to do some contract work from time to time that only lasted a year.
They moved back to the city, gave me back to my mother, and Bill started work at Sperry Gyroscope Corporation. The company manufactured guidance systems for ships, aircraft, and missiles. Bill always took great pride in his work, immersing himself in the tiny details of his craft, and he loved the shaping of hard steel or soft aluminum into useful objects. Once, he showed me a rectangular aluminum box about one and a half inches wide and high and about two inches long. It had a hinged lid. At Sperry, Bill had designed the tool that made this box, which was an electrical junction box for the instrument panel of the Boeing 707 aircraft.
He explained to me the intricacies of bending allowances and the tiny tolerances that went into this simple object. Bill retired again in 1961, but when I returned home from military service in 1964, I found him working every day in a small local machine shop, still making tools to shape metal to his will. Bill's German-born love for precision and order carried over to his off-duty life. He owned just three cars during my lifetime, all Plymouths, a 1941, a 1955, and a 1968.
They were all base models with manual transmissions, and apart from a radio, no amenities. Every Saturday, Bill would check under the hood. Reflecting on my grandfather's life, it amazes me the advances he was part of. Young Wilhelm taking care of horses in the muddy battlefields of World War I. Bill, the tool and die maker acquainted with the pioneers in aviation. Bill, the superintendent helping to win World War II by making water landings possible for military aircraft.
And Bill, the tool maker, seeing parts he helped create flying high in the sky and even into space. Bill Burtner loved this country, and he made the most of the opportunities it gave him. And he returned the favor by giving his best to America. He never lost that German love for precision and ordinal, nor did that distinctly German accent ever leave him. He was my grandpa, and I loved him. And what a gem we just heard.
I mean, what a time to have grown up. I mean, from horses to flight, and there he is right in the middle of flight using his God-given skills to help America defeat the Nazi menace. Our arsenal of democracy, folks, we couldn't have done it without it.
And men like Bill on the front lines. William Burtner's life story is told by his grandson, Robert Froelich, here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we're asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of $17.76 is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to our American stories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming.
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Simply go to Geico.com or contact your local agent today. And we continue with Our American Stories. Up next, we have the story of Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross, told to us by Professor Emily Thomas. Professor Thomas has been teaching history at Nichols College in Dudley, Massachusetts, since the fall of 2000. She works at the Clara Barton Birthplace Museum in North Oxford, Massachusetts.
Here's Professor Thomas with the story of Clara Barton, also known as the angel of the battlefield. So she was born on Christmas Day 1821, although that was not really a big holiday back when she was, you know, born. Her brother was actually in school that day, came home and found out he had a little sister. She had two older brothers, two older sisters, and three of them were teachers.
So a lot of her schooling was done at home. When she was 11 years old, her brother David was injured in a barn raising. He was like standing on what would be kind of the equivalent of a second story standing on a board of wood and it broke underneath him. He landed on his feet, supposedly, was obviously shocked and a little, you know, out of sorts, but he seemed okay walking around. But within a couple of days, he developed very bad backaches, headaches, even a fever. They weren't sure what was going on, so they called in, you know, a doctor who proceeded to bleed him and give him medicine.
What that entailed, we don't know. On and off for two years, he was bedridden. He would have maybe a week where he could get out of bed, move around, feel a little bit better, but then he'd be back in bed for two weeks. So for that two-year period, Clara Barton became his nurse. She nursed her older brother, you know, doing basic things. She talks about having to put the leeches on and take the leeches off. I'm not sure she enjoyed that so much, but she did get used to doing it. She would give him his prescribed medicine and then she was also his sort of contact with the outside world.
You know, she would sit and talk to him and tell him about the gossip in town. After two years, he was still not well. So they then contacted a Thompsonian doctor in a neighboring town. Thompsonian doctors completely rejected like modern medicine of the 1820s, 1830s. So no bleeding, no purging, no chemical-based medicines. They borrowed a lot of herbal healing and natural healing from indigenous people. So David underwent this treatment for two or three months and I assume they also did some sort of like physical therapy with him. And remarkably, he recovered completely. So we will never know exactly what he did to injure himself, whether it, you know, was an injury to his back.
We're never going to know, but he lived to the age of 80. But that was Clara's sort of introduction to the world of sort of nursing and, you know, medicine. But she didn't seem to express, I've never seen, you know, anything written where she expressed an interest to go into medicine, probably because women could not go in to medicine. But the way she explains her entry into the teaching world is that her parents were very concerned that she was very inward and shy. And so yeah, at the age of 17, she talks about how, you know, she goes out and buys a couple new dresses, or the fabric for a couple new dresses, put it that way. And she tried to make herself sort of appear bigger than she was. I'm not sure of her height.
At one point, she told Susan B. Anthony she was 5'4", but I'm not quite sure she was quite that tall, maybe closer to 5'2". But yes, at the age of 17, she's pretty much thrown into a school room with really no training, except what she observed her brother and two sisters doing. So one of her biggest things when she taught was, she called it lack of discipline at one point. She didn't believe in punishing her students. You know, these were the days when if a student is misbehaving, you could literally, you know, whack them with a ruler on the back of the head or the back of the hand, or stick them in the corner, you know, with a dunce cap on.
She didn't believe in that. She thought that the way to get her students, especially to learn and to behave, was more to reward them. There are several stories where she would have, you know, three or four sort of teenage boys who thought they could cause trouble for her. And the one story that comes out of Oxford is that she wanted to show them that, you know, number one, she knew that, you know, the pranks that teenage boys play, but also that she could also sort of best them.
And so they went outside and played some sort of game of ball. And the boys were kind of so impressed with the fact that, you know, wow, she's like our teacher, but she can like hang out with us and, you know, and so she won over their respect. And in fact, the first term that she taught in Oxford, she received an award for the school with the best discipline, despite the fact that she didn't use the traditional, you know, rules of discipline. So she taught for several years, including in New Jersey. She did establish, we'll say the first successful free school in New Jersey.
The town government decided to build a brand new schoolhouse. And Clara was quite excited because she figured, I started this school, so they're going to place me in charge, right? But it was, you know, like 1852 or so. Women did not run, you know, modern schools then. And so a man was hired. Clara was quite upset, I can imagine. But took a position, you know, as a teacher at the school. But after several months or so realized that she did not like working for this man, but he also was strict on discipline. That was a big part of what she didn't agree with. So she resigned, along with her friend Annie Childs, who is also from Oxford. But at that point, and now we're into like 1854, she decides to move to Washington, DC. Washington was kind of like an up and coming exciting city.
And certainly there would have been jobs. She met a man, he was a senator from Massachusetts. He had a friend who was actually the commissioner of the patent office in Washington, DC. And she got a job working as a clerk in the patent office. She was one of the first women to hold a government job. And she was making $1,400 a year, which was the same pay as the male clerks. And it was quite a bit more than she would have been making as a teacher.
Because, you know, at least in New England, a female school teacher might expect to make $200, $300 a year. This was a fantastic opportunity for her. She writes, you know, home several letters saying how her hand hurts at the end of the day. She worked from nine o'clock in the morning to three o'clock at night, just literally copying things. She was a photocopier, basically. But she seemed to enjoy kind of the frantic pace of life in Washington, and definitely enjoyed her job at the patent office. And so when the Civil War began, that's where she's working, in the patent office.
The patent office, there was a lot of empty space in the building, not a lot of other offices were occupied in the building. So when the war began, not only did they quarter some soldiers in the building, including a regiment from Rhode Island in the early months of the war, but they also started using the building as a hospital and a morgue. So she's going to work each day, and she's seeing these injured soldiers, hearing their stories, realizing that they need certain basic needs, like clean socks, blankets, you know, food. And so started going around in her neighborhood to people she knew, asking, you know, could you knit a pair of socks?
Could you bake a pie? Simple things like that. According to, you know, her accounts, she eventually had what she called three warehouses full of supplies. But what she then realized is that for the most part, in the first year or so of the war, the hospitals in Washington were pretty well supplied. The real need was on the battlefield.
Men were dying who might have lived if someone had gotten to them. But how does a single middle-class woman follow an army? And we've been listening to Professor Emily Thomas tell the story of Clara Barton. An accident with her older brother turned her into the younger sister as nurse, and she developed an affection and an appetite and, in the end, a talent for it. When we come back, more of Clara Barton, known as the angel of the battlefield and the founder of the American Red Cross, here on Our American Stories.
And we continue with Our American Stories. We've been listening to Professor Emily Thomas from the Clara Barton Birthplace Museum tell us the story of Clara Barton, the founder and first president of the American Red Cross. Clara had been working in DC and begun gathering supplies for the Civil War efforts. She now had three warehouses full of supplies and needed a way to get them to the troops.
Back to Professor Thomas. And what she realized is she had to get permission from the War Department, but that was not easy. The chance that the War Department was actually going to sit down and talk to a woman, you know, was very rare.
So she would need an introduction for sure from a male sponsor. But in the process of all this, she got word from Oxford that her father was dying. So she went home at the end of 1861. And, you know, her father died in February of 1862. But while she was home, she had some deep conversations with her father, who had been a soldier. He had served in what they called the so-called Indian Wars in the Michigan territories, you know, in the years before Clara was born. So he was sort of a military man and was very proud of that. And so one of the questions, you know, she sort of asked was, how do I do this? Will the soldiers sort of respect me?
And, you know, his answer was pretty much, yes, you know, if you are sort of fulfilling a need, you will be respected. And one of the things he did was he gave her his Masonic pin and told her to also wear it. Because if many soldiers saw that, they would recognize it as a Masonic pin and would also, you know, trust her. So after her father passes away, she goes back to Washington, through the help of some political men, is able to get an appointment with the War Department, tells the man, of course, initially, she was told, well, the front is no place for a lady. But when she told them, apparently, that she had all these supplies ready to go, they changed their mind. By mid-July of 1862, she does have permission and she's ready to go to the front. So that army pass gave her, you know, what she needed to sort of cross, you know, into sort of the army camps.
If anyone questioned, you know, what's this woman doing here, she could pull out the pass and prove that she had permission. It meant that she would usually get free transportation, got a soldier or two on to protect her and her supplies on her travels. So getting that permission from the army was just extremely important. At this point, I'm not sure she really wanted to nurse again. It was more, okay, I have all these great supplies, I'm going to get to the battlefields, go get as close to the battlefields as I can, you know, maybe drop my supplies off and go back to Washington and do it all over again. The problem is, is you don't arrive near a battlefield or at a field hospital and walk away. The need was always just, you know, overwhelming. The very first battle, she ended up, you know, doing some basic nursing as we would understand it today, making men comfortable, you know, as much as possible.
And some of these men are lying on the ground outside, but get them a blanket, get them some water to drink. A big part of it would have been, you know, making rule out of cornmeal or whatever she could find to, you know, give them some sort of food, you know, checking on the ones perhaps that had had surgeries earlier in the day, just to make sure, like, you know, well, they're still alive, you know, maybe check for fever, but not complex nursing. She actually had no formal nurse training, but no woman really had any formal training. If you joined the official nursing corps with the United States Army, which was run by Dorothea Dix, you got a crash course of maybe a week.
But that was it. The first nursing schools did not open until after the Civil War in the 1870s. One of the most harrowing stories comes out of the Battle of Antietam, which was on September 17th, 1862. It still holds the distinction of being the bloodiest day in American history.
More Americans died on that day than any other day in our history. She was working out of what was known as the Poffenberger Farm, you know, maybe initially, at least about a mile from where the active battle was. But Civil War battles were notorious for the lines of combat shifting.
And so you think you're fairly safe and at a, you know, safe distance, and then suddenly shells are exploding, you know, around you, bullets are, you know, coming into the farmhouse windows that, you know, you think is safe. And so at this one battle, she was, many of the men were either in the barn or on the ground outside, around the house and barn. And she was going around giving some of the soldiers, you know, some water to drink. And in this one instance, she's sort of propping up a soldier with one arm, and, you know, trying to give him a drink with the other.
And she felt something pass through the sleeve of her dress. A bullet went through the sleeve of her dress, missed her arm, and instantly killed the soldier she was giving a drink to. That's how close she came at times to being, you know, killed during battles. The other account we have is from a doctor that she worked with numerous times during the Civil War, but also at the Battle of Antietam.
James Dunn was his name. And in fact, when he saw Clara arrive during the Battle of Antietam, he supposedly exclaimed that God has indeed remembered us because he saw Clara coming, knew she had what, you know, they needed. You know, it was only a few hours into the battle and they had already torn up every single bed sheet, tablecloth, linen they could find in the house for bandages. They were actually wrapping some wounds in corn leaves because there was a huge cornfield right next to the battlefield.
So, yes. And then after that battle, he wrote a letter home to his wife, you know, explaining sort of what happened at the battle. This letter was later published in several different newspapers. And at one point, he has this quote, and it's something to the effect of General McClellan, with all his laurels, sinks into insignificance beside the true heroine of the age, the Angel of the Battlefield. So, he was the one that gave her her nickname, Angel of the Battlefield.
And, you know, from the time that was published in the fall of 1862 or so on, that becomes her nickname. Her bravery amazes me. I also think maybe she got a little rush of adrenaline from this. What we do know is that she definitely suffered from depression throughout her life. And those bouts of depression often, you know, occurred after the death of a friend or a family member, which makes sense. But it also seemed to happen when she didn't have something to do, when there was no active battle, when there was no disaster to respond to as far as later in her life during her Red Cross years. She would just go into this depression that in some ways you can almost, sometimes I feel it from her that she's just, she's not even sure she needs to go on with life. And then she hears of another battle potentially approaching. And it's like she hops out of bed and she's ready to go again. And you're listening to Professor Emily Thomas tell the story of Clara Barton. My goodness, that scene with her dad having that deep conversation about his service in the military.
How do I do this? Will the soldiers respect me? The War Department at first tries to block her, but of course she keeps pushing and then she gets the transportation and the troops she needs, the safety she needs to bring the supplies the soldiers need to them. And then that description of the Battle of Antietam, and that is the bloodiest of the Civil War, when a bullet passes through the sleeve of her shirt and kills another soldier. She suffered from depression and it seemed what lifted her out of it was battle. A warrior, Clara Barton was, we know that for sure in her own way. When we come back, more of Clara Barton's story here on Our American Story. And we return to Our American Stories and the story of the founder of the American Red Cross, Clara Barton. Professor Emily Thomas from Clara's Birthplace Museum has been telling us this amazing story. Clara's bravery during the Civil War saved many soldiers lives. She was even present at the Battle of Antietam, one of the bloodiest battles in American history.
We return to Professor Thomas for the rest of Clara Barton's story. Some of the men that she nursed during the war went on to marry and had daughters, and many named their daughters Clara Barton. So we definitely know the soldiers remembered her. And years later, she would go on to do a lot of lecture tours, you know, to talk about her work during the war. And one reason she did that is because towards the end of the war in 1865, she opened a missing soldier's office in Washington, DC. She started to get letters from sisters, wives, mothers, asking her if she knew of their missing son, husband, brother.
And this was back in the day when all you had to do on an envelope was put Miss Clara Barton in Washington, DC, and it would get to her. So she was deeply moved by some of these letters and realized that, you know, yes, she is among the soldiers. Maybe she could do something to help. But until really, you know, sort of the war was winding down, she didn't know exactly what she could do. But she approached, you know, again, some of her political friends and some of the men she had worked with during the war. She did receive permission in the spring of 1865 to open this missing soldier's office. As far as I can determine, she is the first woman to run a government office, although they didn't actually give her an office. She had to work out of her, you know, little really just one, you know, room apartment in a sense that she's living in in DC.
And they also did not give her any salary or any supplies, although eventually Congress did reimburse her $15,000. But she opened this office, sent out word that anyone who was looking for a missing friend or family member should write to her. She hired some helpers because she was sometimes getting 100 to 150 letters a week. From 1865 to 1868, Clara Barton and her small staff at the missing soldier's office received 63,182 letters requesting information about missing soldiers.
41,855 personal replies were sent. By the end of 1868, more than 22,000 soldiers had been identified. But this cost money. So one way to raise money, she went on lecture tours of so many times after her talk, a man would come up to her and say, you know, you nursed me after the battle of, you know, you nursed me after the battle of Antietam. They definitely remembered her. But all of this work exhausted her. And so she had a little bit of a mental breakdown. She was actually giving a lecture in Maine and lost her voice in the middle of the presentation.
The doctors diagnosed her with nervous prostration and suggested that she travel to Europe for three years. While on her travels while in Switzerland, she meets one of the founders of the International Red Cross, which had been founded in 1864 by five of them all together as a combination of Swiss businessmen and doctors. The man who really pushed founding this, Henry Dunant, had witnessed some of the wars in the Italian Wars of Secession and was just horrified.
And he was a wealthy man. And so it took him a couple of years, but he was really the one who pushed for this organization to be founded. The idea was that countries would join in. And once you joined in, you took that sort of oath of neutrality and that anyone caught in the field of war, whether soldier or civilian, must be tended to, cared for. Volunteers would wear a red cross on a white background to identify themselves. And I guess we did send two delegates from the United States who went over to a couple of the initial meetings in 1863 and 1864 as the Red Cross was being founded.
But they came home and basically decided, well, number one, we were in the middle of a war, so that was our number one priority. But number two, from what they understood of what they had learned, the Red Cross sounded very similar to our sanitary commission and that we really did not need to join this organization. Meanwhile, Clara Barton knows nothing about any of this until she is in Switzerland and one of the founding members, you know, meets with her and kind of asks her, why did America not join the Geneva Treaty, which is, you know, what you join to become a member of the Red Cross.
And so she started to read up on it, you know, talk to some other people that were involved and thought, this sounds like a really good organization. When I get back to America, I've really got to look into this a little bit more. But again, she was supposed to be on a restful vacation.
Yeah, then war broke out, the Franco-Prussian War. And again, you know, if I'm on vacation and a war starts, I am packing up and leaving as quickly as possible. And yet Clara's first thought is like, how do I help? Like, where's the front lines going to be?
I need to get there. Working with the Prussian Red Cross, like, amazed her. She even has this great quote where, you know, they did more in four weeks as far as sort of organizing, getting supplies to those that needed it.
They did more in four weeks than we did in four years. And now she's convinced, I need to start the Red Cross. And her new mission in life was getting America to join the Geneva Treaty. But it was a little complicated because not only did you have to get Congress to approve the treaty, you had to get the president to sign it. And that wasn't easy. So again, largely with her own money, she started publishing these little pamphlets explaining what the Red Cross is, what the Red Cross does.
We have a couple at the museum. And one thing she realized was that the focus on wartime relief of the Red Cross was not going over well in America. We had had a devastating civil war, and no one wanted to even think about the possibility of another war. There were also those who really thought we were done with wars. Those silly Europeans will have their wars, but we've got an ocean, you know, around us, two oceans protecting us.
We'll be fine. And then it also was a treaty that had to be signed. So that kind of, you know, set her back a bit until she realized that, wait a minute, why does the American version of the Red Cross have to be just focused on war? Why can't it help people in times of need when there isn't a war?
So after a hurricane, a forest fire, you know, a flood. So adding the idea of disaster relief to the American Red Cross is what finally did it. And so she did get congressional approval for the Geneva Treaty in the spring of 1881.
President Chester Arthur signed the Geneva Treaty in 1882. So by that point, the Red Cross, what then was called the American National Red Cross, was finally a reality. Her life after that was quite busy. Of course, she was elected president and did serve as president for 23 years. So her life did not slow down. I mean, she was 59 years old when she founded the Red Cross, you know, at an age many people today are thinking about retirement, and yet she's got 23 years of work, you know, in front of her, and it was work. You know, you sometimes read her diaries too, and you just, you get exhausted reading what she did.
Never mind thinking about, how did she do this? But she wanted to stay very active, you know, throughout her life. You know, supposedly she was still riding her horse at 80 years old, doing her own laundry. In fact, that was one of her great nieces kind of questioned her once about that, because she had hired help to help her in, you know, her later years. But she would still be seen, you know, out working in her vegetable garden, helping the, you know, helping to do the laundry, cleaning up a bit, because she, again, she needed to be useful.
She needed to be active, and I really do think that kept her going, for sure. She passed away on April 12, 1912, and then her body was brought back to Massachusetts by train, and the sort of big official funeral was held in what is now our town hall, which is also a memorial to Civil War soldiers. She was buried in the family plot next to her parents and her siblings in Oxford. And a terrific job on the storytelling and production by Faith Buchanan, and a special thanks to Professor Emily Thomas. Professor Thomas has been teaching history at Nichols College in Dudley, Massachusetts, and she also works at the Clara Barton Birthplace Museum in North Oxford, Massachusetts. So many of the men she nursed got married, and many of them named their daughter after her. My goodness, probably the greatest honor of all for her. At 59, starts the American Red Cross and works and rides horses straight into her 80s and dies on April 12, 1912. The story of Clara Barton, the angel of the battlefield, here on Our American Stories.
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