Sisters connect with echo of the past
BY TOM McNAMEE SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
Four years ago this Wednesday, Theresa Zagore was driving home from work when her cell phone rang. "Are you related to William Lowery?" a woman asked.
"Um, yes," Zagore said. "He was my uncle."
In her mind, in that instant, she could see him. Uncle Willie. The handsome young soldier in an old family photo. Her mother's brother. He died in a plane crash in World War II before she, Zagore, was even born.
Who was calling about Uncle Willie?
"Can you hold on while I pull over?" Zagore asked, feeling excited and strange. "Do you have information about him?"
"Yes," said the woman on the phone. "I think I do."
And that's how Uncle Willie returned as a bittersweet spirit, a soft echo of the past, to Zagore and her sister, Marie Alexander.
The caller told Zagore that the remains of Army Staff Sgt. William Lowery had been discovered, 57 long years after his bomber crashed, in a remote ravine in Papua New Guinea.
Zagore brushed back tears when she heard the news. And when Marie heard the news from her sister, she cried, too.
They cried for their mother, Florence, who would have loved this day. And for their mother's brothers and sisters, all of whom have died, who never forgot the brother they lost.
And for Uncle Willie, who was coming home.
Smart and funny
They were a big Italian-American family in a little mining town, Republic, Pa.
There was Frank Lowery, born Carmine Laurito in Salerno, Italy. And his wife, Angelina, also from Salerno. And there were their seven children, born in the U.S.A.
Willie was the oldest son, born in 1911. He was really smart -- Zagore and Alexander always heard that -- and very short, until he hit a last-minute growth spurt. He also joked a lot.
I wish I could tell you more about Willie, but that's about all Marie and Theresa could tell me, which no doubt is how it is in most families.
What little Alexander and Zagore know about their uncle, they picked up as children by chance at family parties and picnics. Somebody might mention this or that, and somebody else might say, "I wish Willie could have seen that."
Willie's parents struggled to make ends meet. Frank was a miner. Angelina had health problems and often was bedridden.
As the eldest son, Willie felt a responsibility to help support the family, and so in the early 1930s -- the heart of the Great Depression -- he hit the road looking for work.
He traveled from Bristol, Va., to Cleveland, Ohio, to Effingham, Ill., to Littleton, Colo. He passed through Chicago at least once, and spent a week or so in El Paso, Texas. We know this because he mailed postcards home, although he wasn't much for travelogues.
"Mother," he wrote in a typically short note. "Everything is fine. I'm taking care of myself. Do not worry."
When the United States entered the war, Willie joined the Army. He trained in Florida as a gunner on a bomber, then shipped out to the South Pacific. Two of his brothers, Columbus and Nicholas, also were in uniform.
As before, Willie worried about his folks.
"I am glad to hear that you planned to visit home during the Easter holidays," he wrote to Florence on March 14, 1944. "Father would have felt quite lonely with three of the boys away."
On April 16, 1944, a month after writing that letter, Willie's plane, a B-24J Liberator bomber, ran a strike mission on Japanese targets near Hollandia, New Guinea. As it attempted to return to base, it went down in a storm.
For a few years after that, the Army listed Sgt. Lowery and his 10 fellow crew members as missing in action. But in 1949, the Army concluded the plane must have crashed into the Pacific and the entire crew had been killed.
Not that Willie's family completely believed it. Florence, for one, never fully accepted that Willie was gone, nor did her brother Columbus.
"I know my Uncle Columbus, whowas a prisoner of war himself, always used to say Willie was alive somewhere," Alexander said. "If he'd had one too many drinks, he'd say, 'He's probably out there somewhere. He probably lost his memory.'"
Didn't anybody try to set him right?
"Nobody really wanted to say, 'no, that's not the case,'" she said, "because that was his hope."
A ring is found
This story moves now to 2001, late in the year. A man is hiking in a rain forest near the village of Kunukio in Papua New Guinea. He sees something shiny and picks it up. It's a ring, clearly American, possibly a wedding or aviator's ring.
He shows the ring to a local magistrate, who shows it to others, who bring it to the attention of officials at the U.S. Embassy.
In January 2002, a U.S. team of excavators and forensic archeologists swoop into the ravine. They are from the Joint P.O.W./M.I.A. Accounting Command, a remarkable agency dedicated to finding and identifying the American remains from all wars. An estimated 88,000 military personnel remain unaccounted for, including 78,000 from World War II.
Immediately, they find stuff: A high school class ring. A bracelet from the 1940 World's Fair. Wristwatches. Lighters.
One major discovery solves the mystery: The tail of an American bomber, with a serial number on it.
And there are the grimmer finds: Bones and skulls and more bones. Dog tags with precious names.
When the digging is done, the command tracks down the families of all 11 soldiers, and the phone calls go out.
A woman calls somebody named Theresa Zagore, who lives in a Chicago suburb called Hoffman Estates. She asks, "Are you related to William Lowery?"
Honoring the crew
On April 21, the remains of all 11 crewmen will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Their families, flown in by the Army, will finally be able to pray over their graves.
I know a bit about only one of the crewmen -- Sgt. Lowery -- but I'd like to honor them all, so let me at least tell you their names:
*Capt. Thomas C. Paschal
*Second Lt. John A. Widsteen
*First Lt. James P. Gullion
*First Lt. Frank P. Giugliano
*Second Lt. Leland A. Rehmet
*Staff Sgt. Elgin J. Luckenbach
*Staff Sgt. Marion B. May
*Staff Sgt. Richard F. King
*Sgt. Marshall P. Borofsky
*Sgt. Walter G. Harm
As I sat at the dining room table in Zagore's house, looking at yellowed letters from a soldier neither she nor her sister had ever met, I wondered why they cared so much about him.
But wasn't Uncle Willie, for them, really just a handful of photos and old stories?
"Our mother never let him go, so we never let him go," Zagore said. "He was alive to us."
"And," Alexander said, "he gave his life for his country."
Tom McNamee's "The Chicago Way" runs Mondays in the Chicago Sun-Times.
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