An Uncle Named DeWitt

It's funny how these things turn up from time to time, totally random but also totally at an appropriate time. I'm holding a yellowed copy of The Union-Recorder, the weekly Milledgeville, Georgia, newspaper, dated Dec. 7, 1944. I'm not even sure how the newspaper surfaced. I knew I had it; it was among my mother's possessions I came across after she died. But somehow, in bringing Christmas decorations down from the attic and moving other things around to make way for said decorations, the newspaper reappeared today, Dec. 6, just one day short of being 65 years old. Dec. 7, of course, is "a day which will live in infamy," as Franklin D. Roosevelt put it, for it was on Dec. 7, 1941, that the United States was plunged into World War II because of the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. I grew up with images from that day burned into my mind-- the billowing black smoke from the destroyed U.S. fleet -- just as I am sure the current generation will think of the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. as the most horrible of horrors. But my mother didn't save the newspaper for that reason. Instead, it was because of a more personal tragedy, the death of her 17-year-old brother, DeWitt Talmadge Raley, in a car accident the previous weekend. The newspaper carried a front page article about his funeral service and the accident. "DT," as he was known, was thrown from the car and pinned beneath the wreckage. A seatbelt probably would have saved his life, but those devices weren't in vehicles in 1944. I'm assuming the other occupant, the driver, was probably not thrown from the car because of his closeness to the steering wheel. So, DT was the uncle I never knew, and he and I were both named for his father, DeWitt Talmadge Raley (so I'm guessing DT was a "junior") and I passed the name along to one of my daughters. And though I never knew him, I always knew of the love my mother had for him whenever she spoke his name. His death left a hole in her heart that never healed. And finding this old newspaper reminds me of her, and of him, and of our dear, wonderful Paul, also gone too young and all too soon.