Dusty trunk reveals WWII tale
WASHINGTON — How many Rosebuds are fed to the fire every day in Washington?
After all, we can be a peripatetic lot in this town. The military or some federal agency sends us here, and we cart our stuff with us. Then we’re posted somewhere else, and we pack up and move again.
Sometimes, things get left behind.
Things such as the green wooden trunk in the basement of the apartment building on Woodley Road Northwest. It was old and battered, the sort of thing you might easily overlook. And overlooked it had been, for something close to 60 years.
Jaime Steve found it. He lives in Alexandria, Va., but he used to live in the building known as 2800 Woodley Road, down the street from the National Zoo. It was there that Steve became good friends with Ace Rosner, one of the most interesting men I ever met. Rosner lost an arm at Anzio during World War II but went on to join the CIA and collect — and race — classic cars, dozens of which he kept in 2800 Woodley’s underground garage.
When Rosner died at age 94 in 2011, Steve helped clear out his apartment and disperse his cars. In February, Steve heard that the apartment’s managers wanted some old junk cleared out, including a bunch of stuff everyone assumed was Rosner’s. Stuff like the battered green footlocker.
“It was all covered in dust,” Steve said. When he wiped the dust away, he saw a stenciled name: Maj. F.M. Rogers. And when Steve opened the trunk, he met a remarkable man.
Felix Michael Rogers was a Massachusetts native who enlisted in the U.S. Army as a private in 1942 and retired from the U.S. Air Force in 1978 as a four-star general. Google him and you’ll learn that during World War II, Rogers flew a P-51 Mustang called the Beantown Banshee from bases in England, Italy and France.
He was a bona fide flying ace, notching 12 confirmed kills. Rogers looked the part, too, with a killer moustache.
Among the trunk’s contents: Rogers’ dog tags, a fourleaf clover encased in plastic, a notebook from flight school, a handwritten prayer, a small bottle of whiskey, a razor and strop, and three medals, including the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Steve was able to find contact information for Rogers in Santa Barbara, Calif., but when Steve phoned in April, the flying ace’s wife, Catherine, said he had passed away just a few weeks earlier at the age of 92 at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington. She put Steve in touch with the general’s children, two of whom — Stephen Rogers and Ginna Rogers-Gould — live in the Washington area.
Rogers-Gould said her parents lived at the 2800 Woodley apartment in the early 1950s, then moved when her father was transferred to Madrid as the assistant U.S. air attache.
“They probably just couldn’t take everything they had with them to the overseas posting,” she said. “What I’m guessing is they just asked Rosner if they could store a locker there, and then it became forgotten.”
The family had no idea the trunk existed. The small miracle of its appearance just weeks after Rogers’ death provided some comfort in their grief.
“When I started to go through it, it just was like it was a gift from heaven,” Rogers-Gould said. “It was almost like my dad’s hand reaching out to his family and saying: ‘Don’t forget some of the things I taught you. Don’t forget what it is to be an American.’”
Rogers-Gould told Steve that she was amazed a complete stranger took the trouble to track her family down.
Said Steve: “My view was, why would anybody do anything different?”
Gen. Rogers will be buried in October at Arlington Cemetery next to his first wife, Virginia. Rogers-Gould, of Arnold, Md., is working on a biography of her father.
So, a Rosebud rescued from the fire (unlike Citizen Kane). But there’s more: In the Woodley basement Steve found a second Army-issue trunk.
“It belonged to a fellow who was in the 87th Infantry Division, and he was one of the guys who liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp,” said Steve. Inside were photographs of the camp and scrip issued by the SS. The trunk belonged to Lt. Daniel Grear of Riverside, Ill.
Steve is trying to find out what became of him.