This summer I was awarded the French Legion of Honor and I learned Mr. Holm had been nominated for the same honor because of his combat service in France. His namesake son said, “Dad was really excited but he died before the paperwork was completed.” Harlan Jr.also said the fetching Josephine served in the Coast Guard during the war.
I am so sorry I didn’t have an opportunity to say thank you, Mr. Holm, for the best year of junior high, for Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Whitman’s poetry, for pushing us to become original thinkers, and, most of all for your heroic service framed by quiet modesty.
How I wish I could have told Harlan Holm and Josephine they were exactly the kind of citizens I had in mind when I wrote “The Greatest Generation” almost 50 years after we first met.
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