WWII Memorial Ceremony

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On the second day of the Clamerey, France American Camp Reconstruction,there was a ceremony at the memorial in front of the town church. I sat in the blocked off street before anyone arrived and started to sketch the scene. One American officer was making sure tat no traffic entered the staging area. I was set up and sketching next to one of the steel street barricades.

Then with a thunderous roar of engines, all the military vehicles from the encampment rolled through the town and parked in a row alongside the memorial. All the World War II soldiers piled out of the vehicles and stood at attention beside the memorial. A gentleman in a blue suit must have been the town mayor and he shook hands with everyone.

A procession of French flag bearers lined up across the street and when the moment was right they marched across the street towards the memorial. Men in suits followed closely behind. The mayor stepped up to the microphone and said a few words.

The crowd from behind the barrier moved in front of me, so I was faced with sketching a row of butts. Several people let me scooch forward sitting in front of them. I forgot my pencil case in the rush and a man kindly placed it beside me.

A young girl in her early teens stepped up to the microphone and she read the names of the people from this small French town who had died in World War II. He mom was leaning against one of the street barricades and filming her daughter with her cell phone.

With this ceremony complete, the flag bearers moved off towards the Church of Saint-Cyr and Saint Julitte Cemetery and the crowds dispersed. I followed into the cemetery curious to see what might happen next. The world war II era trucks rumbled off back to camp.

Camp de Reconstruction Militere

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Over lunch in the mess tent, I communicated with one of the woman, who had invited me to sit with the troops for lunch, using Google Translate. The app doesn’t make it easy to switch back and forth between languages but after a while we managed to get a conversation going.

As I started doing the sketch of people eating lunch, she walked over to the woman in my sketch and told her to sit still since I was sketching. The pressure was on to be sure to include that woman in the sketch. Ink is an unforgiving medium but I did manage to get her situated in the sketch.

The woman I had been communicating with let me know that the green car parked across from us belonged to her family. She hoped that I would sketch it and I was glad to oblige. Her car looked like a 1942 Plymouth Staff car. All 1942 Plymouth’s are rare. Car production stopped in mid-February of that year, as factories were converted for the World War II effort. Plymouth built 5,821 such Town Sedans. Five are known to exist; two are operational. Now I am no expert on vintage autos, so I might have the year or model off by a notch but this looks like a rare beauty.

The other vehicle looks like a troop carrier truck with a circular mount above the cab for a machine gun mount. The 75th infantry soldiers would have been moved in such a vehicle. When the engine turns over in these trucks they sound like a true hollow monster.

The cabin in the sketch was a store that showcased products used by the American troops. A person can be seen trying to peer inside, from behind the American flag The radio was broadcasting the song, Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B.

While doing this sketch, a man sat next to me and told me about how overwhelmed he had been on the day the Twin Towers fell in NYC on September 11, 2001. He did business in America and had been to the towers several time. He wasn’t sure which tower he had been in. I told him that I used to drop art portfolios off at the twin towers, and like him I wasn’t exactly sure which tower I had been in. He was sad to see the direction America has been turning in the last few years. There is no open dialogue anymore once an opinion is differed that one’s own the only options seems to be to lash out with violence. We seem to be falling back to the time of 1939 when power hungry men sought opportunities to grab more power, at the expense of others. We seemed to agree that America was united after the fall of the towers but today America is divided as it burns.

Forest to Mausoleum

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A day or two before I left for Europe to follow in my father’s footsteps in WWII, a roof was thrown up on the home being built next to the Lake County studio I was renting. The lot had been a lush forested area just a few weeks before. The sand mountain the home sat on had been leveled and built up in a day. The cinder block mausoleum had gone p in a day, and now the roof structure went up in a day. This was now the largest home in the area on its own mountaintop/

The roof beams had an interesting inverted series of beams which I suppose are to keep the roof from collapsing inward in the high winds of a hurricane. All the triangular sections were delivered to the job site pre-assembled. They were each lifted int place where workmen quickly hammered them into place.

All the workmen spoke Spanish which made me concerned for their safety in the new hate fueled policies of ICE, seizures and deportations. I have seen photos of rooms filled with workmen still in their uniforms in detention centers, having been rounded up from their work sites.

I am in Europe right now in Northern France about to cross the border into Belgium. Russia has just sent military drones over Poland  and it feels like WWIII is about to break out with Trump, a wanna be dictator, in the White House who is owned by Putin.

80 years ago America helped defeat dictators and bring about world peace. Nuclear bombs were used to stop the war in the  Pacific. That was a questionable decision which I hope is never repeated. It only takes a few petty, power hungry men to break down democracy and embrace autocracy in a lust for land, power and a desire to stay in power indefinately.

Market Day

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Stella Arbeláez Tascón and I went to the Webster Westside Flea Market (516 NW 3rd Street, Webster, FL). This is a painting of the combined haul before we divvied up the spoils of the marketing war.

Stella is great at comparing prices and finding the best deal while I just grab on impulse and sometimes forget to pay. I’m just excited to get the produce in my ancient granny cart which was rickety by the end of the shopping spree due to the produce weight.

The jar contains, Tamarind, a hard shelled pea shaped Fruit legume, which is sweet and bitter at the same time. I bit off individual seed pods and nurse the fruit off the seed with my front teeth while rolling it in my mouth.

I have become addicted to having several oranges every day. I am also a fan of cooking corn on the cob every night. It only takes 5 minutes to boil an ear so it is a quick snack.

In the background of the sketch are some ink bottles. Stella was testing each bottle of ink for it’s permanence when used with watercolor washes. It turns out one bottle is not permanent and that is the one she had been using.

My backpack for my Europe trip arrived yesterday. Each morning I put it on to walk around the block to see how it feels. I shopped at REI and maybe packed it 1/3 full. I hope on my travels I can find keep finding lush bounties of fruit as I hike, train and drive from town to town. I am getting close to finishing my itinerary. Which will give me a list of the towns and hamlets I must visit to follow in 1st Lieutenant Arthur Thorspecken‘s footsteps as his C-Company infantry unit moved from France to Belgium, Norway and ultimately the heart of Germany at the end of WWII. I think I solved the mystery of which work concentration camp his unit might have liberated and moved the victims toward Eastern Europe via train box cars. The displaced person’s didn’t want to get on the train and his unit had to hammer the box car doors shut with nails. The trip East might have been a death sentence. Skeletal faces started out from between box car boards in sorrow.

D-Day

Posted on by Thor

On December 10, 2020 more Americans died in s single day than died on the invasion of Normandy in WWII. Now, more than half a million Americans have died from COVID-19. That is more than the number of Americans who died in WWI, WWII and the Vietnam wars combined.

Daignault said, “This is our generation’s D-Day.” The entire country is a war zone. Today the troops are the doctors, nurses and medical personnel risking their own health to treat the sick.

Everyone is fatigued as we near the one year anniversary of the start of the world wide pandemic. People are tired of wearing masks and want life to return to “normal.” But with new variants of the virus spreading through Florida    and the US, this is not the time to let our guards down. The war is far from over.

Case numbers have been falling as have the number of deaths from the virus but we are just now down to the numbers that equal the summer surge. Back then we hoped that was as bad as it could get and people gathered together to celebrate July 4th and other holidays creating super spreader events. We are just now coming down from the Christmas, New Years and Superbowl superspreaders. The insurrection on the capitol had t be the worst imaginable superspreader event and those numbers have yet to be seen. Hopefully everyone who can get a shot of vaccine will get a shot. Right now we are inn a race to keep up with the potential spread of the highly more contagious UK variant the spreads 70% more efficiently. Wear a mask, social distance and wash your hands the end is in sight.