Vickie Venturo ignored the insistent ringing of the telephone. It was late; the number was out-of-state.
“Please don’t hang up,” the voice said. “I have information about your father, James Paul Younger, right? ”
Venturo recalled the conversation.
“July 19, 2014. He gave a Facebook site. My jaw dropped when I saw the picture of a silver military bracelet, engraved with my dad’s name and on the back, ‘Love, Bobbie.’ I knew it was his. We have pictures of Bobbie.”
The caller put Venturo in touch with Uwe Benkel of Heltersberg, Germany, who supervises a volunteer organization that excavates military airplane crashes, especially from World War II.
The privately funded Search Group for the Missing, Arbeitsgruppe Vermisstenforschung, labors under the motto, “Bring the boys back home” and tries to restore personal items to relatives of soldiers from any country.
“It was a very long night, Venturo said. My husband, Gary, and I immediately made plans with our friends, Joe and Dorothy Young. Just this past May, we traveled to Germany.”
The four Americans drove from Frankfurt through the heavily wooded, hilly Saarbrücken district where they met the Benkel family, as well as Tim Flaus and Cornelia Inden, at a biergarten called The Fat Duck.
“There really were fat ducks on the pond and they did serve duck,” Venturo laughed. “I didn’t have any, but the menu offered duck schnitzel.”
During lunch, she talked about her dad, who retired from Tempe High School after 30 years teaching and coaching baseball. He passed away in 2008.
But the Germans wanted to know about the war days.
Venturo explained that her dad had enlisted in February 1943, just after his 19th birthday. He was sent to London, knowing there was a “big secret.”
Although he and his friends celebrated the Normandy invasion that had taken place in the recent past, they had no idea they would soon be landing there.
The German army was retreating from France, pursued by Allied troops. Sgt. Younger and the rest of his infantry division crossed the River Saar and entered German territory, fighting their way through the tangled underbrush and dense forests.
It was somewhere here, near the village of Kleinbittersdorf, that Younger lost his bracelet, perhaps snagging it in the heavy undergrowth. Not long after, a villager found it, keeping it safe for nearly 70 years.
When she read about the group’s success in returning items to soldiers and their families, the finder gave Flaus the bracelet.
After lunch, Benkel summarized his organization’s mission. Outside the restaurant, music played and children laughed.
“They’re enjoying a school holiday,” Benkel explained. Today is our Father’s Day. Appropriate for our ceremony.”
He nodded and Flaus handed Venturo a dark blue jeweler’s box.
“My hands were shaking,” she said.
“And then I opened it—and saw the bracelet. Chills! I felt like my dad was standing over my shoulder. It truly was a gift from the grave.”
For area’s well-known Venturo family, bracelet was a ‘gift from the grave’
