WALTER, JR.

MEMORIAL DAY

As we all remember our loved ones this Memorial Day Weekend I would like to pay tribute to someone my wife and I never met. He was her Father’s brother…Walter Lundgren, Jr. An uncle that died long before my wife was born. The year was 1928. It was just after Christmas when as an eight year he wandered down to Buchanan Bridge Pond in Lynn to play with a friend. A ball they were throwing to one another rolled onto the ice. His friend pleaded with him not to retrieve the ball. Walter felt the ice was thick enough to hold his weight and it was after all only forty feet from shore. When he reached the ball he crashed through the ice. His friend cried for help. The police arrived and with a grappling hook retrieved the lifeless body. They raced him to the hospital but it was too late. Walter was no more.

This all came to light this week when my wife was curious about an Uncle she had heard about and the tragedy that ended his life. It all started when her brother sent the only known picture of Walter to her. When she saw the picture it tugged at her heartstrings and she had to know more about his drowning. This past Friday with the help of our son she spent the afternoon at the Lynn Public Library to search the Microfiche records of Dec. 1928. She visited Walter’s grave and placed a Memorial Tribute befitting a child of eight.

A life unfulfilled. The hopes and ambitions that we take for granted never to be realized. A life lost at eight…a tragedy indeed. He was buried New Year’s Eve 1929 at the beginning of a new decade…the 1930’s. We remember Walter Jr. this Memorial Weekend along with all our lost love ones. Walter may you rest in peace.

 

 

DECLAMATION

At the Bigelow School which I attended in the 1940’s we were required to address the class once a week in a period called declamation. People have reported they fear public speaking more than death itself. So you can imagine the fear as a pre teenager I had in getting up in front of my classmates and speaking. The only saving grace is that we could pick our own subject matter. Now as a young child my experience level was nonexistent so it was a struggle to think of subjects. Since my main escape from my humdrum life was the movies and Danny Kay was my Cinema idol I often used his movies as a subject for my declamation.

One movie I particularly enjoyed and so I decided to talk about it. It was the original Danny Kay movie “Secret Life of Walter Mitty”. It was recently remade with Ben Stiller. The plot was of a daydreamer whose life was also humdrum but he would have fantasies of being a hero. So why not use the same story line.

As I stood before the class my knees rattled and my voice faltered to the point my teacher would have to ask me “to speak up”. I rambled on about my fantasies as a fighter pilot and other comic heroes like Superman and Batman and cowboys shooting the bad guys, all nonsense of course. The important thing was not the content of our declamation but overcoming the fear of public speaking.

Now that I look back it may have been the most important of all the classes I took. Years later in my professional career I had to make many speeches in front of audiences that numbered in the hundreds. The lessons learned way back in my elementary classes at the Bigelow School gave me that confidence.