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baseball
Description
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baseball
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baseball
Text
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Professional Development.
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Randee Wittkopf, 46, high school social studies teacher, mom, wife, sister, daughter and lover of the Humanities
Date
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July 2019
Description
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This past summer, my son was offered an opportunity to represent the United States and play baseball in Belgium and Holland. Naturally, I took one for the team and volunteered to chaperone him on the 10-day tour. I had never been to the Continent, only to England and Scotland, and was eager to collect more stamps for my passport. I knew that traveling to these medieval cities and touring the places that I had only taught about would impact me, but I just didn't know how much.
Our first day, we took a day tour to Bastogne and spent time at the Battle of the Bulge Museum and the memorial there dedicated to the paratroopers and Patton's 3rd Army who fought and saved the town. Standing on top of the memorial and scanning the panoramic views of the village around us, I couldn't help but sense the honor and sacrifice so many made to hold that town. I can still smell the air, feel the breeze in my hair, and the pride I felt as I watched my 12-year-old son read the plaques dedicated to those men who fought so bravely to save the world.
It just so happened that the museum, which if you haven't visited I highly recommend, was also hosting an exhibit that contained art painted on sections of the Berlin Wall. It also had cars from East Berlin that were painted and represented the attitudes of the artists and their conceptions of liberty, freedom, confinement, denial and oppression. The pieces took my breath away...the visions these artists expressed on the symbol of the Cold War were hauntingly beautiful yet also loud and defiant. I will never forget them.
Our first baseball game wasn't until day 4 of our trip, and we arrived to my delight to a ball field that looked like it was built right after World War II...which it was. It was right next to the local airport that was still in use and I could visualize the GIs playing ball, teaching the Belgians the art of the game, sowing the seeds of peace and fraternity while healing the wounds of occupation and oppression for so long.
There are so many moments from this trip that moved me, but the one place that I will never forget and will always keep in my heart was the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. I really have no words to express the sorrow, the inhumanity and the anger I felt as I moved through the house. The last room which held her personal diary, her writings, her stories instilled a sense of loss and sadness in me that I still can't express in the right words. It brought back memories of my grandparents' friends, one of whom had numbers tattooed on her arm. I didn't understand then what they meant, and I wish so much that I still had my grandparents here now so that I could understand what their friends went through. So I could continue to tell their story. The Anne Frank House exemplified Humanity. Life. And it showed what happens when we forget that we are all human and we all should see each other as mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, sons and daughters. Humans.
Title
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How Baseball Leads to Profound Moments
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how-baseball-leads-to-profound-moments
Anne Frank
Baseball
Battle of the Bulge
Battlefield Monuments
Berlin Wall, 1969-1989
Cold War
Cross-Cultural Relations
Teachers
World War II (1939-1945)
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Battle of the Bulge
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Transcription
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<p><strong>Andy Mink</strong>: My name is Andy Mink, I’m the vice president for education at the National Humanities Center. I’m with Ina Dixon, who is the program coordinator at History United, which is part of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and located in Danville, Virginia.</p>
<p>I’ve asked Ina to share with us her Humanities Moment. I know the last time you and I talked about this, you said something that stuck with me. I’ve been trying it out in a couple of places. That was the sense of interacting with something that makes you feel less lonely or more connected to others. I’d love to hear your Humanities Moment, maybe to get your thoughts on what a Humanities Moment might be, both as a process, a way of knowing, as well as a moment itself. Then share with us what you brought today.</p>
<p><strong>Ina Dixon</strong>: Great, thanks, Andy. Well, I’d love to share with you a letter that my grandfather wrote to my grandmother. He was in World War II. In 1944, he was in the Battle of the Bulge. We have all of his letters—his name was Richard Smith Dixon—to Madeline Dixon, his wife, my grandmother. She was living in Kentucky at the time. She saved all of his letters and he didn’t save any of hers. She was always very angry about that. We have really one side of the story.</p>
<p>But my cousin transcribed all these letters. There’s very many that I love, but I’d just like to take one as a particular instance of a Humanities Moment and read a little bit of it, then explain why I found my Humanities Moment in this letter.</p>
<p>This is a letter dated on Christmas Day, 1944, somewhere in Belgium. It’s a very long letter actually. He’s complaining about the conditions, how cold it is, how he hates going to meetings. But at the end, he closes, “Remember, I’m thinking about you always and wondering how long it will be before we can be together again. I love you, sweetheart. Sometime we’ll crawl into those good old clean, white sheets and slumber off.”</p>
<p>Early in the letter, he’s talking about how dirty it is and how cold. If you think about the Battle of the Bulge, they’re fighting in the mud and in the cold winter. The idea of him thinking about clean, white sheets, it really humanizes my grandfather, who I didn’t really know. It humanizes a war that I didn’t live through.</p>
<p>But the fact that I can feel that same sense of the kind of relief and security that he must have been wishing for at this time, I think that is really what a Humanities Moment is all about. This letter provides that sort of connection for me.</p>
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Letter from My Grandfather
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Ina Dixon, History United
Description
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Ina Dixon explains how a letter from her grandfather to her grandmother, written just before the Battle of the Bulge in WWII, reconnects her to her grandfather and the hardships he suffered at the time.
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letter-from-my-grandfather
Source
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A family letter written during World War II
Bastogne, Belgium
Battle of the Bulge
Families
Letter Writing
Letters
Marriage
World War II (1939-1945)