Portraits of WWII servicemen, found in a downtown jewelry shop, are bringing memories of loved ones long lost to their relatives.
Hyfler/Rosner
FRED TASKER, fta...@MiamiHerald.com
December 17, 2006 Sunday
Portrait of a hero -- and of family history;
Portraits of WWII servicemen, found in a downtown jewelry
shop, are bringing memories of loved ones long lost to their
relatives.
Theda Rendon, 67, of Homestead, picked up The Miami Herald
on Nov. 10 and saw the front-page story about the discovery
of long-lost portraits painted in 1945 of Miami servicemen
who died in World War II and the attempts now to unite those
portraits with the men's surviving relatives. Perusing the
list of names, she got to the third-from-last before
spotting the name Norris Walker.''That's my half-brother,''
she said. ``I got so excited I got goosebumps.''With help
from her computer-savvy daughter, Zinida, she sent an e-mail
to Vinson Richter, the South Miami developer who had come
across the portraits and was trying to track down
relatives.The two met halfway, in the parking lot of Christ
Fellowship Church in Perrine, and Richter gave her the
painting.''It was beautiful. It's amazing how good it looked
after all these years,'' she said.''She was really sweet,''
Richter said. ``When I talked to her on the phone, they were
so excited I could hear screaming in the background.''The
portraits, 42 in all, had been forgotten in the storeroom of
a downtown Miami jewelry shop since at least 1965.When
Richter came across them, he and his family started trying
to trace them. After some initial success, they hit a dead
end and asked The Miami Herald to help. The paper printed
some pictures and a list of the names, and put images of all
42 portraits on MiamiHerald.com.The story helped find five
more relatives, meaning Richter now has reunited 21 of the
portraits with relatives.Norris Walker grew up in Homestead,
his half-sister remembered, graduating from Redland High
School and joining the U.S. Marines. He was wounded twice in
the Pacific before being killed at 20 in the invasion of Iwo
Jima.''He didn't even make it to the shore,'' Rendon
said.Walker was buried in Hawaii at the ''Punchbowl,''
officially called the National Memorial Cemetery of the
Pacific, with more than 25,000 other service personnel, many
killed in the Pacific during World War II. The famous war
correspondent Ernie Pyle is buried there.''My daughter,
Cophia, was there once and took a picture of his grave
marker for me,'' Rendon said.She plans to have the portrait
restored and give it to Norris' full brother, Lee Walker, of
Atlanta.Among the other portraits given to relatives: Edward
Rosenbaum, to his niece in Fort Pierce. Aubrey Lewis, to his
nephew and namesake, Aubrey Fisher, and Fisher's two
brothers. Lewis had been a firefighter before joining the
military, Richter learned; his three nephews followed in his
footsteps, serving careers in firefighting before retiring
and moving out of Florida. Quentin Welbaum, to his first
cousin, Rome Earl Welbaum, an attorney who lives just down
Old Cutler Road from Richter.In his research, Richter
concluded that several of the servicemen in the portraits
had no surviving relatives. He's considering donating them
to several local museums; he'll decide by January.``We
wanted to get out all the portraits by Christmas. They made
nice Christmas presents.''
Hyfler/Rosner
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>
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> Theda Rendon, 67, of Homestead, picked up The Miami Herald
> on Nov. 10 and saw the front-page story about the
> discovery of long-lost portraits painted in 1945 of Miami
> servicemen who died in World War II and the attempts now
> to unite those portraits with the men's surviving
The original article:
November 10, 2006 Friday
RECENTLY FOUND PORTRAITS THAT LANGUISHED FOR DECADES IN A
MIAMI STOREROOM BRING BACK MEMORIES OF SERVICEMEN WHO DIED
IN WORLD WAR II.
BYLINE: FRED TASKER, fta...@MiamiHerald.com
They have that optimistic, even cocky air that young
servicemen show in portraits, as if it never occurred to
them that the war they were going into might kill them.It
did. All 42 of them.
That's known because the portraits that have just resurfaced
after decades in dusty storage are part of an extraordinary
attempt by a few artists just after World War II to paint
the likeness of every Miamian who died in the war.
The Miami/Palm Beach family that rediscovered the portraits
now is trying, with legwork, hired expertise and the
Googling skill of a 15-year-old family member, Sarah
Richter, to unite the portraits with the men's surviving
families.
Lillie Sizemore, 79, of Homestead, was thrilled and touched
when the Richters gave her the portrait of her brother, John
W. ''Johnny'' Little, a private killed at 19 in Germany just
after the Battle of the Bulge in 1945. ''It's so pretty,''
she said, crying softly. ``So real. It's like he just came
into the room and smiled at me.''
The story of the portraits begins in 1945, when a St.
Petersburg artist named Marion Terry and one or two others
set out to paint 15- by 18-inch oil portraits of every Miami
soldier killed in the war from photos provided by their
families.Historians say about 500 Dade County residents died
in the war. It's not clear how many portraits were painted.
The idea in 1945 was to put the portraits on permanent
display in a public building. But it never happened. A 1965
story in The Miami Herald said Millie Aronovitz, whose son,
Nathan, was killed in the war and memorialized in one of the
portraits, tried then to reassemble them and put them on
display. She could find only 42. The rest never have been
located.
''I know that if people see all these young faces there
together, young men who died in war, it will make them do
everything they can to stop more wars,'' Aronovitz told
reporter Jean Wardlow at the time.Again, attempts at public
display failed, and the 42 portraits were tucked away in a
third-floor storeroom at Richter's Jewelry, 160 E. Flagler
St., in downtown Miami. The Richter family, Joe and sons Dan
and Alvin, were members with Aronovitz of Temple Israel in
Miami.
The Richters sold the store in the 1970s, and the paintings
were left behind. One of them was of Dan Richter's brother,
Robert, also killed in the war. The store was resold more
than once over the years; today it is Fernand Optical.
Last summer, Dan Richter's son, Vinson, a South Miami
developer, took his own son, David, to visit the old store
to show him where he and his dad had worked. Gladys Jiminez,
who runs the optical business with her husband, Fernando,
looked at Richter and said, ``There's a portrait upstairs,
and it looks just like you.
'Richter went upstairs to look: ''That's my Uncle Robert.''
With Robert's portrait, they found 41 more.
''She was very nice,'' Vinson Richter says. ``She had kept
them safely all this time.''''I didn't know who they were,''
says Gladys Jiminez, who's from Peru. ``But they looked so
important by the way they were dressed.
''She said when she would go late evenings to the third
floor to retrieve company records, she would salute Robert
Richter's portrait.``I knew somebody would come for them
someday.''Richter took the portraits home and showed them to
his father Dan, his brother Stefan and Stefan's daughter
Sarah, 15.'She said, `We need to find the families,' ''
Vinson Richter says. Most of the photos had the servicemen's
names -- sometimes military ranks -- on the back. Others did
not.Sarah, at her computer, quickly came upon
www.wwiimemorial.com, a website created when the National
World War II Memorial was dedicated in 2004 in Washington,
D.C. It has a registry to let the public look up Americans
who contributed to the war effort.Families of the first four
they checked, with unusual names, were easy to find. The
Richters hired a Miami Herald researcher, who found 30
obituaries, which helped to reunite portraits with another
eight families.
The Richters began delivering the portraits to families --
in person when they were local, by FedEx for out-of-towners.
They found brothers of the soldiers in Miami Springs, Ocala,
St. Petersburg and in Cherry Log, Ga., and the son of
another in Middleburg, Fla.''We found one woman in
Melbourne. She was thrilled,'' Vinson Richter says. 'We also
got some strange responses. One woman in Miami was very
hesitant. She said, `This is such old history, it's all
gone. I really don't think I want it.' Later she changed her
mind.
Gerry Munro, 76, of Miami, given a portrait of John E.
''Jack'' Munro, her brother, killed in 1944, expressed the
more typical reaction: ``I cried. I was just in junior high
when he was killed. He was 22.''
The Richter family is still poring over old records and
newspapers, looking for the families of the rest of the
soldiers.But it's getting harder, so they have turned to the
newspaper for help. The Miami Herald today is running the
soldiers' portraits on its website, www.MiamiHerald.com, to
try to locate more families. If that doesn't work, Vinson
Richter said the family would be open to donating the
portraits to the Historical Museum of Southern Florida.
To Miami historian Paul George, the portraits demonstrate
how a war can continue to hurt even 60 years later.
''World War II was larger than life in Miami because it was
such a huge training area for men and women,'' he said.
There's a war memorial monument in Miami's Bayfront Park,
near the foot of Flagler Street, with 504 names on it -- all
men -- that George said is believed to be a more-or-less
complete list of local people who died in the war.''It's
amazing,'' he said. ``The war changed everybody's lives for
years, and now it's largely forgotten.''It's still vivid to
Lillie Sizemore. In her Homestead home on Wednesday, she
recalled the last time she saw Johnny.``I was just home from
the hospital with my first son, Roger. Johnny picked him up
and kissed him, and said, `I wish you joy and peace.
''He told me, `Please tell him I said that if I don't make
it home.' ''