HEADSTONE EDITORIAL

This poem is about my father, Larry L. Stone, who was editor of the Central City, Kentucky, Times-Argus, from 1949 to 1993.

Laconic is a word you taught me
telling me the story of its origins
in Laconia where Spartans
were people of few words
and men of action soldiers
who needed few words to kill.

You wrote your brief epitaph
and summed up a life
as Editor, Soldier, Miner
but a life edited in three words
is written only as an editorial
by an epitaphic editor of headstones.

As a miner your underground stint
before marching off to college
was as concise as your self-definition
but at that time you would not know
about the other two parts of yourself
that would appear in headstone headline.

As soldier during that European war
you bivouacked at the castle with wine keg
so large with dance floor on top
on your way to become soldier-editor
of the Army newspaper
writing terse headlines of battles.

Returned from war you were verbose
as stressed soldier and toasting editor
spewing linotype words of molten metal
not to be proofed until later
when a short life was editorialized
in three-word headstone headline.

As miner of words editorializing soldiers
as soldier battling word demons
but in the end as epitaphic editor
you had the last line
writing your own headline
of stone

WAR BABIES/WAR DANCES

My grandfather and I were both war babies. He, Robert Lee Durham, born just after the War Between the States, in 1867, was named after General Robert E. Lee. I, Lee Durham Stone, born 80 years later, in 1947, just after the Second World War, was named after that same grandfather who died two weeks before my birth. He, if alive today, would be in his 141th year.

His father, my great-grandfather, jumped off a Union prisoner-of-war boat traveling down (up?) the Ohio River and--as it has been passed down to us--kept the flame dancing in his pipe while he swam ashore. But, I'm certain, it was no dance to travel home undercover to Kentucky during war time.

My father "fought" in WW II and spent some time in a German castle during the war emptying the gigantic wine keg that was so large the top formed a dance floor on the castle floor above. Immediately after the war, as assistant editor of the German edition of the Stars and Stripes, the U.S. Army newspaper, he visited Hitler's personal compound, Berghof, near Berchtesgaden, when Allied occupation troops were looting the complex which lay in ruins after the Royal Air Force bombed it on 25 April 1945. I remember as a boy the piece of marble paving stone he took from the complex. Perhaps Eva and Adolph watched village children perform Bavarian folk dances on it?