GAZETTE COLUMN: TWO BROTHERS IN WAR by John P. Flannery

On Memorial Day, we remember those who served in war and acknowledge their sacrifice of time from family and friends, from young ambition, and from life itself, so that they could give to a nation to preserve and protect the freedom it represents.

These recruits were almost always young and that made their sacrifice the greater. 

Brothers Charles and John enlisted in what many thought was the greatest war, the war against Hitler.  Their parents were supportive.  Irish friends thought, however, they should be helping Hitler instead – to beat the English for what the Brits did to Ireland. 

Charles went to Europe and John was stationed stateside in the Army Air Force on ground crews fixing and maintaining aircraft.  John spent the war “trying to get into it.” 

Charles fought through Sicily with General Patton’s forces and then, on to the boot of Italy.  That’s where Charles was taken prisoner of war.  When they landed on Italian soil, they had to fight to take weapons from Mussolini’s forces.  Charles was standing by a truck after the fighting – so he thought - when he was shot in the chest.  It lifted him in the air and sent him flying backwards where he lay until enemy forces took him away.

            John was distraught.  He had become a family man and a patriot for his country, in that order, and the price was separation from his new wife and his imprisoned brother.  John kept trying to get to Europe to join the fighting, and perhaps help his brother, but his duties kept him pinned down in Texas and then in the San Joaquin Valley.

So many times John and his family had thought Charles lost to the war.  Charles’ Mom and Pop aged with Charles’ uncertain absence – tortured with the uncertainty whether he was alive or not.  They were also afraid John might convince some CO to let him go “over there.” 

After the war was over, and his brother Charles was released by the Allies, he was light like those prisoners at Dachau, and Charles didn’t want to look like that again.  He ate as if he were continuously building up stores against his days in captivity when he was starved.  It was clear that Charles had not gotten the right treatment as a prisoner.  He was a walking, living breathing man, and yet a casualty

John’s wife had a miscarriage after the war; they were going to call the child, Charles.  They considered this a bad omen.  A few years later, Charles died from internal bleeding, from his war wounds.  John’s wife wailed, keening, like the women of old Eire.  Charles finally paid the price for his service to his country.

John looked upon his brother’s face in an open coffin, and though dead, it was reassuring somehow to see Charles for the last time -- the only man my father John ever loved after his own father. 

Charles is beneath a marble gravestone at St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx. 

My father John is at Arlington National Cemetery with his wife Rusty.

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GAZETTE COLUMN: THE WATERFALL IN THE WOODS by John P. Flannery

(Photo by Holly S. Flannery)

Perhaps we’d all appreciate what we risk losing in Loudoun if we visited places that are like Loudoun once was.

As a street kid in the South Bronx, the nearby park, away from the swings, in the rolling green meadows, was something like nature. 

A Boy Scout troop hike across the George Washington Bridge to the New Jersey Palisades was better.

The best by far, however, was when our family foursome took a five hour summer drive in my Dad’s Plymouth to the Adirondack Mountains.  Each summer my parents found an affordable rental cabin right on Lake George, just South of Fort Ticonderoga, where Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys still lurked waiting should the British dare to regain the fort; best, James Fennimore Cooper’s “Hawkeye” paddled a dug-out just ahead of you when you swam through the morning mist.

Loudoun shared an identity with nature in 1983 when I bought an historic log cabin called the Janney House in Waterford, Virginia from the Morton family who had restored it. 

In the years since, we’ve lost our way in Loudoun.

The developing theme in this fall election season is about how to exploit and destroy by development the nature that made Loudoun so special.

This past weekend was my birthday and I was hauled off by my wife Holly to an uncertain location in Pennsylvania. 

After about three hours of driving, we reached a stream called Bull Run, a small but fast stream, full of fish, flowing down a ridge called Laurel Hill to join the Youghingheny River.

Over a four mile run, Bull Run drops from about 2,050 feet above sea level to about 1,070 feet, making the water run white near Mill Run, Pennsylvania.

Over the centuries, this water force has shaped and fractured the natural sand stone, forming buff-colored ledges. 

The river is bordered by tall trees, and the floor of the forest is deep with fallen oak leaves. 

Edgar Kaufman bought this land in 1918; his family loved to sit on the rocks and watch the water fall; in 1935, they commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build a home that fit this setting.

Wright wrote how his “visit to the waterfall in the woods stays with me” and the project “has taken vague shape in my mind to the music of the stream.”

Wright designed a home that emerged and extended out of the cliff in three levels with terraces open to the sky above and the water fall below (thanks to cantilevered slabs anchored in that cliff). 

You can walk down from the main room on the first floor family room and sit with your legs dangling in the stream.

There’s not a place in the house, called “Fallingwater,” where you don’t see and hear the calming stream.

Wright believed that what we contribute in architecture to the land should be “organic,” that “form and function are one,” and so we marry the structure to its context.

We could do worse than mimic Wright’s architectural philosophy. 

Indeed, I’m sure we shall do worse – if we continue to build in Loudoun without respect for what’s natural.