David Venditta

With my retirement from The Morning Call on July 1 after 32 years, I left behind a trove of stories about war veterans. I did an accounting in my last days at the newspaper and found that of 102 veterans I interviewed for my “War Stories: In Their Own Words” series that started in 1999 — most of them from World War II — 63 have since died.

Here again is the sad reality: Sixty-two percent of the war veterans I’ve interviewed over the past 17 years have died.

It points to the importance of getting these stories told before they are lost to the ages. I’m glad I wrote them. Not only will these accounts live for future generations, but there was a personal reward in seeing the veterans’ pride over the recognition they received when their stories were published. It was meaningful work.

(I got a big thank you July 19 at the monthly meeting of the Lehigh Valley Chapter, Veterans of the Battle of the Bulge. I’ll tell you about that later.)

My “In Their Own Words” series had a total of 112 stories. In five that I handled, the subject was deceased and his written remembrance appeared with the help of his family. Another five were written by other members of The Morning Call staff. Under the format, the veteran – not the writer – told his or her story, culled from recorded interviews and fashioned into a narrative. Sometimes the interviews extended over weeks or months and took countless hours.

The series had one veteran from the World War I era, Olaf Marthinson, who was 102 when reporter Ron Devlin and I interviewed him in 1999 about his role in the 1916 hunt for Mexican rebel leader Pancho Villa. There was one story from the Cold War, on Berlin Airlift pilot Harry D. Yoder; six Korean War stories; six Vietnam War stories; and one Iraq War story, on decorated helicopter pilot Michael B. Hultquist. The rest were all from World War II, including two who served in the German army.

You can read the “In Their Own Words” stories at http://www.mcall.com/news/local/warstories/ In 2011, The Morning Call published a collection of my interviews in the book War Stories in Their Own Words, available online at http://store.mcall.com/war-stories.html

I wrote a dozen other war stories that were not in the “in their own words” format. These included an interview with reclusive World War II Medal of Honor recipient Alton W. Knappenberger that is posted on the Arlington National Cemetery website http://arlingtoncemetery.net/awkappenberger.htm, interviews with Pearl Harbor radar men Joseph L. Lockard, Robert D. McKenney and Richard G. Schimmel, and a feature about Werner E. Schmiedel of Lehigh County, leader of the Lane Gang who was executed by the U.S. Army in 1945 for a violent crime spree that included his murder of an Italian civilian.

For the record, here is a list of the people I wrote about and the people whose stories appeared in the “In Their Own Words” series:

Olaf Marthinson (deceased), Willard “Bill” Haas (deceased), John Feninez Jr. (deceased), McRae A. Lilly (deceased), Dick Acker, Robert A. Carl (deceased), Oliver L. Cleaver (deceased), Frank J. Cudzil (deceased), John B. Dorsey (deceased), Lamar J.T. Farrel, Elizabeth Granger (deceased), Robert Holden, Marian Arner Jones (deceased), Earl “Lee” Leaser (deceased), Rothacker C. Smith Jr., Charles A. Yenser (deceased), James W. Murdy, Wilbur “Will” R. Weaver (deceased), John B. Desrosiers Jr. (deceased), John H. Minnich (deceased), Joseph T. Poster (deceased), Robert E. Serafin (deceased), Edward A. Goldschmidt (deceased), Ernest E. “Whitey” Eschbach (deceased), Paul R. Moyer (deceased), Julius Barkis (deceased), Earl R. Metz (deceased), Earl R. Schantzenbach (deceased), Rev. Edward W. McElduff, John C. Umlauf (deceased), Frank E. Speer (deceased), Robert F. Kauffman (deceased), Alton W. Knappenberger (deceased), Andrew V. Cisar (deceased), Ernest P. Leh (deceased), Benson B. Hartney Jr. (deceased), Joseph P. Anfuso, James A. Creech, James J. Ahern (deceased), Rolland J. “Joe” Correll, Harold E. Saylor (deceased), Jared S. “Jerry” Webre (deceased), Aleck H. Jensen (deceased), Joseph B. Moore (deceased), Florence B. Michaels (deceased), Charles J. Toth (deceased), Howard W. “Bench” Hartman (deceased), Evangeline R. Coeyman, Daniel Hasenecz (deceased), Clifford Ryerson (deceased), Jack Davis (deceased), Edward Sakasitz (deceased), Horace F. Rehrig (deceased), Joseph E. Motil, Charles Kowalchuk (deceased), Richard G. Schimmel, Bohdan T. Pacala (deceased), Robert J. Hutchings, William J. Walker (deceased), Raymond J. Christman Jr., Dr. John J. Hoch, Chris R. Showalter, Warren “Jake” Fegely (deceased), Warren G.H. “Pete” Peters (deceased), Donald W. Burdick, Joseph L. Szczepanski (deceased), Daniel L. Curatola, Nathan Kline, Graydon “Woody” Woods (deceased), Alfred R. Taglang (deceased), Louis H. Vargo, Hank Kudzik, Dick Richards (deceased), E. Duncan Cameron (deceased), Donald F. Mack (deceased), Samuel F. Shireman (deceased), Stanley A. Parks (deceased), Burdell S. Hontz, John A. Caponigro (deceased), John “Reds” Urban (deceased), Jerome Y. Neff (deceased), Ralph H. Mann (deceased), Donald E. Miller, Joseph L. Lockard (deceased), Robert D. McKenney (deceased), Bert Winzer, Robert H. Gangewere, William R. Munsch (deceased), Gloria Mitchell, Robert L. Kroner (deceased), Walter Kuchinos, Dick Schermerhorn, Bill Fritz, Clifford A. Hahn (deceased), Raymond F. Davis, Walter A.L. King (deceased), Pauline Haydt Minnich, Carl A. Schroeter, Charles L. Gubish, Carl J. Manone (deceased), Morris D. Metz, William E. D’Huyvetters, Werner E. Schmiedel (executed by U.S. Army), Leonard V. Siegfried, Garrett S. Runey, Charles F. Remington (deceased), Walter Warda, Harold G. “Gordon” Higgins, Harry D. Yoder (deceased), Francis Phillips (deceased), Randolph Rabenold, Robert W. Reichard, Cecelia Ann Sulkowski (deceased), Gene Salay (deceased), Jim W. Snyder Jr. (deceased), Victor L. Doddy (killed in Vietnam), Bernard J. Dugan, Juan Jimenez (deceased), Levi “Chip” Borger Jr., Clifford J. Treese, Eric R. Shimer, Michael B. Hultquist.

Imagine it’s 8 a.m. Dec. 7, 1941, and you’re trying to wake up the hung-over guys in your Army barracks on Oahu because the Japanese are attacking. Your “buddies” respond by blasting you with obscenities and everything they can get their hands on without moving from their cots.

Wait, I need to back up here.

Over the holidays, my aunt Hilda Tarlecky handed me a newspaper that had a story marking the 50th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack. She thought I’d be interested in talking to the man whose picture was at the top of Page 1, a longtime friend of hers named Jerry Winslow.

An attack survivor, Jerry had been interviewed by The Daily Record of Coatesville in southeastern Pennsylvania. The story, under the headline “The Day Still Lives in Infamy: Pearl Harbor Remembered,” ran Dec. 3, 1991. At the time, Jerry lived in neighboring Downingtown, my hometown.

Aunt Hilda, who is my mom’s older sister, and Jerry’s wife, Lorraine, were in the Women’s Club together and loved to sew, their hands turning out fine needlework and quilting. They lived only about a half-mile apart and liked to trade cooking recipes. Lorraine died in 2010.

My aunt was a week shy of 92 when she gave me Jerry’s story during a family party just before Christmas. In my many years of interviewing veterans for The Morning Call in Allentown, I’d done stories on 13 Pearl Harbor survivors, or just 12 percent of all the war stories I’d written.

I was intrigued, so last week I called Jerry, who is 99 years old and now lives in Kennett Square. He sounded pleased to hear from me and was eager to talk. He had grown up in Chicago, attended a Catholic high school and was drafted. The Army sent him to Hawaii, where he was a private with the 41st Coast Artillery at Fort Kamehameha.

The base had coastal gun batteries for the defense of Pearl Harbor. Jerry’s job was to help load 8-inch guns. He wasn’t thrilled to be there.

“I had no use for the Army,” he said. “I didn’t give a darn.”

Early Sunday, Dec. 7, Jerry went to church and then ate pancakes at the mess hall. Only three or four other guys were there. The others were sleeping off a long night of drinking and carousing.

Suddenly, there was noise outside. Jerry and the others with him in the mess hall ran to the door and opened it.

“Down the main drag of the island, these planes were coming down, almost touching the ground. I didn’t know they were Japanese planes, didn’t have the faintest idea. I had watched the Navy go out the day before and thought it was a war game, so I was waving at these Japanese planes. One guy flew close to me, and he turned his head. Did he wave back at me? I’ve often wondered when I look back. I know he turned to look. I think he was bewildered, trying to see what was waving at him.

“Somebody grabbed me and said hey, you stupid so and so, the Japanese are attacking us!”

Jerry ran to the barracks to alert the other soldiers.

“They were all dead drunk, a bunch of bums. I’m yelling at them: ‘We’re being attacked, we’re being attacked!’ And all of a sudden all these things began to be thrown at me, pillows, shoes, I never saw so much stuff going through the air – and the language!

“But then, one of the planes came over and strafed the barracks. I’ll never forget it for as long as I live – det-det-det-det. I looked up and saw these holes in the corrugated tin roof. And these guys who were yelling and screaming at me, everybody looked up and realized within a hundredth of a second that it was true.”

A sergeant smashed the barracks locker that held their Springfield rifles. They went outside and fired at the Zero fighters.

“We were all in our skivvies, running around like mad. The Japanese kept strafing. We fired at them with our Springfields. They were old-fashioned rifles, but they were good, they were accurate. I fired mine so much, the barrel got hot.”

As the battle raged, Jerry saw something that still disturbs him. A few enemy planes were shot down, one near the mess hall, and he watched as Americans pounced on the injured pilot.

“Guys were pulling the pilot out of the plane and doing bad things to him. To pull them out of the planes and take them apart while they were still alive!

“I remember that night we were settling down, getting a little chow. I couldn’t eat because I remembered what they did. [But] I had no love for the Japanese. They were destroying my life; they were destroying my buddies.”

Jerry and others from his base were trucked to the northern part of the island and put up barbed wire on the beaches, anticipating an invasion that never came. Jerry was surprised by that.

“The Japanese could have walked onto that island, took it right over.”

Later, Jerry was sent back to the States to Officer Candidate School and spent the rest of the war as a lieutenant in the Philippines and elsewhere in the Pacific islands. He went home to Chicago, worked in a Sinclair Oil Corp. research lab and got married. He and Lorraine had four daughters and moved to Pennsylvania.

Looking back on the Pearl Harbor attack, Jerry tried to find the words to describe the confusion and terror.

“Your brain doesn’t work right,” he said. “You try to analyze what’s happening, but you can’t pull things apart. You’re upset, I guess. All I could think was: I’m not going home. There’s a war on.”

In 1994, when I learned how my cousin Nicky Venditti was killed in the Vietnam War, I set out to write about him. We had hardly known each other. He was five years older, and we grew up in different towns near Philly.

But we had a big Italian family in common. Our dads were among a dozen children of an immigrant from central Italy. (Two of Grandpop’s sons, including Nicky’s dad, spelled our surname differently, with an “i” on the end instead of an “a.” I’ll tell you the story behind that another time.)

Nicky was a 20-year-old Army helicopter pilot when he went to Vietnam in the summer of 1969. He was dead in 11 days. The truth about what happened to him shocked me. The Americal Division told his parents he was mortally wounded when a grenade accidentally went off during an orientation class at LZ Bayonet, just outside the big Army base at Chu Lai. He died five days later, on July 15, at the 312th Evacuation Hospital on the base.

I’d always thought he was killed by the enemy.

One part of writing about Nicky was to re-create his life and follow his path to Vietnam. I could do that through interviews with friends and family. But finding out exactly what happened in that Army classroom on July 10, 1969, was not so easy. It took me many years, because no record of an investigation exists. The military had mishandled its response to the incident, doing a disservice to Nicky’s family and the families of two other young soldiers who died with him, Billy Vachon and Tim Williams.

Twenty-one years have passed since the reality of Nicky’s fate caught my eye. Soon you will be able to read the story I put together over those two decades. It will be published this spring or summer by McFarland & Co. under the title Tragedy at Chu Lai. Information about it is on McFarland’s online catalog at http://bit.ly/1SLp0Ia, where you can pre-order it, if you like.

This is more than a war story. It’s also a life-affirming reconstruction of family, friendship, loyalty and small-town life in 1960s America, the small town being Malvern, Pa., where Nicky grew up.

World War II holds countless mysteries. Here’s a small one that had a big impact on a former soldier I know:

Last November I got an email from a Susan Senger in Minneapolis. While cleaning out a bookcase, she found a decades-old little book, a Prayer Book for Catholic Servicemen. It had a signature in the back, Robert E. Serafin, and an Army serial number. She didn’t recognize the name, so she did a Web search and got a hit.

Susan found that in May 2002, I had done an interview with a Robert E. Serafin as part of my “War Stories: In Their Own Words” series in The Morning Call. Some 100 of these stories going back to 1999 have a permanent home on the newspaper’s website at http://www.mcall.com/warstories.

A career soldier, Bob had served in both World War II and the Vietnam War. You can read my interview with him here: http://www.mcall.com/news/all-robertserafin-story.html#page=1

Susan wrote that if she’d found the right Robert Serafin, she’d like to send him the prayer book.

Right away I was certain that the Bob I knew was the one she was looking for. The first name, middle initial and last name matched. Bob had been in the Army. He was a Catholic.

But how did a prayer book he’d had in the 1940s turn up in a home in Minneapolis?

I emailed Susan the address and phone number of the assisted living facility in Allentown where Bob was a resident. She contacted the place, which put her in touch in with his son, who lives in Slatington.

The book was Bob’s. He was thrilled.

Susan put it in the mail for him Dec. 1 and included a letter offering information that might help determine why her family had it. She said she’d been cleaning out a bookcase that held books once belonging to her grandmother, Zella Rutledge, and her mother, Helen Rutledge. Helen, who was born in 1923, married Louis Smith in the 1940s, and the couple might have lived in Columbus, Ohio, for a while. They divorced and Helen married Susan’s dad, Robert Senger. He’d been in the Navy during World War II but never left the U.S. She thought he was on the West Coast.

Susan said Bob might have crossed paths with her uncle, Boyd A. Rutledge, known as “Bud” or “Buddy.” He was captured during the Battle of the Bulge and held by the Germans at Stalag IX-B, a notorious prisoner-of-war camp near Bad Orb in Hesse, Germany.

“I have no idea how my family ended up with your prayer book,” Susan wrote.

Bob’s son, also named Bob, wrote back and thanked her on behalf of his grateful dad.

Last week I finally got around to visiting Bob, now 92 and still sharp. When I asked about the prayer book, he grinned and pulled it out of a drawer.

“It knocked me over,” he said about getting it back.

But he has no idea how it got to Minneapolis.

“I don’t know any of these guys,” he said of the names Susan mentioned. “I’ve never heard of this family, and I’ve never been to Minnesota. The closest I’ve been to Minnesota is Chicago.”

Bob came from Plains, just north of Wilkes-Barre. He said a Catholic priest gave him the prayer book in 1943 while he was in training at either Camp McCain in Mississippi or Camp Carson in Colorado. After that, he guarded German POWs in Colorado and Wyoming until the late summer of 1944, when he was reassigned as a hospital orderly. In February 1945 he landed in France as a corporal with a mobile hospital unit, the 84th Field Hospital, which followed the U.S. 1st Army deep into Germany.

Somewhere along the way, the book vanished.

“I don’t remember losing it or anything about it,” Bob said.

He wonders if it might somehow have gotten into Bud Rutledge’s hands at Stalag IX-B.

The book is less than a quarter-inch thick. It includes prayers for peace, for the civil authorities and for Pope Pius XII – the pontiff during World War II — as well as the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary and the Act of Contrition. On the last page, Bob wrote his full name and serial number in ink.

In 1963, he went to Vietnam as a military police investigator, serving at the Criminal Investigation Division office in Saigon. He returned to Southeast Asia in 1966 as a CID agent in Thailand. In 1978 he retired as a chief warrant officer.

Susan’s contact with Bob was not the first time someone connected with him after seeing his story online. In January 2014, a man emailed me that he was doing research on letters his father wrote home while serving in the 84th Field Hospital.

“I’m trying to put all the pieces from the letters together and thought of reaching out to Mr. Serafin for any additional info he might have,” he wrote.

I told him where to find Bob, and Bob told me that the writer visited him.

How Bob’s prayer book changed hands, presumably during World War II, and turned up in Minneapolis might never be known. What’s important is, after 70 years and thanks to Susan Senger, he has it.

The Korea/Vietnam Memorial marked its 10th anniversary Sunday at Lehigh Carbon Community College with teary-eyed speakers, tributes to veterans whose names are etched on new pavers in the Armed Forces Plaza and recognition of a World War II warrior, my friend Bert Winzer.

Bert, 92, of Lower Macungie stood in the national limelight in February when he and other surviving members of the elite American-Canadian commando unit, the 1st Special Service Force, received the Congressional Gold Medal in Washington, D.C. Bert brought the medal with him to LCCC and spoke with warmth and humor about his wartime experience in the Devil’s Brigade.

When he was wounded in 1944, he told the crowd in his favorite line, “It was an international incident. German artillery fired from Italy into France hit me, an American; a Canadian gave me first aid; and a Russian-American Jewish doctor operated on me.”

I had met Bert at one of the annual banquets of Lehigh Valley Chapter 190, Military Order of the Purple Heart, and interviewed him for my Morning Call series, “War Stories: In Their Own Words.” The story ran on Memorial Day 2012. http://articles.mcall.com/2012-05-27/news/mc-memorial-day-war-story-winzer-20120527_1_monte-la-difensa-1st-special-service-force-germans I wrote about Bert again a year later when he received a long-overdue Bronze Star medal. After he got the Congressional Gold Medal, he was invited back to Washington, this time to the French Embassy, to receive the French Legion of Honor. Bad weather kept him from going, though, and instead the medal was mailed to him. He was also honored this month at a meeting of the Lower Macungie Township Board of Commissioners.

His happy appearance at Sunday’s event contrasted with somber remembrances by family and friends of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines no longer living. Songs sung by Erin Kelly, who performed at the first KVM ceremony in 2005, reminded everyone of what sacrifice is about — the national anthem, “I’m Proud To Be an American,” “God Bless America.” Names of vets added to pavers were read – Jack Covington, John Groller, Robert Hargreaves and a dozen others — and their family members came forward. At the end, a three-volley rifle salute by American Legion Post 576 and the playing of taps cemented the mood.

As a non-veteran, I felt out of place in this gathering of a few hundred as I looked around at the attendees, among them Vietnam vets in their biker jackets. All were attentive and deeply respectful, drawn together by camaraderie that I can’t hope to identify with. Bert summed it up as he closed his speech: “I’m the same as all of you. We all have a job to do. We do it. We’re all heroes.”

Late last year, after I’d written stories for The Morning Call marking the 70th anniversary of D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge, my friend Dick Musselman asked me at a meeting of the Lehigh Valley Veterans of the Battle of the Bulge:

“What’s next for a 70th anniversary? Iwo Jima?”

I hadn’t thought much about it, but that was certainly a key battle, especially with the famous flag-raising on Mount Suribachi. The Marines landed on Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945, the flag-raising was the 23rd. If I were going to find a Lehigh Valley veteran of the fighting on the island, I didn’t have much time.

But I didn’t have a lead on any Marine survivors. A few weeks passed and I saw the window of opportunity closing. The interviews take time – at least two meetings of perhaps three hours each, then many hours of transcribing the digital recording, then shaping the narrative and finally a two- or three-hour photo session that includes shooting video of the veteran for online as well as a portrait, and copying the vet’s wartime images for the print product and an online gallery.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, I had a stash of papers in my desk that were stories and story ideas I’d collected over many years. Over Christmas and New Year’s, I pored over every paper to see what gems I might still have and to throw out others I would never use.

One scrap of paper jolted me. I had gotten a phone call from a Charles L. Gubish of Bethlehem, who told me that he had a Purple Heart but hadn’t had the certificate to go with it, and he’d finally received the certificate to prove he had earned the medal. Among other things, such documentation has the vet’s name, unit and the date and place where he was wounded in battle.

Gubish said he’d been a Marine and was hit on Iwo Jima. I had noted that, jotted down his phone number and scrawled the date of our conversation on the paper: 3/11/08. I remembered talking with him and thinking that someday I might interview him, but the information got lost in my pile and pushed back in my memory.

I’d spoken with Charlie Gubish almost seven years ago. Was he still living?

A Nexis public records search showed that he was. But the phone number I had for him was out of service. On the same Nexis page, I found a Gubish with the same first name who also lived in Bethlehem, and called the number listed. This Charles Gubish answered and told me that he was Charlie’s son and that his dad was alive and well at age 95 and living in a retirement community outside Bethlehem. I said I’d like to interview him for a story to mark the Iwo Jima anniversary. The son gave me his dad’s phone number. Immediately I called and Charlie picked up the phone. He hesitated for a moment, “Well, I don’t know … oh, OK.”

I interviewed Charlie on Jan. 23 and 29. Harry Fisher of The Morning Call shot photos and video Feb. 4, with me beside him, and I met again with Charlie on Feb. 18 to go over loose ends. The story ran on Page 1 Sunday, Feb. 22. By then, Charlie had turned 96. You can read his story here: http://www.mcall.com/news/local/mc-iwo-jima-anniversary-gubish-20150221-story.html#page=1

Another World War II tale that came out of the stash in my drawer also made Page 1 of a Sunday paper, this one to mark the deadliest air bombardment in history, the March 9-10, 1945, firebombing of Tokyo.

The story-teller was Carl J. Manone. He had been a B-29 bombardier but was no longer living. He had sent his written account to The Morning Call in September 2011, was hospitalized for kidney failure several days later and then was in rehab. He died March 14, 2012 at age 88, before I could meet with him. But I held onto his very detailed story in the hope that I could get it into the paper someday.

That would be for the 70th anniversary of the Tokyo raid.

First, though, I wanted to get permission from his widow. Again, a Nexis search gave me the address and phone number in Palmer Township where Carl had lived. I called, but Carl’s widow, Dani, didn’t live there anymore. The woman who did live there knew Dani and gave me her email address. She said Dani lived in Florida and was now visiting relatives in Thailand. I sent Dani an email and she responded from Bangkok. She remembered that I had tried to contact her husband after he had mailed in a hard copy of his story. She was pleased that I planned to get it into the paper.

After Dani got back to Florida, she sent me 14 photos of Carl, most of them from wartime – all of which were posted in an online gallery when the story ran March 8. In many emails we exchanged over weeks, Dani patiently and thoroughly answered my questions. Her information filled in the background of the story, which you can read here: http://www.mcall.com/news/local/bethlehem/mc-tokyo-firebombing-anniversary-manone-20150307-story.html#page=1

If I hadn’t gone through a messy drawer, Charlie Gubish’s and Carl Manone’s precious stories might never have seen daylight.

With Veterans Day approaching, the U.S. Census Bureau on Friday came out with one of its Facts for Features news releases profiling American veterans. The statistics are all for 2013.

Here’s a sampling:

Number of veterans in the United States: 19.6 million
Female veterans: 1.6 million
Veterans 65 and older: 9.3 million
Those younger than 35: 1.6 million
World War II veterans: 1.3 million
Korean War veterans: 2.1 million
Vietnam-era veterans: 9 million
Veterans who served during the Gulf War Era (representing service from August 1990 to the present): 5.2 million
Peacetime-only veterans: 4.7 million
States with the most veterans: California, Texas, Florida
Veterans with a service-connected disability: 3.6 million

By the way, I’m not a veteran. The military didn’t interest me when I was a kid. Plus, I got out of high school the year all of our combat troops pulled out of Vietnam, a time when the service wasn’t held in high regard.

I’m not sure I would’ve been able to make the grade as a soldier, sailor or airman — I’m too slow, too nervous and too much of a klutz. Still, sometimes I think the training and discipline would have been good for me, might have helped me grow up faster than I did.

And if I’d been in the military like the millions above, I could have said I served the country. That would count for a lot.

The email from Pastor Bob Stevens landed in my box at work Friday afternoon and got my attention immediately. The service on Sunday would be marking the role Zion’s “Liberty Bell” Church played as a hospital during the Revolution.

It snagged me because I knew little about that. I did know, like just about everyone else in the Lehigh Valley unless they’re a transplant from Mars, that Zion’s Reformed United Church of Christ in downtown Allentown was the place where the Liberty Bell was hidden during the British occupation of Philadelphia. For years, on the Sunday closest to the Fourth of July, I’ve gone to Zion’s service where people in the audience get to stand up and read one of the usurpations cited in the Declaration of Independence – the reasons we wanted to break away from Britain. When it’s my turn to rail against the king, I like to spit my lines out, loud and angry.

But somehow in my three decades in Allentown I’ve missed Zion’s annual Colonial Sunday service. This time I wouldn’t.

Bob was dressed in Colonial garb. Singers led us in popular songs of the era like “Schnitzelbank,” and we all played kazoos, which, we were told, were indeed around at the time. During the service we said prayers and sang hymns from the 1770s, some stanzas in Pennsylvania Dutch. Bob used the biblical text that the Rev. Abraham Blumer used more than two centuries ago.

And during his sermon, Bob drove home Zion’s role when he said that right where we were sitting, sick and wounded Continental Army soldiers had been tended to. Many of them died. Hundreds were cared for at the church from September 1777 to April 1778. Some who were better off were taken into the homes of the congregation, which numbered only 38 members. Others, Bob said, were housed at the old Farr building two blocks west, at Eighth and Hamilton streets. The building even has a plaque attesting to that.

Some of Zion’s members helped the soldiers out of support or sympathy for the American cause, Bob said. Others were following the Christian teaching that they should “love a stranger,” which was what these unfortunate soldiers were to the folks of what was then Northamptontown. The congregation was showing the “hospitality” that comes with “hospital.”

Bob’s talk took me back to that time of sacrifice and uncertainty. I could imagine the soldiers in the church, with volunteers giving them whatever aid they could and doing their best to comfort the dying. I thought, too, about this being downtown Allentown and the economic revival that’s bringing a billion dollars’ worth of development, with the new arena and the office and retail buildings and restaurants sprouting up all around little Zion’s.

Members of this church stepped up when the emerging nation needed them 237 years ago. As this hallowed place shows, no matter how much Allentown advances and its face changes, the city will always be deeply rooted in the American story.