Thinking of Thanksgiving
The Times today runs two obituaries that seem strangely appropriate for the Thanksgiving holiday.
The first is of Steam Train Maury, "King of the Hobos," dead at 89.
I'll let the paper tell you....
By 1971, he was a day laborer with a wife, two children and a bad hip that kept him from working much. His hanging around the house was getting on his wife’s nerves, The Los Angeles Times reported in 1989.
So one day in 1971, he hopped a freight on the edge of town with a vague idea he would relive hobo memories and see his wife, Wanda, in a few weeks.
It was 1981 when Mr. Graham finally returned. He had not communicated for more than a decade. Wanda agreed to go out for dinner and talk. (She paid, of course.) He wanted to come home, and she ultimately could not resist his charm.
“It was better than living alone,” she told The Times.
What happened in those ten years is a sometimes wonderful, sometimes mysterious, sometimes painful story.
The second obit is of Jack Werner, a Holocaust survivor who helped save the lives of more than 700 children brought to the Buchenwald slave labor camp in the waning months of WWII. He was 92.
Mr. Werber, a son of a Jewish furrier from the Polish town of Radom, was the barracks clerk at Buchenwald in August 1944 when a train carrying 2,000 prisoners arrived, many of them young boys. By then, with the Russians advancing into Germany, the number of Nazi guards at the camp had been reduced. Working with the camp’s underground — and with the acquiescence of some guards fearful of their fate after the war — Mr. Werber helped save most of the boys from transport to death camps by hiding them throughout the barracks.
But before that happened, Werber lost his wife and daughter to the Nazis...
These stories remind me of what a great gift life is—one's own, of course, but also the gift that other people bring to you through their lives—and what an incredible journey is our time on this earth.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
