I rotate things onto one of my office walls, just like everyone who has large, blank walls. Recently I decided to make a World War II theme. I have two V-E and V-J editions of Stars and Stripes, dusty, yellowed pieces of newsprint from France and Italy. Sometimes they allow me to talk about the appropriate time to use the 72-point font. Sometimes they allow the opportunity to demonstrate how language we use today might be frowned upon in the future. Also, they are just terrific relics.

Some time back our friend Adam gave me a lithograph of his cousin’s World War II plane. And since I decided to make a themed display, this seemed like a great place to put it. You may recall that I met Adam while asking him about his cousin, Dean Hallmark. I wrote a piece about Dean for TWER. Adam is a military man himself, a historian and we became fast friends. So I learned more about the Doolittle Raid of which Dean was a part, and then this poster tube arrived with a sharp print of The Green Hornet.

People should give each other more framable works, I say.

So I wanted to take a picture to send to Adam, since I have a series to show off. This meant moving a piece of furniture. This meant stowing that table elsewhere. This led to me destroying the wire archiving system we use for newspapers. This allowed me to recycle some old stuff I didn’t need to keep anymore. And that brought me back to rebuilding the wire crate structure which grows more precarious by the year.

That led to me cleaning a corner of the newsroom, looking under the sofa for runaway joiners for the wire-crate-frame-finger pincher device that had to have been developed in Eastern Europe.

And, finally, the picture I’d wanted to take.

That’s Dean on his way to deliver — and in this configuration on the wall, the Japanese are ready to accept — his payload. I think about Dean now and again, and what he and some of his compatriots went through:

It was a choppy day at sea and the deck was wet when Dean flew to Tokyo with the rest of the Raiders, dropped his bombs, made a second pass to drop more bombs, and finally made his way to China.

He ran out of fuel though, a by-product of being forced to launch early, and had to put his plane into the sea just off the coast. Dean was catapulted through the windshield in the crash, the pilot’s seat still strapped to his body. He was hurt, but he and his fellow officers survived. The two enlisted crewmembers on board drowned.

Once ashore the officers evaded the Japanese for eight days before being captured.

They were tortured and malnourished. Dean’s navigator, Capt. C. Jay Nielsen, grimly wrote of his time as a POW at war’s end.

“They had put straps on (Dean’s) legs and arms and pulled them until he thought his joints were coming apart.”

Nielsen would also tell of having bamboo shoved under their fingernails. Their captors would light the bamboo on fire, demanding to know how they’d gotten to occupied China. Another captive would later write of being water boarded shortly after their capture.

They were about to be executed, Nielsen said, but the Japanese soldiers’ orders suddenly changed. That meant more torture.

Dean came down with beriberi and dysentery. The Japanese military tried Dean, his surviving crew and five crewmembers from another bomber on trumped up charges. Nielsen said Dean dropped 50 pounds and was on a stretcher, because of his illness, during the farcical court martial.

We met Lt. Col. Richard Cole, who was Doolittle’s copilot on the Tokyo Raid, at Adam’s wedding a few weeks ago. We saw Dean’s marker at Arlington this summer:

He was 28 years old at the time. He would have been 100 next January.

I guess I’m thinking about that as I’ve wrapped up the big family project I’ve been working on. I found the last details I’ll likely ever be able to find on my great-grandfather’s time in the ETO. Now I just have to copyedit the text and finish assembling the presentation. I’m disproportionately excited to show this off in a few weeks. Between that and the new book I’m reading I just have the period on my mind.

Had a nice run this evening. I said on Facebook that it was a 5K that didn’t feel like a 5K and, thus, I did not know what was happening. I said that after my run, before dinner and before I had the opportunity to go down a set of stairs.

And then it felt like a run. Now I have the impression it is going to feel like one tomorrow, too.

I did this on a treadmill this evening, because it was already dark and threatening to be coolish, and I’m just not ready for that. On the treadmill there was a television. And on the television I watched a closed caption longform feature of a young baseball player doing something special, saving a life halfway around the world. You’ve got an All American kid, leading his college on the football field and on the baseball diamond. Then, with scouts watching, he gets a call that his bone marrow is a match for a girl in Ukraine. And then you met this beautiful little girl and you spend the next few seconds trying to keep it together on a treadmill in public.

What a good story.

Things to read, which I found interesting today … First a chunk of stories, if any of these headlines intrigue you:

Mobile is the ‘first screen’ for half of 18-34s

Twitter Overtakes Facebook as Teens’ Most Important Social Network

Louisiana police department will post photos of people who exploited food stamp glitch

Down and out: the French flee a nation in despair

From the multimedia blog: What is important is the money

Perhaps you heard about the student in north Alabama that recently killed himself. It has been in the news a bit because of some indirectly related things. Now his father has come forward, telling an incredibly moving tale:

Adamek said blaming Christian’s suicide on one event is “terribly over-simplistic” and called the national publicity over Christian’s streaking and subsequent death a distraction from the more important story. He explained that his family had been struggling in vain for months to find Christian the help he needed for depression.

“Nobody should have to make more than one phone call to get that kind of help, because there’s just not that much time,” Adamek said.

Adamek declined to go into specifics about Christian’s problems, saying “it doesn’t matter anymore,” but said that the family had tried for months to find the right mental health professionals for his son. They were met with obstacles like insurance issues and a lack of the right doctors.

“We followed every avenue apparently available to us, through the medical community, through the hospital system, but still couldn’t get the necessary diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring that he so desperately needed,” Adamek said.

“We needed to know what he needed. That’s the help we were looking for.”

How heartbreaking that must be. And if the text didn’t get you, the video at the link, will.

And now for something funnier, healthcare and the highly efficient rollout! Jon Stewart:

Surprised he didn’t make a “Glitches don’t get you stitches” joke.