A former Oak Lawn Community High School student saw a stack of documents left out for the trash and thought the papers might deserve a better fate. They ended up being dozens of letters from World War II combatants that had been sent home to family members.
And they’re now helping bring 20th Century history to life for current OLCHS students after the daughter of one of the vets found out about the correspondence and retrieved the letters.
“I think she realized she found something important,” said Patrick DiFilippo, an OLCHS social science teacher at the school, about the student who found the letters. “It’s good she recognized that.”
The former student found the letters in a basket next to a dumpster not far from the school. She brought them to Kristin Kuchyt, who chairs the Social Studies department.
The letters are from Leonard Anderson and Al Binsfield, who corresponded with family members back home about their experiences and daily life during wartime. Family sent the veterans updates on their own lives back home.
Kuchyt made multiple attempts to find any relatives, calling local VFWs. She and Phillip McGee, an OLCHS history teacher, eventually brought the letters to Oak Lawn Public Library, where they were scanned into an archive. The library returned the letters to Kuchyt, who held on to them until this summer.
“Any time we can bring artifacts into the classroom, it makes it more relevant,” she said, adding she kept the letters in a cabinet until they were used in a class. “They’re interested in the letters themselves.
They bring home the lesson that history is everywhere, she said.
McGee said some students who had relatives who are veterans took the lesson home and talked to their families about the letters.
“It kind of expanded the whole family connection,” he said. “It’s also from the neighborhood where the kids are now. It brings history almost alive, so the kids can understand this happened in Oak Lawn, it’s not just something they read in books.”
It turned out that connection was nearby, when Marge Harrington, daughter of letter writer Andersen and niece of Binsfield, did a google search and saw the letters at the library.
“Before my eyes was a library listing that referenced a letter sent by my uncle to his mother. In the bit of online information supplied, it noted my uncle’s plane was shot down during World War II, and that he survived,” Harrington said in a release from the school. “I knew this about my uncle but was surprised to see this online.
“After my conversation with Kristin, I was excited that I was going to get the letters back and be able to read them and share them with family.”
Harrington called the letters a “priceless treasure.”
Despite the decades that have passed, many Oak Lawn students have ancestors who participated in World War II, and the rest have at least heard about it.
“It’s one of the things they learn about,” said DiFilippo. “There are so many references in popular culture, in movies. When there’s events like the war in Ukraine, people worry, will that event turn into something bigger, like World War II.”
The staff have their own connections to that war, which made the find special to them.
McGee said his great uncle was a police photographer during the war and one of the first Americans in Hiroshima to witness the devastation wrought by the atomic bomb. DiFilippo’s grandfather was stationed in the Philippines.
“My grandmother would share a lot of stories about his service,” said DiFilippo.
Kuchyt’s grandfather was in the U.S. Navy during the war.
But their minds were more on the relevance to students.
“We all love history, so I think any time a kid does something outside the classroom (like find the letters), that makes us feel better,” said Kuchyt.
Janice Neumann is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.