The Town That Remembered Walt Kessler
That is the other thing I want on the record here, because a story like this is easy to tell as one woman doing it all herself, and that is not the truth of it. Reuben made six calls that night. He is not a man who gives speeches. He is a man who, when his wife says a lonely veteran is not getting buried with four people in the room, quietly picks up the phone and starts working his own list without being asked twice.
Before I ever opened anything of Walt’s, I learned one more thing about him, though I did not understand yet what it meant. Wednesday evening, going door to door on his own street with flyers Lavonne had run off at the Courier office, I knocked on the apartment next to his above the hardware store and found Mrs. Reinhardt, eighty two, who has lived there eleven years.
“He never said two words past good morning,” she told me, standing in her doorway in her housecoat with the porch light throwing a yellow circle around us both. “But every snow we had, by the time I got my own door open, my walk was already cleared. Every single time, going on eleven winters. I never once caught him doing it. I’d just step outside and there it was, done.”
“Did he ever say why?”
“You don’t ask a man like that why he does a kindness. You just say thank you the next time you see him, and he’d nod, and that was the whole conversation.” She wiped her hands on her housecoat. “I’ll be there Saturday. I didn’t know he served. I just knew he was a decent man who kept his word to a woman he barely spoke to, eleven winters running.”
That was Walt Kessler, as near as any of us could piece him together before Saturday. A man who did the kind thing and never once asked to be seen doing it.
By Wednesday morning I understood something plain: calling the post roster and hoping was never going to be enough, because half that roster was already in the ground, and the other half did not know Walt existed, because nobody had ever told them to care. A phone tree only works if somebody built it fresh in the last five years, and ours hadn’t been.
So I stopped calling veterans only and started calling everybody else.
I called Pastor Lund at First Methodist and asked if he would announce it Sunday, except Sunday was two days too late, so he put it in the Wednesday bulletin instead and read it off at the midweek service to the eleven people who come to that.