I have spent a lot of time in the last few weeks with those who have been called "The Greatest Generation."

One old lady, at Heritage Hill here in Weatherly, is formerly from Vermont. She misses the husband she met during WW II. She is now 85 and rapidly declining.

They met during the war when he was 19 and she was 16. He stayed at a boarding house where she worked. To pay for her board, she cooked breakfast before going to work a 10-hour shift in a Bridgeport, Connecticut, foundry.

She couldn't flip an egg for the life of her, and the only tool she had was a spatula. The tall Coast Guard officer from the Military Transport Command put his arms around her and showed her how to flip an egg without a spatula. Two days later, he went off to sea. They met again four years later.

In her work at the foundry, this farm girl from Vermont cast 16" brass shells for the battleship's big guns. I was with her on her 80th birthday on a WW II aircraft carrier in San Diego, California. There was a display about "Rosie the Riveter."

That was the first that I realized that my mom was "Rosie the Riveter." She said, "I did that, you know." I did not know. She told me that no one before her had ever exceeded her proficiency rating of 98 percent, and she had tracked the foundry's rating after the war and no one had since. We stopped making the 16 " shells shortly thereafter, and we have tens of thousands of this ordnance in storage. The shells weighed more that she did.

Also at Heritage Hill is a wonderful couple that Kathy and I have known for 25 years. They also met during WW II—he was a pilot for the OSS (predecessor to the CIA), and she was a Norwegian member of the flight crew. The most dangerous mission in WW II was flying over the Hump into Burma. Niles and Birta did that impossible task hundreds of times.

I have another client in Jim Thorpe who was in the same CG Transport Command as my father. He describes the experience of moving slowly across the North Atlantic in a Victory Ship and having the Captain tell the crew to assemble on deck to look at a speck on the horizon.

The Captain told them that what was on the horizon was the Queen Mary, with 10,000 US troops on board. The Queen was moving through the water with all boilers flat out and 100,000 HP turning the screws. Only a German submarine directly in her path could even slow her down, but not stop her. Joe tells me that even the wake almost capsized his Victory Boat.

I miss another WW II veteran who survived, in his Signalman Group, the Battle of the Bulge. I only learned of what he had gone through when I gave his eulogy.

Are we all talking to these heroes and recording what they went through before they can no longer tell what they know? I now have a tape recorder with me at all times. Do you?

Bruce Conrad