Love, Loyalty, and Friendship
Lois La Pointe Kiely
My dad enlisted in the U.S. Army three 8mes before he was accepted. WW II was still raging, and he felt it was his duty to serve his country. He had just become a father and could have been exempt, but he assured my mother that he was helping to “kick the pants off the Nazis.” He promised that he’d return home very soon to become “Daddy” to their infant daughter, but that day never came. In 1944, he died on an Italian battlefield near Rome. That’s when I became classified by the government as a “war orphan.”
I never heard the term “war orphan” until I was 18-years old. A letter from the U.S. government arrived, stating that because my dad had been killed in action, I was eligible for survivor benefits. There were over 180,000 children from WW II who lost their fathers in the conflict, and I was one of them.
I grew up in Jersey City where my mom and dad met and married. As the story goes, she had loved him since she was 10-yars old. She told her best friend. ‘There’s the man I am going to marry, he’s the handsomest man I’ve ever seen. “Eight years later, they met again – now it was his turn to fall in love. They were soon married.
When my dad’s neighborhood pals returned from the war, they were devastated to learn that one of their own did not make it home. They decided to honor him, but they weren’t sure how to do it.
“What would Lou have wanted as his legacy?” they asked themselves. One man suggested, “He’d want his daughter, little Lois, to be able to go to college.” That simple sentence changed my life. I was just a toddler and unaware that a powerful idea was taking shape. One that would
set me on a path to future success. The Louis La Pointe Association was formed.
My dad’s friends petitioned Jersey City to create a park in his honor and it was dedicated when I was seven years old. There was music and a parade of veterans proudly marching down the street. I can still remember the large banner that read, “The Louis La Pointe Association. The The band played “God Bless America,” and my mother cried.
The Association’s goal was to raise $10,000 to send me to college and pay for all expenses. To accomplish this, they held fundraisers. There were card parties, dinner dances, raffles, and boat rides. I went to most of them with my mother, but I never understood why I was the only child there. As I neared my teens, I finally realized why. It was important for them to see me. I was a reminder of what they were doing and why they were doing it.
I graduated from college in 1965 and became a public-school teacher, it was my way of paying back the generosity of my father’s friends. In 1987 I was selected to become the “New Jersey Teacher of the Year.” I traveled up and down the state speaking to various groups–educators, parents, and students. I had the opportunity to share the story of the Louis La Pointe Association with hundreds of people. One group was the Purple Heart Society of Scottsdale. These were the men of the Vietnam War. They knew the toll that war took on their loved ones.
One of them had tears in his eyes when he shook my hand and told me how touched he was with the story of the Association and the love and loyalty of my father’s friends. I thanked him, and said, “I’m pretty impressed too.”
Although I grew up not knowing my father, I consider myself to be very fortunate. Most war orphans did not have a group of men stepping up to the plate and assuming a fatherly role in their lives. When people refer to The Greatest Generation, I know that it is a fitting description of my father’s buddies who believed in love, loyalty, friendship. It took them 20-years of fundraising to send me to college, and it is taking me a lifetime to honor their dream.
Lois La Pointe Kiely is a writer, artist, and lecturer. Her father died in WWII when she was an infant, and his story has been a source of her writing inspiration. When she published “My Father’s Voice” in Chicken Soup for the Soul for Military Families, she went on the author lecture circuit and raised money for veterans’ organization through the sale of the anthology. Lois holds an Honorary Doctorate from Monmouth University for her work in promoting programs for disabled and gifted students. She divides her time between Phoenix, AZ and the Jersey Shore.
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