Family Stories

I have decided that I don't want to use the fishing story anymore because it doesn't really say anything about my culture or family beliefs. However, now I'm in a dilemma because I can't chose between two other family stories. So I'll just tell both stories right now and then decide which one I like better later. For each of the stories I won't go into much detail because I can do that later when I do the final drafts. These two drafts are mainly just the significant details of each story.

My grandmother, whose maiden name was Judith Gagnon, is from New Hampshire of French Canadian descent. People of that ancestry often manifest humble and hard working characteristics. My grandmother’s second cousin, Rene Gagnon, who as a young child worked in the mills to help support his mother, experienced his brief period of fame as one of the American servicemen pictured, and later immortalized in the famous statue, raising the American flag on Iwo Jima.

The characteristics of my grandmother’s culture were needed at Iwo Jima, as the fighting to take the island was intense and deadly with the US losing 6,825 soldiers in the battle. The impromptu raising of the flag on the fourth day of the battle was followed by another three days of fighting in which three of the six Americans who raised the flag in AP photographer Joe Rosenthal’s famous photo were killed. The raising of the flag helped to rekindle the nationalism the solders had. This helped them to keep fighting for the country they loved.

The other story is about my great grandfather, John Von Pabst, who was born in the US to German parents and then raised as young boy in Germany. Later, as a young man, he returned to America and served in the US Navy during the WWI. Following the war he obtained an education in the US and went on to become a successful insurance executive in the Chicago area. Throughout his life he was an extremely loyal and patriotic citizen, which are often traits associated with people of German Ancestry. He also possessed the typical Germanic temper. As a young sailor in WWI he was almost court martial when he punched out his commanding petty officer for calling him a profane name that he felt insulted his mother.

My great grandfather’s sense of duty and patriotism remained strong and, two years prior the US entering WWII he resigned from his high paying job and enlisted in US Navy as an intelligence officer, using his fluent German language skills to infiltrate the German American Bunds (fraternal organizations) prevalent in the Chicago area at that time. In early December of 1941 he quietly told my grandfather, a young Naval ROTC officer at Northwestern, that we would be at war with Japan within a week. It has never been determined within our family whether this prediction was conjecture based on his intelligence work or actual knowledge. Just that he could make such a prediction is remarkable.