thedrifter
03-03-08, 07:26 AM
Published: March 03, 2008 05:57 am
Life through a license buried in the sea
By Richard Gaines
Staff writer
James Wilbur Rice's driver's license was hauled up from the bottom of the ocean in a lobster trap — 97 years after he was born and 56 years after it was issued.
The weird catch is the only reason why The Eagle-Tribune can tell you a little about a man whose traces are now nearly erased, found in a laminated license and the U.S. military's veterans' virtual databases.
Whatever else this man was, he was a patriot of the first order — a participant by choice in not one but two wars.
These — World War II and Korea — he survived for a very long time.
Whether in his later years he was ever aware that a wallet he carried with his driver's license had been lost (or maybe stolen) and somehow found its way to the bottom of the ocean near the coast of Manchester is, like so much about the man, unknown and perhaps unknowable.
Even the little that could be brought to light from virtual databases of the veterans' network would have been lost to history were it not for one of the coincidences that keeps the human comedy from getting dull.
It started dully enough. Fifty-year-old Mark Ring was lobstering in late October in 150 feet of water off Kettle Island with his nephew Matt Ring. Matt was clearing a trap when he found a wallet.
Wallets are not unheard of in traps. Enough get lost near shore that now and then they end up snagged in the traps which are subject to heavy foot and fin traffic.
But when Ring examined this wallet, he found a driver's license that was issued 54 years earlier, in 1953.
The license had been laminated, so it was still intact and legible.
"It's my theory," said Ring, "it got buried in the muck which got churned up in a huge storm that roared up the coast in the days before I went out."
Perhaps. While the wallet virtually disintegrated, the laminated license could still be read.
It was issued to James W. Rice in July 1953. The precise date of the issuance was typed onto a part of the license that had chipped off, but there's no reason to care about that detail.
What interested Ring was the issuing authority — the Navy.
The licensee was a Navy man in 1953. He also had brown hair and blue eyes, was filled with type O blood, stood 67 inches tall and weighed 202 pounds.
Lucia Amero, assistant to Veterans' Agent Arley Pett, took the sketchy data from the license into her database and quickly retrieved a bit of secondary data, equally sketchy, that tells us the barest details of a life that the limited evidence suggests was lived with purposeful structure, meaning and determination.
Born in Lynn, he worked for General Electric, married Mary, and at the age of 32, on Jan. 6, 1943 — a bit more than a year after Pearl Harbor — he enlisted in the Navy.
He was trained at the Great Lakes Naval Base in Illinois, Moffet Field in California, and Galveston, Texas, and was awarded ribbons indicating he spent part of the war in the States and part of it in the Pacific.
The records go blank again until 1951. At the age of 41, he re-enlisted at the start of the Korean War. It was a war somewhat like today's in Iraq — a war fought for strategic aims that made it difficult to understand and to some observers, impossible to win.
It ended in a truce which remains in effect a half-century later. It ensured that the Korean people would be divided by a border that cut their peninsula in two.
When it began five years after World War II ended, America had no stomach for it, but grudgingly its soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen went.
At 43, Rice was too old to worry about being recalled to fight, as was Ted Williams, a World War II ace fighter pilot, but Williams was only 33 and his recall caused a stink (especially among Red Sox fans).
Still, Rice thought the cause right enough to draw him back.
Whatever events occurred in his life after 1953, after Korea, are not found in the veterans' records. All we know or may ever know is that his life came to an end 30 years later in Rockingham, N.H.
One can read these bare facts and squint and try to imagine this man.
Then one can think that without the decision of a lobsterman to lobster on a certain day in a certain place, not one of these facts would have emerged.
And James Wilbur Rice would have remained forgotten.
Ellie
Life through a license buried in the sea
By Richard Gaines
Staff writer
James Wilbur Rice's driver's license was hauled up from the bottom of the ocean in a lobster trap — 97 years after he was born and 56 years after it was issued.
The weird catch is the only reason why The Eagle-Tribune can tell you a little about a man whose traces are now nearly erased, found in a laminated license and the U.S. military's veterans' virtual databases.
Whatever else this man was, he was a patriot of the first order — a participant by choice in not one but two wars.
These — World War II and Korea — he survived for a very long time.
Whether in his later years he was ever aware that a wallet he carried with his driver's license had been lost (or maybe stolen) and somehow found its way to the bottom of the ocean near the coast of Manchester is, like so much about the man, unknown and perhaps unknowable.
Even the little that could be brought to light from virtual databases of the veterans' network would have been lost to history were it not for one of the coincidences that keeps the human comedy from getting dull.
It started dully enough. Fifty-year-old Mark Ring was lobstering in late October in 150 feet of water off Kettle Island with his nephew Matt Ring. Matt was clearing a trap when he found a wallet.
Wallets are not unheard of in traps. Enough get lost near shore that now and then they end up snagged in the traps which are subject to heavy foot and fin traffic.
But when Ring examined this wallet, he found a driver's license that was issued 54 years earlier, in 1953.
The license had been laminated, so it was still intact and legible.
"It's my theory," said Ring, "it got buried in the muck which got churned up in a huge storm that roared up the coast in the days before I went out."
Perhaps. While the wallet virtually disintegrated, the laminated license could still be read.
It was issued to James W. Rice in July 1953. The precise date of the issuance was typed onto a part of the license that had chipped off, but there's no reason to care about that detail.
What interested Ring was the issuing authority — the Navy.
The licensee was a Navy man in 1953. He also had brown hair and blue eyes, was filled with type O blood, stood 67 inches tall and weighed 202 pounds.
Lucia Amero, assistant to Veterans' Agent Arley Pett, took the sketchy data from the license into her database and quickly retrieved a bit of secondary data, equally sketchy, that tells us the barest details of a life that the limited evidence suggests was lived with purposeful structure, meaning and determination.
Born in Lynn, he worked for General Electric, married Mary, and at the age of 32, on Jan. 6, 1943 — a bit more than a year after Pearl Harbor — he enlisted in the Navy.
He was trained at the Great Lakes Naval Base in Illinois, Moffet Field in California, and Galveston, Texas, and was awarded ribbons indicating he spent part of the war in the States and part of it in the Pacific.
The records go blank again until 1951. At the age of 41, he re-enlisted at the start of the Korean War. It was a war somewhat like today's in Iraq — a war fought for strategic aims that made it difficult to understand and to some observers, impossible to win.
It ended in a truce which remains in effect a half-century later. It ensured that the Korean people would be divided by a border that cut their peninsula in two.
When it began five years after World War II ended, America had no stomach for it, but grudgingly its soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen went.
At 43, Rice was too old to worry about being recalled to fight, as was Ted Williams, a World War II ace fighter pilot, but Williams was only 33 and his recall caused a stink (especially among Red Sox fans).
Still, Rice thought the cause right enough to draw him back.
Whatever events occurred in his life after 1953, after Korea, are not found in the veterans' records. All we know or may ever know is that his life came to an end 30 years later in Rockingham, N.H.
One can read these bare facts and squint and try to imagine this man.
Then one can think that without the decision of a lobsterman to lobster on a certain day in a certain place, not one of these facts would have emerged.
And James Wilbur Rice would have remained forgotten.
Ellie