Memorial Day

Memorial Day was begun after the Civil War to remember and honor the war dead, of whom there were something like six hundreds thousand in that ferocious conflict, the most ever for our nation.  And ever since, those who have died in military service have been added to the list of those to be honored and remembered.

Carl Laverne Lindquist, 1944.

In my family, the only person (to my knowledge) to have been killed while serving in the Armed Forces was Carl Laverne Lindquist, my 'Uncle Carl'.  He was the eldest son of my grandparents Herman and Ebba Lindquist, and my dad's older (and only) brother.

Born in 1915 and raised in Erie, PA, he enlisted in the Army Air Corp sometime in the early years of WWII.  Selected to train as a B-17 bomber navigator, Uncle Carl was killed on February 24, 1944 in the crash of his bomber during a training mission in Alexandria, LA.

My father Lennart was at the time also in training to fly a B-17 as a copilot.  He went on to fly 35 bombing missions over Germany, from Aug. through March, 1944-45.

Uncle Carl was buried in a small family plot in the Lakeside Cemetary in Erie.  12 years later he was joined there by his father and 42 years later by his mother.

The Herman Lindquist family sometime in the early 1940s.

He was and is sorely missed.