Vet’s son tries to match WWII photos to subjects

“These photos have some meaning to me. But it just seemed that these photos would be more meaningful to the people who had been photographed and their heirs. ... It makes more sense for these to be in their family albums than sitting on my shelf.”

Clark Wideman

World War II vet’s son

COLUMBUS (AP) — Clark Wideman knew what his father did in World War II. But he hadn’t seen the cardboard box until a few months ago.

Wideman, a lawyer, was going through some old stuff with his sister in her basement, and there it was. His father must have sent some of the contents to his wife while he was overseas and brought the rest of it back with him, Wideman figures.

His father, also Clark Wideman, died in 1975. He was a reporter and an editor at The Columbus Citizen before he was drafted, so the Army put him to work as a sort of correspondent at the Camp Blandford hospital complex in southern England in 1944 and 1945. His job was to write short, positive stories about individual wounded American soldiers, the kind of treatment they were receiving and the people who treated them. Sometimes an Army photographer was with him.

The Army would send those stories and photos back to newspapers in the United States for publication. But most of what Wideman found in that cardboard box were his father’s originals. Hundreds of stories, dozens of photos.

Some featured Ohioans, and many of those included the home addresses of the people in them. Almost all the stories mentioned the names of spouses or parents. And that got the younger Wideman thinking: What happened to these people? Could he find them or their families?

“These photos have some meaning to me,” he said. “But it just seemed that these photos would be more meaningful to the people who had been photographed and their heirs. ... It makes more sense for these to be in their family albums than sitting on my shelf.”

There was a photo of Staff Sgt. Frederick Prueter, 22, of Wapakoneta from April 25, 1945. The caption said he had been hit with shell fragments east of the Rhine River in Germany. His treatment complete, the photo showed Prueter taking a break during a bike ride with another soldier.

There was a photo of a nurse, 1st Lt. Kathleen E. Guthrie, of Bellaire, from Jan. 15, 1945. She was teaching soldiers how to fold bandages. One of them was Staff Sgt. Elmer Neal, 22, of Cincinnati, who had been wounded near Metz, France.

There was a series of photos of 1st Sgt. Lowell Drummond, 30, of Columbus, from early April 1945. They showed a re-enactment of the treatment Drummond received at the 34th General Hospital, from the time he arrived in England with shrapnel wounds to the time he was getting on the bus to go back to the front. The original photos and story were in the box, but so was a copy of the newspaper where they were printed.

So, with some training in an Ohio Historical Society class, Wideman started looking. First up was Prueter, the guy from Wapakoneta on the bike ride.

Directory assistance had six Prueters listed in Wapakoneta. The first two were Prueter’s cousins, but they had lost touch with him.

The third was a cousin, too. His wife was able to get in touch with Prueter’s brother, and she passed along Prueter’s phone number to Wideman.

Prueter is now 86 and lives in Columbus. He was a member of the Army’s 1st Infantry Division — the “Big Red One” — on Feb. 19, 1945, when an 88 mm shell landed near his platoon. It killed the platoon leader. Pieces of it sliced into Prueter’s right hand and left thigh. He was evacuated to Paris, and then to the hospital in England.

Last month, Wideman went to meet him. Prueter returned from the war and became a longtime employee of the Singer Sewing Co. He still works at the Northland Sewing Center on E. Dublin-Granville Road, which he owns with his son. That’s where Wideman handed him the photo and said, “This is what I am hoping is a photo of you.”

Prueter looked at it for a full 30 seconds before saying: “Well, I don’t think it is.”

He took it home to his wife that night, who told him, “How can you not tell that that’s you?”

Prueter had met his wife, Helen, not long after that picture was taken. He was continuing to heal at a hospital in Cambridge, in eastern Ohio, and his wife was in the hospital’s steno pool. He first saw her in the line at the PX. He thought she looked like the actress Hedy Lamarr.

They’ve been married 63 years, so he defers to her judgment. He doesn’t remember any bike ride, but “There are a lot of things I don’t remember from the war, because I don’t want to.”

Wideman left the photo with Prueter and thanked him for his service.

Wideman would like to find homes for the other photos and stories. Some are easier to find than others.

An obituary database showed that Katherine G. Conner — the former 1st Lt. Kathleen Guthrie, the nurse demonstrating bandage-folding to soldiers — died in 2003 in Alabama. She has a son and daughter there.

First Sgt. Lowell Drummond’s wife, Janice, was listed in a story that Wideman’s father wrote. A search by the Dispatch found her living in Chapel Hill, N.C. Her husband ran a diner called the Hamburger Mart in Clarksburg, W.Va., after the war, she said. He died in 1981.

The Drummonds were from Clarksburg, but she lived in Columbus with her sister near the end of the war. That’s why the story said he had a Columbus address and why it was printed in a Columbus newspaper. Mrs. Drummond, 90, already had copies of the photos.

“I thought they were very good,” she said.

But she doesn’t have the story that went with them. She will soon.