The Town That Remembered Walt Kessler
“Dottie, I need you to come back to the office before you leave today,” he said. “I found this going through Walt’s things yesterday, getting his good suit ready. I didn’t know what to make of it, and I didn’t want to say anything until after the service was done right.”
What he put into my hands in his back office twenty minutes later was a composition notebook, the cheap kind with the marbled black and white cover, soft at the corners from seventy three years of handling, the spine cracked and taped and cracked again.
I opened it at the kitchen table in Les’s office with my coat still on.
Page after page, in handwriting that had started firm and young and had gone shaky and small by the later pages, was a list. Nine names. Men from Walt’s own rifle company, the ones who never came home from Korea. Beside each name, a hometown. Beside each hometown, a column of years, starting in 1954 and running, unbroken, every single year, all the way to this past January.
Beside every year, a checkmark.
“Les,” I said, “what is this.”
“I made some calls myself this morning before I knew what to do with it,” Les said quietly. “I called the historical society over in Clark County, because one of those names was a boy from there. Dottie, these are men whose families got a letter every single year, forty years, fifty, some of them seventy three, from somebody who never signed a full name. Just W. The historical society had one framed. Nobody in that family ever knew who sent it. They thought it was a stranger who’d read an old obituary somewhere and taken pity.”
I sat with that notebook open in my lap for a long while.
Walt Kessler had come home from Korea in 1953, and from that year until the month he died, he had written, by hand, every single year, to the mother and then the sisters and then whoever was left of nine families whose sons did not come home with him. He never told them his name. He never asked for a reply. He simply would not let nine boys who died at nineteen and twenty years old be forgotten by the only people in this world who had once loved them, and he carried that promise quietly, alone, for seventy three years, while the rest of us walked past him at the hardware store and thought we knew him because he nodded on the sidewalk.
He had spent his whole life making sure other men were remembered.
And he had very nearly been buried with four people in the room.
I did not tell the chapel that day, because there was no more time left in that morning for another thing to carry, but I told the auxiliary at our meeting that Tuesday, and I told Emily, who read the notebook twice through and did not say a word for a long while.