By Alicia Colombo
The holidays came early for Overbrook resident Gerald Showers, who received a new computer from Philadelphia Corporation for Aging (PCA) in October.
Showers was one of 837 readers who responded to the Milestones readership survey last spring, and his name was picked in a random drawing to win the computer.
This is his first computer. The 68-year-old retired short-order cook admits he knows nothing about how to use a computer. Now, he can’t wait to learn.
“When I read the computer issue [June 2007] of Milestones, it piqued my interest,” he said. “I will start by learning the basics. I want to know everything about computers. It’s all fascinating to me.”
Showers is excited about learning how to send and receive e-mail. This will allow him to stay in touch with his daughter, who lives in Georgia. Currently, they communicate by phone. “She’s very computer-savvy and will likely teach me how to use this computer,” he said.
He has been reading Milestones for about two years. “I’ve seen the blue boxes around the city,” he said. “I became more curious about it, as I got older. Now, I read it every chance I get. It’s very informative for older people.”
Like many other readers, Showers’ favorite section is the recipes. He is interested in information about healthy foods.
Showers attends Paradise Emanuel Tabernacle Baptist Church, on Woodland Ave., at 47th St., and takes part in its senior citizens group.
For a Milestones pick-up location near you: 215-765-9000, ext. 5050. Home delivery is available for $12 a year.
By Kitty Baker
Eugene Sharf, a retired pharmacist and combat veteran of World War II, is now an artist.
Sharf, 87, conceives and fabricates stained-glass pieces of art.
At age 68, Sharf, who had operated his own pharmacy in West Philadelphia, joined a team of doctors, nurses and social workers in a program at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Philadelphia working with heroin-addicted veterans.
A presidential handshake
In 1990, he was personally commended by President George H.W. Bush. During a visit to the hospital, the president came down the hospital hallway to shake hands with Sharf at the pharmaceutical dispensing window.
Sharf was a Bronze Star Medal recipient for his service as a combat medic in World War II. He had served in three campaigns — Rhineland, Ardennes (Battle of the Bulge) and Central Europe. The award was for “meritorious achievement in ground combat ... against the armed enemy ... in the European Theater of Operations.”
He received the medal 43 years late, probably, he says, because his records had been destroyed in a fire at a St. Louis military records depot.
Studio in a bedroom
As an octogenarian, Sharf has developed a new enthusiasm. A cousin is a stained-glass artist, and for some years, Sharf had been intrigued by the patient dexterity needed to create the luminescent beauty of stained glass. Having ventured into the field himself, he uses the copper foil method, cutting and soldering intricate shapes into designs, such as birds, flowers and scenes that take on a contemporary Tiffany effect.
One bedroom of the Bala Cynwyd condo he shares with Hilda, his wife of 40 years, is a studio stocked with a variety of colored glass, necessary tools and materials. The odor of hot copper means another Sharf-designed piece will be set into its metal-and-wood frame, perhaps as a gift to one of his two daughters or two grandchildren.
By Ann L. Rappoport
It’s amazing what a guy with a bullet in his back can do.
Danny Hinds was born and raised in Kensington, and educated in Philadelphia parochial schools. After climbing up SEPTA’s career ladder — from cleaning buses to shop foreman, mechanic and supervisor — he turned down promotions and entered the police academy.
Hinds loved being a cop. “I did a little bit of everything. Plain clothes, airport, vice squad, Center City uniform,” he said. But he took two bullets in the 1970s, and left the force in the ‘80s. “I miss the street,” he says now. “I like to be with people. Every day was different. You never knew what was going to happen.”
Luckily, he found a job that offers the best of those features.
Since 1990, he has been superintendent of the world-famous Masonic Temple, catercorner to City Hall.
Inspired by brother’s plight
The structure was built free of charge and completed about 134 years ago, with many Masons donating their labor, and Hinds says fondly, “They’re going to have to bury me here because I’m not retiring.” He says he “owes it to the men who built it, and to the ones who will follow” to maintain and preserve the historic property.
It was his brother Bobby’s story that moved Hinds’ initial interest in Masonry. Among his early memories are weekly trips with his grandmother and Bobby — who had a club foot — to the Shriners Hospital when it was on Roosevelt Boulevard. After 15 years, countless operations, leg braces and treatments, Bobby was released to sneakers with the Rx: “Play ball!”
And, Hinds says, “It didn’t cost us a penny.”
In 2007, Hinds received the prestigious Pennsylvania Franklin Medal for distinguished Masons, and has been elected to receive the esteemed 33rd Degree next summer — one honorary notch higher than the highest degree achievable through effort and petition.
Cop background helps
Hinds is on call for the Masonic Temple 24/7. But on a typical day, he arrives at daybreak and checks the logbook for what transpired overnight. He checks all the rooms and assigns the troops, so to speak. By 9 a.m., he’s ready for the public, radio and security in high gear. It’s a busy place, bustling with meetings, catering and contractors. With a facility like this, he says, there is always contract work underway. And tours.
Aide to many grand masters over the years, Hinds says he’s not a bodyguard, but “I watch their backs and run interference,” occasionally having to play
the role of bad cop. Fortunately, those instances are infrequent, but he acknowledges that his background in law enforcement certainly helps.
Hinds, 56, and his
wife, Diane, now live in Bensalem.
They have two children and five grandchildren, whom he admittedly spoils because that’s “PopPop’s prerogative.”
‘Dollhouse roof’
He remembers vividly his out-of-body experience at Temple Hospital’s emergency room after he’d been shot: “It’s as if you take off the roof of the dollhouse and look down on all the rooms.”
In desperate condition, even as the doctors were trying to revive him, Hinds was trying to reassure his family he’d be fine. He says he glimpsed that light at the end of a long hallway, and sensed his deceased mother at the other end.
So, Hinds says he’s not afraid of death because “I’ve been halfway there, at least.”
Afraid or not, he’s in no hurry. He learned the lesson of living in the moment, and enjoys spending time with his loved ones.
“You can’t go back and make it up,” he says. “The children are our future. Without them, there’s nothing.”
By Bill Kent
They could be just another bunch of guys sitting around, telling war stories.
“Right after I got drafted into the Marines at the Customs House,” Harold Selvin said, “they told us we were going to Parris Island. I thought, Paris? This looks like a good deal.”
(Parris Island is a U.S. Marine base in South Carolina.)
Aaron May was among the GIs who liberated the Dachau concentration camp. “We were under instructions from General Eisenhower to make the people living near the camp go out and dig up the bodies, so they would know what went on there.”
“We were all a bunch of street kids,”
remembered Ralph Carollo, an infantry gunner who saw combat in the Pacific. “The war turned us into men.”
These and other stories told by World War II veterans at Sterling Glen, a Center City senior residence recently renamed Atria Center City, have been recorded and are among the more than 50,000 on file at the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center in Washington.
For family history
The vets were assisted in recording their recollections by Sandy Ems, Sterling Glen’s activities director. “Our owner, Atria, had success with the Veterans History Project at other residences, so we gave it a try. It’s now an ongoing activity.”
In its eighth year, the Veterans History Project was established by Congress to collect and preserve recollections from veterans of every U.S. armed conflict since World War II.
The thousands of interviews, in print, on audio or videotape, are viewed by historians, says Robert Patrick, a retired Army colonel who heads the Project. “But it’s also valuable for veterans’ families. It provides them with a chapter of family history that may otherwise go untold.”
Locally, the Veterans History Project has received regular support from U.S. Reps. Joe Sestak, a retired admiral, and Allyson Schwartz, daughter of a Korea War veteran.
Ch. 12 interviewed 120
The project also received encouragement from WHYY-TV12. Producer Anne Standish conducted some 120 interviews, featured on the air, and on
the station’s website, during last November’s televising of The War, Ken Burns’s multi-part documentary.
Standish says, “The war affected so many people in so many ways. Because the Veterans History Project also includes people on the homefront who were working in factories, the USOs and growing Victory Gardens, we got experiences from people right here, in our own backyard.”
If you’d like to share your experiences, you may visit the project’s website, www.loc.gov/vets. There you can download and print a “Field Kit” (if you don’t have access to a printer, you can order a Field Kit by e-mailing your name and address to vohp@loc.gov or by calling 888-371-5848).
There is no fee for participating. Anything submitted, whether in print, audio or video form, is in the “public domain,” and thus, available free to bona fide researchers and scholars, as well as other veterans and their families and friends.
Veterans who need assistance can call Melissa Heinlein, chief of Voluntary Services at the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center, 215-823-5868. Heinlein sends volunteers to assist in recording those priceless memories.
Volunteers assisting
A former Army corporal and retired employee of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Walter Valentine is one of a handful of unpaid volunteers who have been assisting with the History Project. He has done everything from filling out the paperwork to interviewing individual veterans.
“I do this because I love it,” he says.
Valentine has recruited students from Philadelphia Military Academy to help him. “For some of these kids, these stories are a revelation,” he says. “They get an idea of how much everybody sacrificed, and continue to sacrifice, so they can live their lives in peace.”
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