By Emily Rosen

ERosen424@aol.com

www.emilyrosen424.com

Jim Kurtz flew from Boston to George Britton’s house in Boca Raton this week,  to talk to George about Jim’s long-dead father. He arrived at 6 p.m., left at 10:30 p.m. and flew back to Boston early the following morning. So what’s the story, and what’s it to me?

The search for a father is not an entirely new story, but this one is in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes, with a Freudian passion and drive that hasn’t let up for the past 10 years. Jim was 2 years old in 1952 when his father, Bob, died, from service-related heart issues, seven years after having been discharged from the Air Force. In essence, Jim never knew  his father – “knew,” that is, in the way he had yearned for, and the gaping hole in his life remained just that, despite all of his many life successes, and, too, despite the stories of his three elder brothers and his mother, who just turned 90. Every Father’s Day in his life made the hole bigger.

Father Bob had been an Air Force co-pilot, and, on his 19th mission, was shot down over Austria, captured and imprisoned by the Germans for the remainder of the war. George Britton, a writer, student and friend of mine had been part of that B-24 crew and, now, at age 86, is one of the two remaining survivors of that experience,  and is the last connecting dot on Jim’s trail of his dad.

Driven to squeeze out every ounce of that story, Jim was determined to talk to George in person. Even with today’s multi-layered alternative methods of communication, the one-on-one eyeball connection was important to Jim. I was there, by mutual consent, to help with the story that Jim is planning to write.

These are the lengths to which Jim has gone — having extricated a trove of material, letters, pictures and various mementoes from the attic of his mother’s house (many of which he brought to share with George), he was all the more determined to relive, to the extent possible, that particular period in the life of his father.

“I wanted to feel, as much as possible, what he felt,” he said.

He took two trips to Austria, after deep research, and met and spoke to some of the witnesses to the crash, and climbed an arduous 6,500 feet into the still snow-covered mountain where the plane came down. He actually discovered some of the remains of the plane, including the co-pilot’s seat which he brought home. He even located and talked to the German pilot of the plane that had shot down his father’s plane.

But still, not enough for Jim. Through the Collings Foundation, he flew in the last operational B24 in the world, just to get a sense of being in one. And then, he hauled himself into a commercial sky-dive to feel … feel … feel the free fall of the parachute descent his father had experienced.

But for Jim, it’s the letters which define his father, a prolific writer himself, the letters and words and impressions of others … from each person, another father.

Did he get to know his father? Do any of us ever really get to know our parents? How well do we even know ourselves?  For some, the search never ends.