“Someone’s trash is a military family’s treasure: Ours”. Herb Weiss story spreads around US.

by Nancy Thomas, publisher

In the first week of June, our writer on aging issues, Herb Weiss, documented a personal search to retrieve a military chest belonging to his father, when a couple in Detroit found it cast away on a sidewalk for anyone to claim. The couple went out of their way to try and track down the Weiss family. The rest can be read in Herb’s article for RINewsToday, which follows.

But the story doesn’t end there. He decided to see if other media outlets might be interested, and yes, they were! Join us in congratulating Herb on telling the story that touched our hearts – and now touched hearts of over a million others who have read the story of the military chest finding its home.

Versions of the story, and some original work that have added unknown info to the quest of the military trunk to find its home, are slightly different. Herb’s story appeared in RINewsToday, and then in several local papers. The Providence Journal, a Gannet publication also did a story, in both their digital and print editions, and then other Gannet papers picked it up around the US. We’ve seen it in the Cincinnati paper and the Indy Star – and occasionally Herb hears from others who has read it locally.

Perhaps the biggest connection, though, was made with Stars & Stripes – the US military’s independent news source with a circulation of over 1 milllion, combined versions.

___

Herb’s original story:

Someone’s trash is a military family’s treasure: Ours – Herb Weiss

Everyone is aware that the internet can have its negative impact on cybersurfers.  Just log in and you’ll see a widespread distribution of fake news, cyber-bullying, on-line threats, cyber-theft, revenge and child porn.  Its use can even lead to internet addiction.

But the internet can also be a valuable tool for sharing information, researching issues, even locating long-lost friends and family members.  As I recently found out, the net was used to return my father’s olive green foot locker – issued during World War II – to me.

This foot locker was found on a street curb in Detroit, Michigan, ultimately to find its way back to this writer residing in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.  Seven hundred miles separate these two cities.  And it’s been over 80 years since my father packed his personal items, extra uniforms, and toiletries into it. 

Introductions…

At 11:30 p.m. on April 24, 2024,  I received a Facebook chat message from a person I have never met. “Mr. Weiss, I found an old army trunk in Detroit with the name, Lt. Frank M. Weiss, stenciled on the front side of the olive green trunk,” stated Michael, a Detroit resident, excitedly sharing a photo of the foot locker resting in the back of his pickup truck.    

Michael would later tell me that he was driving around his neighborhood “looking for scrap” that he would sell, and watched a person drag the old military footlocker to the curb. The former owner’s name was “Lt. Frank M. Weiss,” and it was prominently painted on its front. This caught Michael’s attention.  He later told me that he learned that this trunk had been stored in a garage in his neighborhood – for almost 60 years.

This foot locker might be a great piece of décor for somebody’s apartment, he remembers thinking before stopping to pick it up off the curb.  It would be easy to sell, too, he thought.

Michael went home and showed it to his girlfriend, Cetaura, suggesting that it might sell quickly at a local flea market to bring extra cash into their household. “It would be a great decorative piece for someone to buy,” he said, thinking someone might turn it into a coffee table.

“Out of curiosity my girlfriend searched the internet,” Michael told me, “seeking more details about the life of Lt. Frank M. Weiss.”  Was he an American hero, they wondered?

Cetaura quickly found an article that I had previously written about World War II vets dying (“In coming years, generations of older veterans will be leaving us”).  The article was dedicated to Second Lt. Frank M. Weiss, my father.  So, the net search gave Cetaura and Michael a lead.  There might be a family connection between them they speculated, contacting me through Facebook to confirm.

And amazingly, yes, there was.

Confirming Proof of Ownership

I told Michael that my parents lived in Detroit, Michigan, during World War II.  They were married in that city in 1942.  With my grandfather, Samuel Weller, being a prominent defense attorney, almost every Detroit judge attended their wedding. 

My father was drafted into the military service and would serve in military bases around the country (including the 1033^rd Technical School Squadron, Kearus, Utah, the 357^thTechnical School Squadron at Jefferson Barracks, St. Louis, Missouri, 3705^th AAF Base Unit, Lowry Field, Denver, Colorado, and the Army Air Forces Technical Training Command, Miami Beach, Florida).  He entered the U.S. Army Air Force at the rank of private and left the military as a Second Lt.

Michael said he would give me the footlocker and I paid to have it shipped to my residence in Rhode Island.  While I waited for this footlocker to arrive, I  was attempting to verify that it really had belonged to my father.  Of course, I wanted to be 100 percent sure that it was his.

The Detroit Public Library confirmed that after the war my parents moved from Detroit to Saginaw in 1946, and then relocated to Grand Rapids in the 1950s.  They would ultimately move to Dallas, Texas in 1951. But it seems that his military footlocker remained in Detroit, never reaching his new home in North Dallas.  

I wondered, could the foot locker have belonged to another “Lt. Frank M. Weiss?”   A research librarian confirmed that they could identify only one Frank M. Weiss in Detroit in the 1940s.  The others with Frank Weiss’s identified had different middle initials.  But could I consider this as total proof?

After the footlocker arrived, I closely examined  a faded mailing label on its top.  By enlarging the label with Photoshop, my graphic designer was able to identify my father’s Detroit mailing address, 16841 Wildemere Avenue,  (which matched the address in his military records) on the label.  Now I was convinced that this trunk was owned by my father.   

Because of the kindness of Michael and Cetaura, I was able to thank them for their tireless efforts to locate the family of Second Lt. Frank M. Weiss. My father’s military footlocker has finally come home.  It was empty but today it contains the folded American Flag we received at his funeral, his scrapbook of faded pictures of his comrades and assigned bases from his long-ago days in the military and memorabilia, all safely in his footlocker.  Now it is truly a treasure chest.

Special thanks to the librarians at the DPL’s special collections for their assistance in verifying the ownership of the military footlocker.

___

The story as it appeared in the Detroit Free Press which tells more about the man who found the trunk:

A WWII footlocker appears after 80 years — but mystery remains

by Neal Rubin – Detroit Free Press – July 5, 2024

2^nd Lt. Frank Weiss’s World War II footlocker arrived safe and sound at his son Herb’s home in Pawtucket, Rhode Island

The FedEx guy was on Michael Shannon’s porch in northwest Detroit, and he had an issue. “We’re not supposed to take things without a box,” he said.

Shannon pointed to the item at his feet − 31 inches wide by 16 inches deep by 13 inches tall, olive green in color, one of millions of sturdy objects of its kind to survive far worse than a few hours on a modern jet.

“It is the box,” he said.

Specifically, it’s a U.S. Army Air Forces footlocker, made of wood and reinforced with metal at its edges. Eighty years ago, as World War II raged overseas, it held the few possessions of 2nd Lt. Frank M. Weiss of Detroit.

Rediscovered by Shannon at a curb on trash day in late April, it has been safely relocated to a basement in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where Weiss’ son has packed it with wartime memorabilia and the flag from his father’s funeral.

It’s a receptacle, though, for more than that.

A story, to start with, the tale of how it spent at least six decades in a stranger’s garage and only found its way home after someone finally decided to throw it away.

A reminder, in an angry world, that simple kindness can still be a motivator for people to go above and beyond the call of duty when the only likely reward is inconvenience.

A dividend, in Shannon’s case, for endless curiosity and an appreciation of the past.

The path of the fiberboard chest touches on white flight, the 1967 riot and even the Purple Gang, if you go back far enough.

There’s a mystery to it − how did the footlocker find its way to the garage where it sat protected for so long? − and to Shannon, there’s an element of spirituality. A lot of stars had to align before Weiss’ son could take possession of an artifact he didn’t even know existed, and playing a role in destiny seemed far more worthy than making a few dollars that would only disappear.

As for how it made the trek from Shannon’s house on Appoline Street to Herb Weiss’ home in Pawtucket, that just took a yank and a drive.

He hefted it into the bed of his 2016 Dodge Ram 1500 and drove it to a FedEx store in Southfield. Weiss had prepaid the $160 fee, and a shipping clerk agreed that yes, indeed, it was a box.

Fate and fortune

Shannon’s late parents bought the Appoline house in 1968. White flight from Detroit had begun in the 1950s, but the 1967 riot accelerated the process, and a transitioning Jewish neighborhood became both attainable and affordable.

The area remained sedate enough that Shannon, 55, knew weatherman Sonny Eliot’s mom, who stayed put across the street, and it’s comfortable enough that he can still find small treasures in other people’s castoffs. Alongside the black pickup in his garage, he has a couple of lawnmowers, a small generator and a snow blower, each needing only a spark plug or a few tweaks to be up and running.

“He’s a curious person,” said 98-year-old neighbor Elva Gamble, enjoying a bit of sunshine on her porch. “He’s always digging up something.”

While Shannon says he’s not a scrapper or a dedicated salvager, he hates seeing useable objects put to waste – as witness the rescued lawnmowers, small generator and other objects awaiting repair in this garage. Neil Rubin, Detroit Free press.

“People throw away anything,” Shannon said, and not that he’s scavenging, but sometimes he can’t help but notice.

Retired from the city wastewater plant, he does small repair jobs for friends of friends − windows, decks, what have you. He can’t recall what he was returning from when he turned onto a street that’s not usually part of his route home, but that’s when he saw a man pushing a wheelbarrow with the empty footlocker in it.

If he’d made his regular turn, Shannon said, he’d have missed it. A few seconds earlier, the same. A few seconds later, he might not have glanced in that direction.

He pulled over, and immediately took note of the name painted in white on the front of the locker: “LT. FRANK M. WEISS.”

The letters were brushed, not stenciled. “Bomber art,” the history devotee called it, like the illustration on the nose cone of a B-17. That was enough for him to snap a cell phone picture and dial retired Detroit schoolteacher Cetaura Bell.

She’s his next-door neighbor, his girlfriend, and the daughter of a devoted flea market entrepreneur.

“I was like, ‘Get it! Do not dare put that in the trash,’ ” Bell said.

By the time he made it to her house − one long block, two short ones − she had found both Weisses online.

Deep roots in Detroit

Frank M. Weiss was born in Philadelphia in 1914 and moved to Detroit with his family the next year.

He was named Morris F. Weiss then, and still named Morris in the 1920 census records that Detroit Public Library archivist Laura Kennedy turned up as she helped Herb Weiss reassure himself that the footlocker was in fact an heirloom.

Researched by Laura Kennedy, of the Detroit Public Library helped establish that an address label on 2^nd Lt. Frank M. Weiss footlocker matched one where his family lived in Detroit, making authentication of the boxes ownership certain. Provided by Herb Weiss.

By the time he met Sally Weller, he was Frank, and he took her to the London Chop House on their first date in August 1941. Given the prices of the entrees, he said later, he was pleased that she finished her lamb chops rather than just take a few dainty bites.

Her father was Samuel Weller, a well known defense attorney whose clientele purportedly included members of the Purple Gang. When Weiss asked permission to propose to his daughter, just six weeks after the lamb chops, Weller had only one question: “Were you ever in jail?”

The Weisses began their 62-year marriage in January 1942 at the Book Cadillac Hotel, as classic a Detroit location as the Chop House. Weiss was working for Winkelman’s, the department store chain, and climbing briskly up the corporate ladder.

Then the U.S. Army suggested a career change.

Where duty called

More than 16 million Americans served in the military in World War II. Not all of them came ashore at Omaha Beach or flew dangerous spy missions in the Pacific.

Frank Weiss spent his war stateside, going where he was assigned and doing what he was told. Kearns, Utah, at an air base with no runways. St. Louis, Missouri. Denver. Miami Beach. At one point the Army Air Forces, which had yet to split into a separate service, had him studying meteorology. Later, it was statistics.

He rarely spoke of those years, Herb said, but he had some scrapbooks full of photos and some assorted paperwork and letters of recommendation issued by superiors as he made the climb from private to commissioned officer.

Herb kept them in his basement in a red Nieman Marcus box. Then a message popped up on Facebook about a trunk.

Herb, 70, serves as deputy director of a senior center in Pawtucket and writes freelance articles for several local newspapers about issues tied to aging. He dedicated one of the pieces to his father, and that’s what Bell found on the internet.

After that, connecting the dots was easy. Tracking the steps of the footlocker has been more problematic.

A tire, but no tracks

The man with the wheelbarrow was a friend of the elderly homeowner who had volunteered to clear out her garage. It appears, Shannon said, that the footlocker came with the house when she bought it in 1965, almost 60 years ago.

Frank Weiss had returned home to his wife and oldest child after the war. In the early 1950s, at the behest of Winkelman’s, the family moved to Saginaw. Ultimately he took an executive job at a women’s clothing chain in Dallas, where Herb was raised.

Herb wonders if his widowed grandmother − the wife of attorney Weller − held a garage sale before she joined her daughter’s family in Texas. Maybe she hauled the footlocker to the curb, generations before someone else did the same thing.

Herb Weiss, a senior center administrator and freelance writer from Pawtucket, Rhode Island, remains mystified as to how his father’s World War II footlocker wound up at a curb in northwest Detroit – but also grateful to now own it.  Provided by Herb Weiss

One thing he knows for certain is that Shannon and Bell, to use an aquatic metaphor for an Air Forces footlocker, swam against the tide.

“They didn’t have to do this,” he said. They could have kept the trunk as a coffee table, or sold it at a swap meet; less pristine specimens are priced at more than $400 online.

In this crazy world where people don’t give a rip about each other,” he said, “and certainly don’t care about strangers, look at all the trouble they went to.”

In insufficient thanks, he said, he sent Shannon a gift certificate to a favorite restaurant.

The footlocker, meantime, sits in his basement, safe and dry, atop some plastic tubs of other collectibles and next to three chairs salvaged from a historic Pawtucket theater demolished in 1997.

That was six years before Frank Weiss died in Dallas at 89, his old footlocker surely forgotten − but not, as it turned out, gone.

___

Then! Stars & Stripes:

Act of kindness unites Army footlocker from WWII with soldier’s family after nearly 60 years By Corey Dickstein Stars and Stripes • July 15, 2024

Herb Weiss did not know the box existed. But late one April evening, when the 70-year-old Rhode Islander could not sleep, he saw a Facebook message from a stranger. The man, Michael Shannon, had happened upon an old Army trunk that had been discarded on a curb in Detroit for bulk trash collection.

It was in good shape and bore the name, in all capital letters, Lt. Frank M. Weiss — the name of Herb Weiss’ late father and the rank that he wore when he left the Army at the end of World War II.

The olive-drab box measured 31 inches wide by 16 inches deep and 13 inches tall, featured a brown, metal frame and buckles and a leather handle. It had sat — apparently untouched — in a northwest Detroit garage for nearly six decades, Shannon had learned. Weiss wondered: Could this really be his father’s old Army Air Forces footlocker?

“It’s mind-boggling,” Weiss recounted. “My father’s from Detroit. His home was Detroit while he was in the military. Maybe, amazingly, this is his locker.”

Shannon’s girlfriend, Cetaura Bell, used an internet search to connect Herb Weiss to the name on the footlocker that Shannon had grabbed after watching a person wheelbarrow it to the curb on bulk trash collection day. Shannon offered Weiss the box and asked for nothing in exchange. He was just glad the box could end up with the family of its rightful owner instead of in a landfill or another stranger’s home.

“It’s a sentimental thing,” said Shannon, a 55-year-old retiree of Detroit’s wastewater facility. “I have no idea what it is worth. Maybe I could have sold it. More importantly, if there’s a living family member out there, you know, [Lt. Weiss] I think would have wanted this back with his family.”

2nd Lt. Frank Weiss

Frank Weiss rarely spoke of his three years and four months in the Army Air Corps, Herb Weiss said. And Herb and his three siblings — Michelle, Nancy and his twin Jim — never pushed him to share more about his time in the service.

In some ways, Herb Weiss said, the footlocker makes him wish they had before his death in 2003 at the age of 89. “I think most people view their parents as parents and not people,” said Weiss, who is the deputy director of a senior center in Pawtucket, R.I., and writes a weekly newspaper column on aging issues for Rhode Island’s Pawtucket Times and Woonsocket Call newspapers and RI News Today, a daily digital news site focused on the state.

“My father was always my father to me, and not so much a person. I wish I knew him better on a personal level. I wish I knew about his Army days.” Old military and family documents saved for years — and now safely stored in the footlocker alongside some of Frank Weiss’ other military memorabilia — tell some of the tale of his military career.

Weiss was 27 years old when he was drafted into the Army in May 1942, just three months after marrying the former Sally Weller in their hometown of Detroit. Sally Weiss was the daughter of a prominent criminal defense attorney in the Michigan city, and she had taken a seat on the local draft board after the U.S. entered the war in the wake of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

Some citizens, Herb Weiss recalled his mother sharing, had called for Frank Weiss to be drafted, given his renowned father-in-law and his wife’s position on the board. When his number came up, Sally Weiss delivered his notice herself. “What a shock I received” at getting the draft notice from his wife, Frank Weiss recalled in a 1992 family newsletter marking the pair’s 50th anniversary. He was quickly shipped off to the Army Air Forces as a private.

Weiss rose from a private to a technical sergeant in 13 months and was sent off to Miami Beach Officer Candidate School in early 1944, his service records show. While more than 12 million American troops shipped off to faraway lands to fight in the European, Pacific and North African theatres during World War II, Frank Weiss was among the roughly 27% of U.S. service members during the war who remained stateside, according to figures from the National World War II Museum in New Orleans.

Weiss would spend the war moving from one base to another working as a clerk and then a chief clerk before training to become an administrative officer in Florida. He served at Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis with the 357th Technical School Squadron and at the 1033rd Technical Squadron at Kearns Army Air Base in Utah. The Army Air Forces sent him to Fresno, Calif., then Harvard University in Massachusetts to study statistics and later the brand-new Meteorology Training Detachment No. 11 at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where as a staff sergeant he helped build the unit’s headquarters in 1943 as its senior enlisted soldier, according to records provided by Herb Weiss. At nearly every stop, his commanding officers wrote recommendations that Frank Weiss attend OCS.

Weiss was “a soldier in every sense of the meaning of the word,” one of his commanding officers wrote in 1942. He “performed his duties with particular excellence and attention to detail,” the commander of the Meteorology Training Detachment No. 11, Maj. Martin W. Krause, wrote in an evaluation the next year.

“I have found him to be loyal, competent and efficient. He is commended to the attention of anyone concerned as a superior soldier and of excellent character.”

In March 1944, as tens of thousands of American troops prepared for the D-Day invasion of Europe earmarked for June, Weiss accepted a commission as a second lieutenant, and shipped off days later to Denver, Colo., to work at the Air Corps’ Western Technical Training Command at Lowry Field, where the service was rapidly training as many weapons, aircraft, communications and aerial photography specialists as it could, according to military records.

In August 1945, after Germany’s defeat and as the Japanese neared surrender, Lt. Weiss was given a choice to remain an Army Air Corps officer or accept an honorable discharge. “I chose to return to Detroit,” Frank Weiss wrote in the 1992 newsletter. He retired his uniform and returned to his job as a merchandise manager at Winkelman’s department store.

Perhaps, Herb Weiss pondered, his father loaded up that Army footlocker and shipped it home to Detroit before he left Denver for military out-processing at Fort Sheridan, Ill., just north of Chicago. In fact, a faded shipping label on the box bears the address of the Wildemere Avenue home in Detroit where Sally Weiss’ parents lived for nearly 30 years. The label convinced Herb Weiss; the box most certainly belonged to his father.

A mystery

What remains unclear is how Frank Weiss’ footlocker ended up at the home where Shannon saved it from the curb and likely the landfill.

Herb Weiss enlisted the help of a Detroit public librarian and combed city records to see whether he could establish some connection between the family and the Sorrento Street house where the trunk ended up. Shannon asked questions of the homeowners and neighbors, but no one seemed to have any answers about how the trunk ended up in the home some 3.4 miles from the home of Frank Weiss’ in-laws.

“It’s just a mystery,” Shannon said. “I went over there a couple times, and I can’t find out. Apparently, [the homeowner] is elderly, and the trunk’s always been there. They don’t know how. I’m just so curious: How did that trunk get over there?”

He and Herb Weiss said they would continue their efforts to solve that mystery.

Frank Weiss left Detroit for Saginaw, Mich., in the early 1950s after a transfer with Winkelman’s. Ultimately, he ended up in Dallas, where Herb and Jim Weiss were born. Herb Weiss wonders whether his father left the footlocker behind with his in-laws when he moved. Perhaps, he said, his late grandmother sold the box to the owners of the Sorrento Street house when she left Detroit to join her family in Dallas in the 1960s.

He may never find the answer, he acknowledged. But he is eternally grateful for the act of kindness from Shannon and Bell that reunited his father’s footlocker with the Weiss family.

“They did not have to do this,” Herb Weiss said. “He could have sold it, probably made a couple hundred dollars.”

Similar trunks sell online for $200 to $400. Weiss sent the couple a gift certificate to their favorite restaurant as restitution.

For Shannon and Bell, hearing the happiness in Herb Weiss’ voice when they chat with him about the box is payment enough.

Bell found a column that Herb Weiss had penned in November on aging World War II veterans, which he had dedicated to his father, 2nd Lt. Frank M. Weiss. She found no other solid matches for the name on the box.

“You had a very clear name on it, and it just stood out, so I Googled it,” Bell said. “You know, we just wanted the right person to have it, or at least we hoped maybe we could figure out who it had belonged to.”

Once they found Herb Weiss’ columns, she said, “All the pieces of the puzzle really aligned nicely.”

“Luckily, he’s a writer and had done that story, and we were able to find it,” Shannon said.

For Weiss, receiving his father’s World War II footlocker from a stranger who just happened to be in the right place at the right time to grab it, and then tracked him down was like “winning a million-dollar lottery.”

“It’s just something that doesn’t happen often. Absolutely amazing,” Weiss said. “And it was just like amazing on a metaphysical, spiritual level. I said, ‘Man, my father must want to send me a message.’ I’ve got to try to figure out what is the message he wants me to get.”

Read more at: https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2024-07-15/wwii-missing-army-footlocker-soldier-14493413.html

___

Never doubt the power of a story to impact lives – each in its own way and own perspective – and as our world shrinks via the internet and our ability to reach out all over the world in seconds – powerful stories touch lives – we’re grateful of our small part in publishing Herb’ story about his father’s military trunk – first – and we are grateful to have Herb part of our team.

Look for Herb Weiss’ articles on Monday as he reports on aging issues.

Read all of his stories – here: https://rinewstoday.com/herb-weiss/