Jay Eldred

Stories in the End is presented as a collection of short letters written near the end of his life by a veteran of Pearl Harbor, the D-Day invasion, and 20+ years in the US Navy, to a friend identified only as "B". It is clear as we read along that "B" has been a very important person in Mr. Tom's life, first as household help during his wife's later years, then as full-time caretaker for Mr. Tom himself, and finally as collaborator with Mr. Eldred in organizing and compiling Mr. Tom's documents, photographs and written memories into this delightful bit of history in personal context. The letters reach from Tom's childhood through his Naval service and his civilian career as operator of a water treatment plant on a Marine base in Cherry Point, NC. There is a "scrapbook" included which shares photographs, telegrams, notes, and drawings from Tom's cache of mementos with the reader. As Eldred says, Mr. Tom was "the kind of person to whom history seemed to happen", and there is nothing better than hearing the little stories that made up the big picture of history. As we lose the Greatest Generation to time (Mr. Tom died in 2017 at the age of 98, and we have just lost another of the few remaining Navajo Code Talkers so critical to the outcome of WWII) I could wish that each and every one of them had left us such a book.… (más)