The Nazi SA (not "SS") dagger is lost today.

There is not even an image of the thing here today because Imageshack.us, the photo-hosting org, went belly up like a stank fish.

However, I remain alive and healthy at 64 and happy to be a witness for life.

I love life and love people who celebrate living without harming other people.

My grandfather PB Welch (Paul Brown Welch I) was like this.

So was my father. So is the son. There is no holy ghost.

There are we. Think. Here we are. Add a T to here. Ere,

There is no magic but for what sleight of mind people make.

My paternal grandfather Welch (not Welsh) winked out by sudden cardiac death at 2 in afternoon, EST,

just as Drew Pearson was writing and about to record his broadcast, May 6th 1945.

The irony is perfect and that's all it is: amazing coincidence of time, people, catastrophe.

Two sons, only, both in the service, one in the army and the other in the navy.

PB's best friend was orthopedic surgeon, Art Weiland. They hunted and they found together what friendship was about.

PB brought Art to Miami from Chicago in 1926. He brought Art here on a train and Art smashed his right fists knuckles, flat

in result of a card game gone rough to sharpers.

Art laughed and told me the story again on New Year Day, 1970.

Art after his friend's death, carried the casket and went on to found today's Miami Children's Hospital.

Great men do and die. Art Weiland's Coral Gables Clinic, originally built and opened by my grandfather PB, Hitler's opposite,

is today the home of Books and Books.

Non fiction.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Ckem-iuDGiY4I531xi8HYViyKTF8xLKc

What serendipity: you present here a broadcast that aired on the very day that my paternal grandfather died (May 6th, 1945).

Coincidence: PB Welch was born the same year as Hitler, died suddenly one week after Hitler.

Coincidence: Pearson was my paternal grandmother's first cousin.
That makes him my first cousin twice removed.

I've never heard a Pearson broadcast before, so this is a treat. But it touches me to know that
he's speaking at the same time that my grandfather
had just died.

Their elder son of two sons, my uncle Paul, was in Europe at that moment. Letters did not get to Paul jr.

As late as the first week of July, '45, Paul wrote to his folks back home, "Mom, Dad, I'm coming home in August! I can hardly wait. It'll be so great to see you all again."
(He didn't know his dad was dead)

FIFTY NINE YEARS later, a call came to me from the current owners of that home that PB built,

"Reid, we had workmen here last month. They removed a faulty plaster section in the master bathroom. Something fell to the floor from the attic crawl space above."

Paul Welch Jr. had returned home from France in August.
He lived at home for year or so, taking care of his widowed mother (Pearson's cousin). Paul came home with the usual war booty souvenirs: a Lugar pistol, maps, etc.

How that Nazi SS knife ended on the floor of the bathroom, almost fifty nine years after Paul had hidden it? Why did Paul bury the dagger into the vermiculite up there?

I can guess, because I knew my grandmother's personality. She'd had enough horror. I just bet that Fern saw that dagger and demanded to son Paul,
"NOT in my house. No, you get rid of that dreadful thing right now."

And I posit that Paul put the dagger into that hiding place then and there,and forgot about it.

Paul died about the year 2000.

On May 6th, 2004, Beryl Fournier rang my home phone:

"...Reid, we think you should have it to give to your Uncle Paul."

"He's dead now."

"Well, then it should be with you. Can you come over?"

I visited my boyhood home again for the first time in decades. I came home with this thing I'll show you in the next form.

And so I close this posting, it was no review.
But, instead, another incredible confluence of dates, chance, history, kindness and rememberance
of the dead, of those (Pearson, our country's men, women, the people of the world who died in the struggle, the Allied nation's sacrifices;

for me, it all boils down to kinship with a symbolic knife that somehow has come to my possession,
I know not why, I am not at all spiritual.
I accept wonderful confluences of chance for what they are: rare mediums reinforcing a message.

The knife Fern Wolfe Welch would not have in her home:

http://img256.imageshack.us/img256/9244/screenshot214lk3.jpg