Who we are

Iknew my dad’s paternal grandparents immigrated to the United States from Denmark, but I had never seen the immigration papers from the 1800s of my great-grandfather Thorvald Kofford (Kofoed before being changed on Ellis Island).

I knew my mom was pretty and smart as a child, but I had no idea she had been selected by her junior high school classmates as her school’s May Queen.

I knew my dad served on a ship that was in extensive combat during World II, but I had no idea he had kept a photo album of his service during the war, including photos that appear to be Pop and his shipmates in Okinawa after the invasion by American troops of the southern Japanese island.

My brother Brooke, who lives in El Centro and teaches in Imperial, soon will be moving back to the area in Northern California where he and I and our other siblings grew up. He wanted to lessen his load of belongings before he moves, so the two of us and my wife, Sandra, went through boxes on a recent Sunday to decide what to keep and what to discard.

My mother, who died a few years ago, had been the keeper of family memorabilia, and Brooke had inherited her boxes. I don’t think any of us involved in the looking through those boxes had any idea of some of the stuff my mom had.

Along with great-granddad’s immigration documents and my Pop’s war photo log, my mom had my father’s high school diploma, awarded in 1946, when he was 20 and a World War II veteran. My dad had told me that male students in the Los Angeles High School District were put into an accelerated program to get the young men into the war that much faster. Such students essentially did two years of school in one, he said.

Apparently, in the rush to get Pop to the war, the LAHSD hadn’t issued him a diploma. When he made it back in pretty much one piece, the school district gave him his diploma, it appears … either that or he didn’t finish his high requirements until he got back from the war. Since there is no one to talk to about this anymore, I am going to choose to believe the former rather than the latter.

Along with the documents, we came across countless photos, of grandparents, great-grandparents, great aunts and great uncles, cousins and second cousins, of my brothers and sister and me, of the homes we lived in, of our long-gone pet cats and dogs and guinea pigs.

There were photos of my Aunt Shirley marrying my Uncle Sam, who is now 95 (and doing wonderfully). There were many photos of my Uncle Sam, my mom’s older brother, when he was young that we need to get to him and my Aunt Shirley.

There were articles and photographs from our hometown newspaper, the Antioch Ledger, including photos of my siblings and me on teams and in competitions or just caught in various activities around town. There even was an article in which where I was cited as one of the stars of the local high school’s junior varsity football team that, as I recall, at least slightly exaggerated my contributions to that team.

Seeing the photos and everything else spurred memories of good times had and true love shared. But going through such boxes was heartbreaking, too, knowing that so many beloved people are gone, including my parents, my cousins Sue, Steve and Ricky, my childhood/teenage friends Victor Rodriguez and Dave “Hud” Hudson, and too many more.

Those photos, those documents, those memories and those people made me who I am, though, and I will carry those with me in my mind and soul for the rest of my time on this planet.