Conley Publishing - Special Sections
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C o n l e y M e d i a • M e m o r i a l D a y • 2 0 1 6 • 3 Finding The Last 64 Faces M E M O R I A L D A Y 2 0 1 6 by Jessica McBride UW Milwaukee Journalism Lecturer When I first saw Andrew Johnson standing at the Wiscon- sin Newspaper Association con- vention in Pewaukee, Wis., with his sign, I was simply curious at first. "Help Find the Last 64," it said. When I stopped and talked to Mr. Johnson, I learned these were more than just 64 names. They were 64 names of 64 young men, many of them from the Mil- waukee area, who left our coun- try to fight in a long-ago war and never returned. When Johnson explained that these men were missing photos for a major na- tional project to honor their serv- ices, I immediately knew that UW-Milwaukee, where I teach, could help. And when I heard Johnson's story about his son, David, I knew for sure we had to. My journalism students are trained in necessary skills for a modern media age. They know how to edit audio and create video stories. They understand journalistic use of social media, and so forth. However, they are also trained in time-held report- ing principles, such as interview- ing, tracking down people, and researching records. When I heard Johnson's story about his son, who had died in Afghanistan, and heard the pas- sion in his voice, I realized this was an important mission. And that it would be a way to teach my students journalism that mat- ters. Journalism shouldn't just be a collection of facts. It must be infused with a sense of story, of humanity, and of meaning. We simply could not allow these young men to be forgotten, espe- cially now, when there are still people alive for whom they were a living memory. At that time, I had no idea how incredibly moving this project would end up being. In 20 years and then some as a journalist and teaching journalism, I have never been involved in more moving work. As the state's urban univer- sity, I felt our students were uniquely positioned to find the supposedly unfindable photos. Their determination and tena- ciousness were incredibly im- pressive, and many of the students have commented that they've never before done such meaningful work. They are win- ning awards for it too; the class project just won a regional Soci- ety of Professional Journalists' Mark of Excellence Award. But had these men really van- ished without a public trace, other than their names? A photo shows something more dimen- sional than letters on granite, al- though those also have their own power. In the words of Ansel Adams, "photography is an aus- tere and blazing poetry of the real." We will find them, I told Johnson. Everyone is findable. At one point, I told him the only way we wouldn't find the photos is if they literally did not exist on this earth. For a time, we feared that was the case with at least one of them. We toyed with the idea of hiring a sketch artist to draw that final man from family mem- ories. The team of student journalists began investigating. I gave them the semester. They were picking up the final baton in a relay that had involved so many others, people who found many, many photos over many, many years. We soon realized that others were still investigating too. Stu- dent Nicole Beilke told the story of a dedicated Baraboo veteran, Terry Kramer, who was posting so many photographs at the end that he almost seemed like the students' shadow. He would drive many days from Baraboo to Milwaukee, where he would sit in the Milwaukee Public Library poring through records. He found many photos. At the beginning of the proj- ect, in February, each student was given two names and in- structed to find the photos and choose an angle for a story. Archival searches revealed the media did little to humanize most of the men when they died; the students were to write that rough draft of history more than 45 years later in some cases, tracing the relatives and friends of men who died before the advent of the Internet. The stories were extraordi- nary. There was the young man in Arkansas who did not have a photo of his father anymore, al- though he'd seen one years be- fore on a relative's mantle; his father, James Calvin Ward, was 17 when he died in Vietnam, and the military banned combat for juveniles as a result. The young man from Milwaukee had deep roots in the South; when the stu- dent and I, after endless calls to relatives, eventually found a photo, it turned out it was the one from the mantle all those years ago. The photo search was work- ing in powerful ways; it was con- necting people. Imagine this young man being able to lay eyes on his father's face once again, after all of this time. One man wrote the student a let- ter entitled "Do Him Justice" about a Milwaukee area service member, Donald Voltner, whose photo the student was seeking. It turned out that the man had killed the soldier in friendly fire and had been blogging about it in an attempt to come to terms with it ever since. He wrote in part: Dear Maggie, I'm happy to help you record Don's story. Do him justice. I am a 67-year-old former CAP Ma- rine looking at the images you sent, a face I haven't seen since Feb of 1969, and I'm crying like a little kid. If you and I took a trip back to that village in Vietnam we would find villagers that would still remember Moose and grieve his loss. I know nothing about you so I am asking that you do not treat this lightly. This isn't another class assignment; this is a man's life, and death. I tracked down one 95-year- old father in Delafield, Jack Bohrman, who still had his son Michael's red Corvette under a quilt in his garage. When he ten- derly lifted the blanket off it, it glistened as if it had hardly been touched. I immediately noticed the American flag sticker on the window. Michael had put it there. In another case, a soldier's sis- ter, who is dying of cancer in Florida, sent a student all of the photos of her brother, Robert Wisch, asking her to preserve them. It was not lost on me that many of these young men went to war at ages no older than the students are today. The students' research took them from the Menominee and Stockbridge-Munsee Indian reservations to the Deep South. It took them from California to Arkansas and from Milwaukee's inner city to its western suburbs. The final list was extraordinarily diverse, containing the names of service members who were African-American, Native- American, Latino, and Cau- casian. The men on the list ranged in age from the 17-year- to several older service members who had served in several wars dating back to WWII. They in- cluded a German and an Italian immigrant. "The camera is much more than a recording appara- tus," said the filmmaker Orson Welles. "It is a medium via which messages reach us from another world." In just over three months researching, only a single name remained on the list – Willie Bedford of Milwaukee- and it would be left to journalism stu- dent Rachel Maidl to tell his story. She continued diligently working on Bedford's picture – all five of his siblings had no pic- ture of Bedford and his parents are deceased – after the semester was over and her grade already in. In the end, Maidl found a photo of Bedford, unearthing it from an old yearbook, where it had been miscoded, meaning that Wisconsin became the 5th state nationally to find all of its pho- tos. The photo search ended up reconnecting Bedford's only child with his sister. They had never met despite living for decades only a few blocks from each other. You can read the student stories at: http://media milwau- kee.com/special-projects/faces- not-forgotten-finding-photos-w isconsins-vietnam-fallen Finding The Last 64 Faces SP5 Gerald L. Kuhnly Was Last Photo Found When the photos were being prepared for this section, it was discovered that four of them were duplicated and associated with the wrong name. These were cor- rected. On February 24th of this year, it was also discovered by the staff at the VVMF that the photo for Gerald L. Kuhnly was incor- rect and was still missing. Jessica McBride led the search for Kuhnly's photo. It was a difficult photo to find even after locating family members including Kuhnly's mother. However, on March 28th, 2016, McBride lo- cated a niece of Kuhnly who cur- rently lives in Shell Lake, Wisconsin. The niece's mother was a half sister to Gerald Kuhnly, and she did have photos that were eventually passed on to the niece. Kuhnly's niece provided a photo of Gerald Kuhnly. Last October, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial had a booth at the National Newspaper Association annual convention and trade show in Columbia, Missouri. It was the goal of the booth to bring awareness of the Faces Project to community newspaper publishers and editor from around the country. From left: Andrew Johnson, Gold Star dad and National Newspaper Association Regional Director, Heidi Zimmerman, Manager of Communications and Media Relations, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Laura Johnson, Gold Star mother, and UW Milwaukee Journalism Instructor, Jessica McBride. (submitted by Dodge County Pionier)