Items from WWII Marine's life follow his remains home
`It just said something to me'
Claire Goldtrap has traveled all over the country since he died 75 years ago.
His bones have been to Hawaii. He left his heart in Missouri. His spirit visited Minnesota.
It was in the North Star State where a fellow Sooner found him.
“That' s who it is ,” said Sheridean McMahan. “That's him.”
On a recent Friday morning in the living room of her home in Jones, McMahan described the moment she realized she held a piece of Goldtrap, a Hobart native who died i n World War II.
Returning home
The boys in the Corps called him “Goldy.”
He was a 21- year-old corporal and member of the 2 nd Amphibious Tractor Battalion of the 2nd Marine Division. Goldtrap died Nov. 20, 1943, during the first day of battle on the remote Pacific island of Betio in the Tarawa Atoll of the Gilbert Islands.
He was among 18,000 Marines who stormed Betio as part of Operation Galvanic. Over several days of fighting at Tarawa, the Japanese were routed, but roughly 1,000 Marines and sailors were killed and more than 2,000 were wounded.
Sanitation concerns led to hasty burials with little record-keeping conducted by Marines untrained in graves registration, according to the Department of Defense.
About 100 of the U.S. troops' remains later were inter red at the National Memorial Cemetery of t he Pacific, located at Punchbowl Crater in Honolulu, Hawaii. Among them were Goldtrap's remains.
On June 1 last year, the Department of Defense officially accounted for him, through the use of DNA testing, dental records and circumstantial evidence.
Earlier this year, Goldtrap's remains were returned to Oklahoma. On April 10, what would have been hi s 96th birthday, a ceremony for Goldtrap was held in Hobart.
McMahan was shocked when she read of Goldtrap's return to the Sooner State.
She was previously married to an Air Force man. As is common for military families, they moved around the country. Wherever she went, McMahan liked to shop at garage sales, with an eye for any item that reminded her of Oklahoma.
About 15 years ago, while living in Duluth, Minnesota, McMahan came across a small trinket at a garage sale. About an inch wide and three inches long, the wooden piece was a replica of a crate packed with oranges, made in southern California.
The little souvenir was stamped with the name “Mission Beach,” a neighborhood in San Diego. It was also stamped with a note that said, “This is the crate of orange sI promised to send you from California.” The replica crate carried a 3- cent Thomas Jefferson stamp.
The gift was addressed to Blanc he Gold trap in Hobart. The sender' s name on the little orange crate: P. F. C. Claire E. Goldtrap.
Stationed in southern California at the time, the young Marine sent his mother a token of his love, a couple of years before dying in World War II.
Nobody know show the piece ended up at a garage sale in Minnesota. McMahan doesn't know why she held onto it all those years. She held the crate one last time.
“I saw this, and I guess it just said something to me,” she said.
She always wanted to return the aged souvenir to the family, but could never decipher the last few letters of Goldtrap's handwritten name on the small crate.
“I was excited when I read the news article,” McMahan said. “I told my son `this is the guy!'”
McMahan handed the orange crate to a reporter from The Oklahoman.
“I won't miss it,” she said. “It should go back to the family. I would want it if something happened like this in my family.”
Goldy keeps coming home
Gold trap' s greatnephew, Robert Goldtrap, lives in Sayre. On a recent Monday afternoon, he visited The Oklahoman newsroom to pick up the tiny orange crate.
“It was heart warming, having that closure ,” Gold trap said of his great- uncle's return to Oklahoma.
Goldtrap said he would donate the crate to the Gen. Tommy F ranks Leadership Institute and Museum in Hobart. The museum features military memorabilia.
“Everything of my uncle, we're putting in the museum,” Goldtrap said. “This would be pretty cute to put in there.”
The orange crate is just the latest in a line of lost items returned to the Goldtrap family, since the news of the Marine's long-awaited homecoming.
Tiffany Gold trap, Robert' s wife, said a woman in Missouri sent them the fallen Marine's original purple heart, claiming she had bought it at an estate sale in Oklahoma. The family also has received some of Claire Gold trap' s handwritten letters to his mother.
Now, they are working to locate another vetera n' s family. Tiffany Goldtrap said her sister found a World War I coin personalized with a man's name on it.
“We've been trying to find the family to give them his coin back,” she said.
“I was excited when I read the news article,” McMahan said. “I told my son `this is the guy! I won't miss it. It should go back to the family. I would want it if something happened like this in my family.” Sheridean McMahan