Richard Van Divort, my mother’s only sibling, was an uncle whom I never met. A Navy pilot during the Second World War, he was killed before I was born. The story I grew up hearing was simple: Uncle Dick was a young Navy pilot who was killed during the Second World War—not during battle, but while flying a test plane for the Navy, here in the States. He’d graduated from Dartmouth College. Before his death, he had fought in Europe, flying several missions over Italy. My father always told us that he had loved being a pilot and had eagerly volunteered to fly the test plane that killed him because it was a chance for a man in love to fly to the city where his fiancée lived.
My grandmother never recovered from her son’s death, instead spiraling into a deep depression that deformed her personality. My grandfather was stoical. His approach was to never utter a word about the event. We learned what there was to learn from my father, who, to spare my mother pain, hardly ever talked about my uncle’s death. Yet my grandparents, like many people who lose someone, had put together a reverent scrapbook on my uncle that my sisters and I were permitted to leaf through every once in a while—on special occasions when our hands were especially clean and we were all seated serenely together in a row on the couch.
I vividly remember one shiny black-and-white photograph in particular. My uncle, dressed in his Navy uniform, was a tall man who towered over my grandfather. In the photograph, he’s proudly showing his father some sort of gizmo that had to do with the airplanes he flew. The scrapbook was full of photographs like this—an astonishingly handsome young man, loving the prime of his youth. Wartime scrapbooks frequently offer this same fare—sweet and bitter evidence of young lives suddenly and brutally obliterated. This particular scrapbook was also full of several yellowed clippings of the obituaries announcing my uncle’s death, as well as stories about the Navy investigation that followed the crash that killed him. The investigation concluded without finding any reason for the crash.
When my mother died, the scrapbook went to my eldest sister, who tucked it away into deep storage. For some reason, I ended up with a few of the Navy pins that used to decorate my uncle’s uniform.
This Memorial Day prompted in me a sudden desire to look up my uncle on the Internet. There wasn’t much there. His name appears on a site devoted to college yearbooks—a Dartmouth page that lists him as a member of the class of 1938 and his address as 25 Oak Ridge Avenue, Nutley, N.J. That was my grandparents address, all right—an address that hadn’t flitted across my mind for decades. I then found a web site about men and women from Nutley, N.J., who have died in America’s wars. I read there that of the 2,882 men and women from Nutley who served in World War II, 92 never came home. My uncle was one of these.
Poking about, I discovered the following mention, taken from a letter to the editor of The Nutley Sun, written in June 2003—60 years after my uncle’s death. It apparently came from a list of those from Nutley who were killed in the Second World War in 1943. The list had been put together by someone named Anthony Buccino, who has kept track of these things on a web site called Nutley Sons Honor Roll:
Captain Richard Van Divort, of Oak Ridge Avenue, was killed on a routine flight over Forestell, Mo., in October.
To Anthony Buccino, thank you very much.
