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Dick took over as postal officer. He was no longer under the watchful eye of the mail censor so he could write whatever he wanted with only the judgement of God, De, and a community of Tumblr users tracking the #Justice4DeEtta tag eighty years later.

I say this BECAUSE HE STARTS THIS LETTER LIKE THIS:

BECAUSE OF THIS:

Blanche was voted class clown. She was the 'backbone of plays and skits'. Her stories were told with 'vivid gesticulation' and were the 'disruption of any gathering'. She started a riot in field hockey? Bequeathed 'a small sized revolution' to a friend in the class will.

Sang? "For who, having heard her interpretation of a swing classic could deny that she is a second Sophy Turner." I think she had a Chihuahua?

She was in Yearbook club, the French club VP, in bicycle club, and drama club. "How nauseating" her pet phrase. She's 'a riot' herself. Can be found 'expounding' . Her Besotting sin is "Overworking"

And then in the most messed up section of the yearbook with the senior hobbies and jokes, she's listed with the hobby of "Constant breakdowns". (Other girls had "eating pills" and "getting thin" so WTF. High five to the girl who's hobby is Abe Lincoln, RPF Forever Pat. But, hello? Red flags? )

"We know from the way she has won us that she will always have a lot of friends."

We all know what happens to her and we have very little background on that. I wonder if she was a friend to everyone and only had Mimi as hers. If the humor and drama was a coping mechanism. She and her brother both have this look about them, they're 17 and if the smiles and facade drop, they both look 20+ years older. These two were so active and noticed in their high school years. They did a lot for others. Just as Dick chronicles during the war--- Nix was always there with what you needed.

Blanche goes by 'Nix' too. Or 'Nixon'.

I keep thinking about Grace saying Nix 'always has a smile for me when I come in the room' and 'always puts others before himself'.

-The costumed debate where he was Al Smith and the topic was who was worthy of being rescued from a sinking ship.

-Debate on shaving

Sounds like the same guy who would go to Alaska for a survey job.

Also a great reason to donate to the school who turned you loose to go do some cool shit in the mountains with your friends, a donation that is still being made to Cate School to this day via the Grace Nixon Foundation.

Lewis Nixon, from sad little Lew on ice skates to this teen dressing up as Al Smith and bringing fireproof paint and roofing for your cool cabin, to Yale/MIT, to jumping out of planes, and making a lasting impact on a man who thankfully never shut up about you. You're more than Vat69 to us.

From Mr. Cate's memories:

The "shack":

Contact Tracing, Part V: Reintegration. Winters/Nixon, Rated M, 17k words.

Not having heard much from Dick since his return stateside, Lewis makes a trip to Pennsylvania to see him.

NB: Although this is part of a lengthy series, this is the first one in a while that actually works well as a standalone.

Excerpt:

^Lt. Noman Dike in 1944

Interview by André Tlodari

If the cavalry hadn't been disbanded in the US Army in 1942, Mr. Norman Dike, president of the Sofedine Company, which would be undertaking the reconstruction of the Grand Casino in Geneva, would obviously not have been one of the first paratroopers to land on the Normandy coast on June 6, 1944, around 2:00 a.m. Born in 1918 in Brooklyn, the son of a New York court judge, Lieutenant Dike had been drafted into the mounted troops. When they were disbanded, he opted for the infantry.

Airborne. So there he was, a volunteer paratrooper, assigned to the famous 101st Division which, in the final months of the war, supported the siege of Bastogne and ended its European campaign at Berchtesgaden. Thus, Mr. Dike, now settled in Switzerland for over ten years, lived through "the longest night." He speaks of it without lyricism. It doesn't occur to him to boast about this painful episode, from which he refrains from deriving any vain glory. He doesn't even readily discuss it with his family; with his ten-year-old son; with his wife, whom he met in the United States, but who is Swiss by birth, being the daughter of the late director of the Lausanne Conservatory, Mr. Alfred Fochon. Lieutenant Dike, barely 26 years old, had been transported to England about six weeks before the landings. The 101st Division was stationed in southwest Great Britain. It was at Hungerford, near Swindon, that the young reserve officer, like tens of thousands of other American soldiers belonging to airborne units, underwent intensive technical and psychological training, especially during the ten or twelve days preceding D-Day. Cut off from their families, the strict military secrecy meant that the men were confined to their camps, cut off not only from any possibility of release but also from any correspondence with their families or friends. —

Having studied and rehearsed every detail of our objectives a hundred times on maps and models, we knew it wasn't Sainte-Mère-Église, but a sector further south and east. On the map, it was to the right of Carentan. Our main objective was to reach bridges and blow them up to prevent German tanks from advancing. Our secondary mission was to sow confusion among the enemy troops, draw their attention, harass them, disappear, and reappear elsewhere. To make

In short, these were resistance operations. The difference was that we didn't really know the region or its inhabitants.

— When did you board the plane? — At the crack of dawn on June 6th. We were on board long before takeoff. It was a C-47, a Dakota modified for this mission. There were about thirty of us in the cabin. There were three squadrons, each made up of three of these aircraft. We should have stayed very close together. After a crossing of the Channel made easier by the moonlight, we were hampered by a light fog as we approached the coast. In fact, there was some dispersal. We had to avoid marshes whose great danger had been clearly warned of.

— We jumped at a rapid pace. On the ground, it took us no more than fifteen minutes to find each other, the 29 men of our section. We used small "crickets" made from a spring blade to recognize each other in the night. But we had lost radio contact and were effectively cut off from unit command. — I tried to get my bearings. I realized we had landed 8 or 10 kilometers from our objective. Hidden in the tall hedges that line both sides of the road, we began to advance cautiously toward Carentan. — Again, the night was clear. We hadn't gone 600 meters when we came under fire from "our" first Germans. Among them were paratroopers who were very good soldiers. We had wounded. And, in the situation we were in, this posed embarrassing and painful problems. We bandaged our friends, whom we then hastily sheltered. But no ambulance, not even medics! — Extreme confusion reigned in the sector at dawn and throughout the morning. Seeing Allied gliders, we understood that the massive landing was succeeding. We were perfectly prepared for isolated actions. Oh, morale always! Our small group remained without communication for three days and two nights, left to its own devices. We never lost morale and managed to disrupt several enemy positions, destroying equipment, including three trucks. These tall, almost impenetrable hedgerows of Normandy offered excellent cover for camouflage. Moving away from the main lines, we encountered some locals. The welcome wasn't exactly enthusiastic. Frankly, it was reserved. You have to understand these people, most of them old or very young. They didn't get along too badly with the Germans, who bought their butter and Calvados. Before showing their joy, they waited to verify that the liberation was successful and that the occupiers weren't likely to return in a fury. Fear was palpable. We didn't find much help; but neither did we encounter any hostility from the locals, who let us proceed. — Apart from a few paratroopers, whom I mentioned, and a tank unit, the German troops we encountered were mostly made up of men in their forties, of diverse origins, generally not very determined to continue a fight whose futility they fully appreciated. It was a memorable mess. As long as we were separated from the main body of our troops, the prisoners we managed to take caused us considerable trouble. — It wasn't until June 9th that I handed our group over to a higher-ranking officer; and on the 10th, that our battalion began to be reorganized in Carentan. In the course of the operation, we had suffered losses: of eight officers, only three remained fit for duty. When, A month later, we left again for England, our division now numbered barely 45% of its strength from the beginning of June: roughly 6,500 men out of the 14,000 who had left.” Parachuted in and decorated. This is Mr.Dike, now in his fifties, is actively involved in the tourism and hotel development of Geneva. At the end of the war, promoted to captain following a campaign in Holland that saw him parachuted into the Eindhoven region, and then during the siege of Bastogne, he was decorated and appointed aide-de-camp to General Maxwell D. Taylor, the new commander of the 101st Division (and later Chief of Staff of the American forces under the Truman and Kennedy administrations).

He recognized nothing. We ask him again if he has seen any of the people or landscapes he unexpectedly discovered after falling from the sky one night in June 1944. In Normandy, where he returned last year with his family, Norman Dike recognized almost nothing and no one. On the contrary, in Holland, he found the jam factory where he had taken up position during his second parachute drop. The manager was still the same as a quarter of a century ago.

“Wonderful people”; there were genuine displays of emotion. His blue eyes dream melancholically. He wouldn't want it repeated too often. But his landing in France left him with a “harsh” memory, a feeling of disorientation, devoid of those human connections that, at the worst of war, can occur and evoke unforgettable emotion. For Mr. Dike, a New York lawyer, then the “discoverer” of a uranium mine in New Mexico, the Normandy mission was simply a way of voluntarily paying—without heroic exaltation—the tribute he felt he owed to the liberation of a Europe that then seemed very distant to him. If someone had told him 25 years ago that he would be living between Anières and Hermance and that they would be overseeing the construction of a residential hotel and a leisure center in Bellevue, near the junction of the highway and the road to Switzerland!