Papa blows out the candles on his 90th birthday cake.
Papa at Nuremberg Stadium 1945 & His Small Wooden Box 2010.
This photo was made in Nuremberg Stadium at the end of WWll in 1945 and is of Lt. Col. Ben Frank Curtis, my father and the man we all called Papa. He was born in 1917 in Portland, Arkansas and died in Dallas, Texas in 2011 at the age of 93 from complications caused by a pulmonary embolus suffered after a fall he took while playing tennis.
Papa was the real thing, an authentic American hero who was with the Third Army during WWII. After his death, I discovered a small wooden box with a tennis racquet inlaid on top in a drawer in his study.
Papa’s war history mirrored the history of the American involvement in the European Theater. He was on the beach at Normandy on June 6, 1944 and in Paris on August 15, 1944, when it was liberated by the allies. He was at the heart of the 500th Quartermaster Corps and was assigned to provide gasoline support for Patton’s armored divisions. In late December 1944 he and his men trucked a force of the 82 Airborne into Bastogne to support the besieged one hundred and first. He was always in harm’s way, out in front of Patton’s spearheading tanks, resupplying them with gasoline. He rolled into Germany on March 7, 1945 across the Rhine over the bridge at Ramagen.
His last photograph taken during the war was at Nuremberg Stadium leaning on a hand cane. By this time, he had 5000 troops under his direct command and had been injured during the loss of his fifth command car, the Doris (my mother’s name) Five.
He ended the war aboard Doris Six in which he, his sergeant, and their fifty-caliber machine gun mounted on top helped to liberate concentration camps along the line pushing toward Berlin.
He was involved in each of Patton’s major campaigns and his technique of gasoline resupply in the field became a military paradigm and continued to be taught at West Point well after the war.
The small wooden box in his study with the tennis racquets on top contained nothing much, just odds and ends, a little of this and that. There was a tiny photo of his beloved father who had died young working to support his family during the depression and his grandfather’s old pocket watch with a cracked face. There was a small woolen boy knitted by my mother during the war that hung on their Christmas tree for the rest of their lives, his class ring from Oklahoma University, and several scissor-trimmed pictures of me and my mother that dad kept under the clear plastic pistol grips of his army issue forty five, the straps from his field glasses with which he studied troop movements during the major battles that affected the entire free world, then and now. Nothing much.
There were no big things, campaign citations or medals of which there were many, not even a well-earned purple heart, included in his treasures. Just the little things, the things he was willing to give his life for.
As I write this, I am looking at the little woolen Christmas tree boy framed on the wall behind my computer along with a love note to my mother written in my father’s hand, and I am holding my great-grandfather’s cracked-faced watch and thinking about nothing much. Just the man we all called Papa.