Harding Magazine

Alumnus Will Everett interviews World War I veterans as he strives to
keep history alive.

By April M. Fatula, photos by Jeff Montgomery

World War I veteran Frank Buckles, 106, says he plans to celebrate his 125th birthday. He just might, since his secret to longevity - as revealed to independent radio producer Will Everett ('90) - is a strong desire to live.

Buckles shared this advice and more when Everett interviewed him for a documentary titled "WWI Living History Project."

Buckles, one of the few remaining U.S. veterans of "The War to End All Wars," saw no action in the European conflict but completed assignments in England and France after talking his way into enlistment at age 16.

"I wanted to get to France in a hurry, so I joined the ambulance service," Buckles says.

"You were sure aware that that war was a serious thing."

Everett fears Americans have lost that awareness. "It is an end not too many people seem to know is approaching," he says of the day when there will be no remaining veterans. "There is not much to remember them by. America's memory of World War I has been overshadowed by World War II."

When Everett began the documentary, 17 veterans were living. Of the 17, only three are alive today, substantiating the sense of urgency he felt toward the project.

"When I found out that no one was doing it, I had to," he says. "Somebody had to. Nothing speaks louder than the testimony of an eyewitness. And we're losing those eyewitnesses."

So the Port Isabel, Texas, resident set out to preserve their voices in a two-hour National Public Radio special. Narrated by Walter Cronkite, the two-disc CD features many veterans in their own words, as if taken from diary entries. It also includes period music and speeches.

Identifying living veterans was not as easy as calling Veterans Affairs and requesting names and numbers. For one thing, 80 percent of World War I veterans' records were lost when the St. Louis building that housed them burned in the 1970s. When Everett initially contacted the VA four years ago, he was told, "That information is private."

"That kind of deterred me for a couple of years," he admits. "At the time there were 150, so that made it hard to know which ones to choose."

In October 2005, he was in Hollywood doing a story on Chuck Wild, a music composer originally from Kansas City, Mo., where a local World War I monument stands. (No national monument exists.) "His father had been on the board of Liberty Memorial, so he had a personal connection to it. He sort of pushed me along and said, 'You really need to look into this. I bet you could get funding.'"

With renewed inspiration, Everett contacted the VA again and talked to someone more helpful. But he still had his work cut out for him.

"The records were a mess," Everett says. "They had only a fragmentary list of people who they thought might be veterans. They didn't know if they were alive or not. They're so overwhelmed, I guess, with World War II, Vietnam. ... They just didn't have the resources to deal with it."

So he took the VA's list and searched via Google and news archives, finding several unregistered names.

"I needed some VA support, and I think I helped them by cleaning up their records," he says.

That was phase one.

Everett then had to become somewhat of an authority on World War I in order to write an accurate script - especially since he was asking the Walter Cronkite to narrate.

"I just crammed on the subject," he says. "For months and months, I read and read and read. I got every movie, every documentary. Documentaries were really helpful. They gave me an idea of how other people condensed the war."

The first segment of disc one outlines events leading up to the United States' involvement in the war.

"That's 28 minutes telling the story of the war," Everett explains. "It wasn't just Cronkite reading a history book. It was a narrative combined with these different voices."

In addition to his research on the war, Everett studied centenarians, reading a book called If I Live to Be 100.

"It really helped me to grasp the difficulties and nuances of interviewing old people. I was reading that on the road, going to my first interview. By the end of the first trip, I'd done more research on World War I, and I felt a lot more comfortable talking to these people."

He started interviews in April 2006 and finished that August. Some of the veterans he located died before he had the chance to visit. "I'm amazed that I got as much as I did," he says. "Some of these guys, you'd never guess are 112, 114. ... What a unique honor to go around interviewing people that age."

The reaction from most veterans, though, was surprise that they would be singled out for such an honor.

When Everett interviewed 107-year-old Homer Anderson, for example, he began by asking if he knew how many veterans were left. "About 150" was Anderson's guess. "No, only 18," Everett told him. "It's a pretty elite group."

"Reassuring people was something I learned to do right away," he says. "To let them know that it's OK to talk about this and this and this and this. Then that just opens up all these stories. I'm more interested in these people as human beings as opposed to old soldiers with tales from the trenches. Most of them saw World War I as a footnote to their lives. They were teenagers. There were other wars; they got married. ... So many other things happened to them."

Including death. Anderson proved to be a case in point of here today, gone tomorrow. Everett interviewed him July 13, 2006; he died two months later on Sept. 23.

Anderson's death saddened him, but he puts it in perspective. "Here he is, 112. I meet him one day, and then a few months later he's gone; that makes sense," he says. "You don't want them to go, but you know they will."

Everett took pains not to impose his 21st-century views on the project, but some listeners might struggle not to compare current events in the Middle East. Listening to the documentary, knowing that this was to be "The War to End All Wars," one cannot help but look forward to a day like the one 110-year-old Anthony Pierro described upon hearing that the war was over: "It was just like a new day. Just like the sun had come out of the clouds."

For more information on Will Everett's "WWI Living History Project," visit www.treehouseproductions.org.