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The J(id Next Door
By BILL CUNNINGHAM
Mr. Cunningham's tribute to Captain Lisbon appeared originally in The Boston Herald; and has been published in beautiful gift book form by Hale, Cushman and Flint of Boston. It is here reprinted in its entirety — a heart-warming "true story" of families bound by war in new-found ties of sympathy, solace, prayer and faith.
I
THE kid next door was the nearest thing to my personal fighting man in this particular war. I saw him grow up. I was one of his character references when he applied for admission to the Army Air Corps. Because his mother and father are good friends and good neighbors, I was able to follow him closely and proudly as he won his wings, was promoted to First Lieutenant, and eventually emerged as the Pilot of a Flying Fortress, expertly trained and ready to go.
His mother and his dad were over at my house the night he called and said, "This is it. We're flying at dawn." How he got the call through, or whether he should have, I never knew and it makes no difference now. But that meant England and the war over Germ.any.
He was in the thick -of it before his folks knew it, and evidently he didn't want them to know it. His letters were brief, but light hearted. They said nothing about any danger. It's now pretty evident that from two raids he brought back planes shot so completely to pieces that they
had to be scrapped, and on at least one of these, he had dead and wounded aboard.
That one got into the newspapers. The London edition of Stars and Stripes featured it, and evidently figuring he'd better say something about it, he wrote his mother, "1 guess you've read about our ship, but we have a new one now and everything's swell."
II
Evidently it was swell for only so long, for a subsequent letter said he was leading the life of a duke, or some such, in a wonderful rest camp, that the food was great and the countryside beautiful.
He didn't say anything about having been shot up so badly over one of the hottest of those September targets that he had to crash land in the sea, where the crew took to life rafts and was listed as missing for five days before it got back to its base. That's why they were at the rest camp; they were recuperating.
But all at once there was no mail of any sort. The days began to run far past the number usually marked