The Sheehan Family foundation and mark and pat suen. Many thanks to jack and mary romanos, our sponsors for this gloriouss venue, the Trinity United Methodist church. Wed like to extend special thanks to our literary members and individual donors who have made and continue to make Saturdays Free festival events possible. 90 of our venue of our revenue comes from donors just like you. Thank you. We are very excited to have a savannah book festival app for your phonene available this yea. Its very easy to get it from the app store, and there are directions in your programs. Please try to download it. Itll help you today. Before we get started, i have a couple of housekeeping notes. Immediately following this presentation, brian curtis will be signing festivalpurchased copies of his books in Telfair Square right across the way. If you are planning to stay for the next author presentation, pleasese move forward to seats n the front so that we can accurately count how many i spas are available for the next group. Please take this moment to turn off your cell phone and no flash photography isel allowed. For the question and answer portion, please raise your hand. Ill call on you, and the ushers will come and bring a microphone to you. In the interest of time and to be fair to the other attendees, please limit yourself to just one question, and please dont tell a story. [laughter] brian curtis is with us today courtesy of bill sickles and chris akin and bo and chris anders who are here with us. Brian curtis is a New York Times best selling author of several books andf has contributed to sportss illustrated. Curtis has served as a national reporteril for cbs college spors and was nominated for two local emmys for his work as a reporter for fox sports net. Please give him a warm welcome. [applause] thank you, nancy. Good morning. How are we . I love savannah. You have great restaurants. You, every day is beautiful weather like this. [laughing] can i i just see a show of han. How many of you live in the landings . Good lord tickets only part about about how phenomenal it is there but im truly honored to beer be in savannah to talk about one of the most impactful books for me that ive done out of my ,o tell you a quick story about rings. I dont wear a class ring. Went to the university of virginia irks some men wear jewelry, some dont. I was researching this book and heard about rings. Rings that are given to participants who play in the rose bowl. In particular, the 1942 rose bowl that i wrote about, players and young men from duke and oregon state were all given a rose bowl ring, signifying that they had participated in the story again. I didnt think much of it in my research until i had a military researcher work to get me the military files of a lot of these men out of the use archives in st. Louis. And as i reconstructed their lives, and, unfortunately, there deaths as well, there were four men that played in this game who died on the battlefields in world war ii. What was interesting is that three of the four men when they were killed in iwo jima, places in the south pacific, the only possession on the body was the rose bowl ring from 1942. And those rings were mailed home to mom and dad, often arriving months if not years before their bodies actually made it home to america. I was relating a story to a gentleman named bill halverson, and the halverson is live up in oregon and is working on a book project researching him. His father had participated in this game and has served his country. He happened to mention to me with his father had died years earlier, he was buried with his rose bowl ring on his finger from 1942. And again this ring kept coming up in my research as i was crafting this story. I got a call about two or three weeks after meeting with mr. Halverson, and he said ive got to chile a story. Sure. Im all about stories. Everyone has a story. He said he met with you a few weeks ago in the lobby of the Marriott Hotel in Downtown Portland and i was telling you how my father, blessed be his memory, was born, excuse me, was buried with his rose bowl ring on. And i said yeah, you told me that story. He said well, ive got to tell you something. You got me thinking about the 1942 rose bowl and wanted to go online and buy some memorabilia for my kids and my grandkids. My children and i went online and we started googling and went on ebay and it was a rose bowl ring for sale. And it just warmed my heart as hes telling me the story that it meant so much to him that he wanted to buy this ring. Then he said, we look at the ring more closely and it was dads ring. And i said, i dont understand. He said, many years ago thered been a robbery at my parents house and unbeknownst to me one of the items taken was his rose bowl ring. So while i believe this whole time hed he been buried with e ring on him in actuality someone had stolen the rain and that was selling it for thousands of dollars on ebay. He and his family cobbled up enough money. Gone to the authorities and the authorities had either set the statute of limitations are gone, et cetera if the halverson said gather together money and bought his fathers ring back and i was back in the family possession. So this theme of rings kept coming up in my research for this book. What started out as an article for Sports Illustrated in the summer of 2013 ended up being fields of battle. I thought this was a sports book but it didnt turn out that way. Then i thought it was a military and war book but it really didnt turn out that way either. It really is a story of the young group of men and what sacrifice means and what service means, and what happens when you come home from war. So i was struggling to find my next book topic about four or five years ago. Id gone about a year since writing my last book. I was reading a newsletter at the rose bowl put out and it was a little did you know fact section. It said did you know the only rose bowl game never to be played in pasadena was played in the room North Carolina in 1942. As a former Sports Reporter and sports author i was shocked ive never come across that littleknown fact. So i did what historians and researchers have done for centuries and i went to google. [laughing] and i typed in 1942 rose bowl. There wasnt a tremendous amount of Research Done on it but what few articles i read i was fascinated i have this granddaddy of them all game had gotten transplanted from pasadena over to durham, North Carolina, and thats what started to pique my interest in this story. What i didnt know at the time that about the Sports Illustrated story and certainly i didnt know even during all my research is that of the 80 men who coached and participated in the game, only one is still with us today. If id written this book 30 or 40 years ago it probably wouldve been a completely different book i literally had to reconstruct a story of mens lives without the men there. Without much firsthand or secondhand source knowledge. So one of the gratifying things for me in this Early Research process was just trying to find a Family Member pics i would be online sleuthing and reading obituary trying to find the name of the son or daughter, and i would finally tracked him down after two or three months. I would introduce myself on the phone and say, you know, mrs. Parker, my name is brian curtis, im writing this book. Id love to talk to you about your dad and world war ii and the rose bowl. And most of them would get emotional immediately and said brian, we would love to tell you the story but we dont know it. I had never talked about war, and dad never talked about the rose bowl. What we knew he played but we dont know much. As excited as i would get to track down these Family Members it was equally disappointed understand they could not be helpful to me. So i would get on a plane and go to oregon in the small towns of jefferson and albany and hood river and salem in the outskirts of portland, and try to collect as much information that it could from longlost cousins or from local libraries or the archives at oregon state and similar doing the same thing at Duke University where i found personal letters that were written home form the war front that probably have not been touched since youre donated to the archives. So part of this project was piecing together a military files, academic transcripts, what little newspaper stories there were about this game in 4244, and and in coming up wia narrative. One of the blessings for me in doing this project is that i have been able to educate the families about their debt and the grandparent. I can tell them when he went to high school. I can tell them what classes they took in college, a lot of them got ds and fs. [laughing] and i was not shy about passing that information on as well. Just so all the stories about how they worked hard, listen, your dad was as smart as you thought. [laughing] but i was also able for many of them to get hold of the fold military file so we knew when he enlisted in what dates they serve and what ship they shipped out on, and again it was duty for me because even though 80 or 90 information to research, i was able to pass it on to the families and give them a little bit closer to mom and dad. So really this is about building a story about a group of men who played in this now remarkable game, and ended up coincidence in the battlefield. What really hooked me on is that as did research to discover the story of Charles Haynes and frank parker. Charles haynes played for Duke University, grew up a couple blocks from campus, was an allamerican wrestler and a boy scout and everybody in durham new vigor to enroll at duke. He didnt play much on a Football Team but he suited up for coach wallace and played in the game. Shortly after that game, haynes found himself in the army. Yet tried to enlist a couple of times earlier in the air force but his eyesight had prevented him from becoming a pilot. So haynes in supply solar two years from the game in 1944 and deciding in the hills of italy against the germans. It just so happens that about a month before october 1944, a few a few months before, july, he is at an intent meant while they were off the front lines and is talking just been named frank parker. Frank parker happened to play in but same rose bowl game, for the other side, oregon state. So here they are two years later, not really knowing each other, but having a connection of playing in the granddaddy of emda all, so to speak. One of their jobs was to be the first up the hill. Charles haines one day on october 4, 1944, charges up the hill, and as he makes progress, theres no bullets coming this way. Theres no bombs. Heo cant believe it. Heg keeps going further and further. He hits the apex of the hill when the germans open fire. They rip open holes in his legs. He gets shot in the chest x a wound about the size of a softball is in his chest. Bullets are flying. Hisre fellow soldiers cant get him to pick him up off the battlefield. Hess belizeed to bleeding o death, hes thinking about his parents back home in durham, he says goodbye and closes his eyes. It starts to rain, it starts to snow. Then an hour goes by, two hours, five hours, seven hours. Seventeen hours he lay dying in the snow and mud on this hill in italy until someone grabs his a arm. Charles, charles, wake up, wake up. Charles barely opens up his eyes. Hes still alive at this point. And who does he see, but he sees frank parker. And d frank parker, the man who had played against him on that football field two years earlier withtb help from another soldie, picks up charles bloody body, the hill undern gunfire, gets him to a medical tent. Eventually transferred to a hospital in naples, and charles makes a full recovery. Frank parker, after taking him to the medical tent, turned around immediately and went back up the hill and saved other lives over the next 24 hours. Charles haines gets released. Imagine almost dying on that hill, and a few months later hes back on the front lines because we needed bodies as americans in our war. Frank parker and Charles Haines create a friendship. They say goodbye in may of 1945 in the austrian alps. They stay in touch a little bit when they get back in the states but never laid eyes on each other until approximately 1991. It was celebrating the 50th anniversary of that rose bowl game, and the folks at oregon state wanted to recognize their only rose bowl champion. So they hosted a banquet for whoever was still remaining and able to attend. They also invited any of their opponents who had played against them at duke. And there were just a handful of duke players that came. But one of them was Charles Haines. And Charles Haines said i know we at duke are going to host our own reunion in a month, but i cant wait to see the man who saved my life. I need to see if hes still alive. Av and Charles Haines traveled from durham out to corps valleys, oregon. Core valleys, oregon. And as i write about in the introduction of the book, sure enough, he starts weeping as he he looks across the room and sees the man who saved his life. Four weeks later frank parker and his wife travel to durham, and the same kind of reunion takes place. And until their death, the men stayed in touch. Charles haines went through a couple marriages. His last partner, girlfriend, mailed me last year many of his last possessions including some of the gifts that frank parker had given to Charles Haines. And i wrote about these two men in this book because here are two t guys one dirt poor from oregon, one who had lost his father at the age of 11 or 12 in a car accident. His uncle married his mother. He had to work all through high school and college just to make ends meet. And here is Charles Haines in durham, middle upper class family, father was an executive at an American Tobacco company. They bothve that off in war o off in war. They both kill dozens of men. They both get awarded medals for their service in action, but they h come home to america, and their lives couldnt have been more different. Charles haines was a war hero, opened up a restaurant, gregarious, had fun, took cooking classes, was known for walking, around durham in full duke regalia. Opened a construction company, was very successful, had a couple wives as i mentioned. Frank parker moves back to oregon but stayedd in italy an extra year after the war. He couldnt go home to face his lifetime sweetheart and wife with. He thought he had fundamentally changed as a man because of the horrors that he saw and the crimes, in his eyes, that he had committed. So he delayed returning home. He suffered from alcoholism most of his life. He became a fisherman, never went back to complete his college education. Lived his life on the sea, almost died a few times. After his wife passed away from an aneurysm, considered suicide multiple times. Finally one of his eldest daughters got him to a v. A. Hospital in kodiak, alaska, and then in portland, oregon, where for the first time after 50, 60 or years he started to open up and talk about some of the demons of war. Some of the other players from the game came home, suffered from drug abuse and alcoholism, some committed suicide. We talk about the greatest generation, and in my eyes they all are. Finish but we think about ticker tape parades and homecomings, and these men who were really boys sent to islands and places far away struggled with this the the rest of their lives. And part of fields of battle, the book and narrative, what started as this sports book about how the rose bowl went from one city to another ended up being a story about these boys going to war. But my own curiosity kept it from ending at war. Because i said to myself what happened to these guys when they gotot home . Did they become teachers . Did war impact them . Did football remain a piece of their life . Youai know, im a former sports broadcaster, and for those of you that follow sports, you often hear broadcasters use war metaphors when talking about sports. Its t the battle of the centur, they left it all out on the battlefield. These are soldiers. My men need to hit hard. After doing this book, i realize how silly that is. Because war is nothing like football. And what i learned is that these boys, as eager as some of them were to sign up at 19, 20, 21 years old, thought that war was a game. They thought that war would be just like football because their coaches would say, men, go over thereoo and fight hard and be strong and hit hard. All it took was about an hour in battle more these young boys to realize that war has nothing in common with football. Now, as a side note, some of the lessons these boys learned on the football field did certainly help them in war; overcoming adversity, getting knocked down and getting right back on your feet, the tough get going when toughness faces them. And there are countless stories not onlyhn with these players, t other athletes who have fought in war talking about how the lessons they learned on the sports field kept them alive. So its a triumphant story in ways. We won the war, for those of you who dont know. Those of you in savannah, i hate to say it, but the north actually won the civil war as well. [laughter] the parts of the story that were great often overshadowed the sadness of not just the death, the suicides, the alcoholism, but stories like jack yoshohara. He was 2 years old when he came to america from japan with his mom. They settled in portland. He was raised in a Public School in portland living a life in the small Japanese Community in Downtown Portland, going to Public School, was a great athlete. Picked up the game of football, was a great basketball player. Matriculated to oregon state and made the Football Team under coach Louis Vuitton steiner lon steiner. And everybody loved him. The only thing that set jack apart was his japanese last name and where he was born, but for all intelligen