Kathy Brant

My father, Gordon Brant, had a dazzling smile and bright blue eyes; he was fun, effervescent, and had movie star good looks---he was also a champion swimmer.  North Dakota winters made training challenging; there were no Olympic-sized indoor pools back then, but eventually he spent time in California.  Some sports pages there hailed him as the fastest swimmer on the West Coast, so he dared hope for a spot on the US Olympic Team.  However, Hitler marched into Poland and the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and Dad's swimming dreams did a U-turn. 

He enlisted in the Army Air Corps; for over three years he marched through jungles in India and China and fought from fox holes on Tinian.  He saw close up the face of a pilot shooting at him, and he saw the Enola Gay take off.  He also saw the face of an American serviceman pounding on the window of a plane on fire, screaming to get out, but the heat and flames prevented my father and the men with him from rescuing this desperate young soldier, a kid really.  It was an image that haunted Dad's elder years. 

After the war competitive swimming was done. I once asked him if he felt cheated out of his shot at the Olympics, and he said, "There is so much more to life than swimming. . ." 

He, of course, got to come home, and come home whole; too many young men did not.  In the last decade of his life, I watched the opening ceremonies of the summer Olympic Games with him.  His voice soft with age, he said, "It really would have been something to be there with all those athletes. . . to watch the torch being lit. . . ."

 This is the largest of my father's many trophies and medals, and it came to me sometime after his death.  He received it for winning a three-mile freestyle race in Winnipeg, Canada, three years in a row.  It represents my father to me, a long life, well-lived; it also represents the importance of maintaining  perspective, something he taught me.