Posted on 12/17/2006 5:08:56 PM PST by nuconvert
Theda Rendon, 67, of Homestead, picked up The Miami Herald on Nov. 10 and saw the front-page story about the discovery of long-lost portraits painted in 1945 of Miami servicemen who died in World War II and the attempts now to unite those portraits with the men's surviving relatives.
Perusing the list of names, she got to the third-from-last before spotting the name Norris Walker.
''That's my half-brother,'' she said. ``I got so excited I got goosebumps.''
With help from her computer-savvy daughter, Zinida, she sent an e-mail to Vinson Richter, the South Miami developer who had come across the portraits and was trying to track down relatives.
The two met halfway, in the parking lot of Christ Fellowship Church in Perrine, and Richter gave her the painting.
''It was beautiful. It's amazing how good it looked after all these years,'' she said.
''She was really sweet,'' Richter said. ``When I talked to her on the phone, they were so excited I could hear screaming in the background.''
The portraits, 42 in all, had been forgotten in the storeroom of a downtown Miami jewelry shop since at least 1965.
When Richter came across them, he and his family started trying to trace them. After some initial success, they hit a dead end and asked The Miami Herald to help. The paper printed some pictures and a list of the names, and put images of all 42 portraits on MiamiHerald.com.
The story helped find five more relatives, meaning Richter now has reunited 21 of the portraits with relatives.
Norris Walker grew up in Homestead, his half-sister remembered, graduating from Redland High School and joining the U.S. Marines. He was wounded twice in the Pacific before being killed at 20 in the invasion of Iwo Jima.
''He didn't even make it to the shore,'' Rendon said.
Walker was buried in Hawaii at the ''Punchbowl,'' officially called the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, with more than 25,000 other service personnel, many killed in the Pacific during World War II. The famous war correspondent Ernie Pyle is buried there.
''My daughter, Cophia, was there once and took a picture of his grave marker for me,'' Rendon said.
She plans to have the portrait restored and give it to Norris' full brother, Lee Walker, of Atlanta.
Among the other portraits given to relatives:
• Edward Rosenbaum, to his niece in Fort Pierce.
• Aubrey Lewis, to his nephew and namesake, Aubrey Fisher, and Fisher's two brothers. Lewis had been a firefighter before joining the military, Richter learned; his three nephews followed in his footsteps, serving careers in firefighting before retiring and moving out of Florida.
• Quentin Welbaum, to his first cousin, Rome Earl Welbaum, an attorney who lives just down Old Cutler Road from Richter.
In his research, Richter concluded that several of the servicemen in the portraits had no surviving relatives. He's considering donating them to several local museums; he'll decide by January.
``We wanted to get out all the portraits by Christmas. They made nice Christmas presents.''
Wow. Remarkable, yet haunting. Thanks for posting this.
Very interesting, do we know the story of how these portraits came into being?
Thanks for the link!
Your welcome.
Judging from your name, you might be interested in this.....
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1754998/posts
I don't know any more than what's in the article.
Maybe someone in the Miami area who read another article has more info.
BUMP FOR LATER
Look at slide # 31
One of the portraits was of the retired jeweler's brother.
How haunting is that?
I found the article on the 10th of Novemeber 2006 in the archives but they want money to see the whole thing. This is what is available for free:
"They have that optimistic, even cocky air that young servicemen show in portraits, as if it never occurred to them that the war they were going into might kill them. It did. All 42 of them. That's known because the portraits that have just resurfaced after decades in dusty storage are part of an extraordinary attempt by a few artists just after World War II to paint the likeness of every Miamian who died in the war. The Miami/Palm Beach family that rediscovered the portraits
Published on November 10, 2006, Page 1A, Miami Herald, The (FL) "
kind of sad and yet cool that they found the paintings
Thanks, I guess the 1965 article was about the paintings done in the late 1940s? I searched FR and it does not seem that anyone posted the 10 Novemeber 2006 article here.
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