Insight: A family connection worth remembering

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

My aunt, Bernice Rogers, remains one of the most enigmatic individuals in my life and years after her death, I’m still trying to figure her out.

Bernice Rogers, left, visits her sister Harriett Pierce, while 
on a trip to Rochester, New York in 1962.   

At times she could be one of the most sensible and caring people I’ve ever known, and then suddenly turn on a dime and be someone I just couldn’t stand to be around. Her loud laughter could fill up an entire room and make me smile, but five minutes later she’d say or do some of the most hateful things that would make me cringe.

Some of her personality was shaped by traumatic events early in her life. Along with my mother, Bernice experienced abusive foster homes and orphanages in Rochester, New York during the Great Depression when her mother died when she was 14 and her father, who was blind from birth, was placed into the care of the New York School for the Blind. She became pregnant at 16 and was forced to give the baby away because she didn’t have the money to raise it alone. Then she married a man who proposed to her when she was 17 but he abandoned her when she miscarried their child four months later. She filed for divorce and it was granted by the court.

At the age of 18, she enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps, training at Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia. She went on to serve as an office clerk at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri for the duration of World War II, rising to the rank of junior leader, equivalent to an U.S. Army corporal. Upon her discharge, she returned to Rochester after the war and married again, and that ended in divorce less than a year later when her abusive husband threw her down some stairs, breaking her arm. Another brief marriage ended in divorce and their child was raised by the father’s family.

To help her recover from those experiences, Bernice’s brother, Bernard, and my mother, Harriett, paid for her to spend time in Miami, Florida with an elderly relative. There she met a boat captain from Alexandria Bay, New York named Ray Rogers, Jr. and they fell in love and got married. To ensure that this marriage would last, she stopped drinking alcohol and became a devout Christian, frequently attending tent revivals and welcoming door-to-door Jehovah’s Witnesses into her home for lengthy discussions when they rang her doorbell.

By the time I was entering school, Aunt Bernice was my favorite aunt, sending me birthday cards with a $5 bill inside or showing up unexpectedly and taking our family out for dinner at Howard Johnson’s restaurant. One summer when I was in high school, Aunt Bernice and Uncle Ray gave me a summer job pumping gasoline at their marina in the Thousand Islands area.

While I enjoyed that job, it was tough to live for a week with Aunt Bernice. She required total silence in her home every afternoon for hours while she napped. The bar of soap in the soap dish in her bathroom was not to be used as it was ornamental only. If I needed to wash my hands, I had to use the garden hose outside. I was forbidden to read any books or newspapers other than “The Watchtower” magazines she had accumulated. She constantly lectured me about the evils of alcohol.

Back home, Aunt Bernice’s eccentric behavior didn’t go unnoticed by my parents. She promised to send birthday or Christmas presents to my brother and I over the phone, but they never arrived. She frequently asked to borrow money and my mother discovered that Bernice and her husband were deep in debt because of her penchant for running up their credit cards shopping for clothing and home furnishings.

Through the years, my visits with Aunt Bernice became fewer as I grew up and went away to college. When I moved to Florida in 1991, she was living in a mobile home about two miles away from my parents in Melbourne. Uncle Ray had died the year before, and Bernice had trouble walking, falling frequently. I once saw her shopping at the grocery store on my way home from work and she didn’t seem to know who I was. She said she had lost her cane when she placed it on the roof of her car the week before as she put her grocery bags on the back seat and then drove away. That happened a lot, and I replaced her cane for her at least seven times.

In September 2005, Aunt Bernice called me from a rehabilitation facility nearby where she was recovering after breaking her hip in a hard fall. She asked my wife Nancy and I to visit her and we did. She asked Nancy if she could wash a pair of pants for her and we took them home. The next morning the rehab facility called to tell us that Aunt Bernice had passed away overnight at the age of 85.

I never did figure her out, but I loved her for who she was and maybe that’s all I could do. She was big part of my family growing up and I still think about her today.<

Insight: Quest for a Purple Heart

By Ed Pierce

Managing Editor

I recently listened to a story on NPR about an active-duty U.S. Navy corpsman who turned down a Purple Heart medal for being wounded by an enemy mortar shell in Afghanistan because he didn’t think his wounds were “severe enough.” 

While I commend that sailor for standing up for his convictions, it also reminded me of how valuable that Purple Heart medal can be for some and a story of a veteran who desperately sought one and died without ever obtaining it.

George Nichols grew up in Boston and was drafted into the U.S. Army during World War II and trained as a medic. His job was to retrieve wounded soldiers from the battlefield and bring them to the Army aid station for treatment.

While on his 19^th trip onto the beach to rescue wounded servicemen during the American landing at Anzio in Italy in 1944, a German mortar shell exploded nearby, sending shrapnel into his right knee. He completed that mission and Army physicians stitched up his wound, bandaged it and then sent him back to the front lines.

George’s first sergeant told him that he was going to put him in for the Purple Heart medal for being wounded in action. Being just 19 at the time, George said he was more concerned about surviving the war than the medal, so six months later when the war was over, he was discharged without ever receiving the Purple Heart.

He got a job working in the shipyard in Boston, got married, bought a home, and raised two daughters. After retiring, he and his wife moved to Contoocook, New Hampshire to be closer to where their daughters and grandchildren lived. George joined the VFW and some of his veteran buddies asked why if he had been wounded that he didn’t have a Purple Heart.

At age 65, George asked his wife to help him complete the paperwork for the medal and they applied to the VA to receive it. A few months later a letter arrived denying his request. They reapplied and received yet another denial letter and over the course of the next 20 years, the VA denied George’s request a total of 14 times.

His wife died and George’s physical condition required more care than his family could provide, so he eventually moved to the New Hampshire Veterans Home. He had cancer, was on oxygen and was in a wheelchair when he told me his story and asked if I could write about his plight and convince some politician or the VA to do the right thing and award him the medal.

George was by then 89 years old, and he told me all he wanted to do before he died was to receive the Purple Heart that he had fought so hard for.

Of all the military medals, the VA strictly enforces the rules for the Purple Heart more than any other because of the importance it holds and the physical injuries that military members endure in combat to be awarded it.  In George’s case, he was denied for reasons beyond his control.

On July 12, 1973, a devastating fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri destroyed somewhere between 16 and 18 million Official Military Personnel Files documenting the service and medical histories of former military personnel discharged between 1912 and 1964, including those of George Nichols.  

Since the VA requires documentation of medical wounds from each combat injury to award the Purple Heart and without those records lost in the fire, the only way George could receive his medal would be to produce three affidavits of soldiers who physically saw his wounds more than 70 years before in 1944.

He had his discharge papers from the Army, but not his medical records and it was impossible to find soldiers from the battlefield at Anzio who could attest that George had been wounded, even though his knee still bore the shrapnel scars decades later.

When the story appeared in the newspaper, numerous veterans wrote or called the veteran’s home and offered to give George their own Purple Heart medals that they had earned in combat in different wars. He thanked them, but politely turned down their offers, holding steadfast to the belief that VA should give him his own Purple Heart and he would accept nothing less than that.

No matter who tried to intervene on his behalf, the VA could not waive the rules in his case and his quest for the medal was futile. George Nichols passed away in 2015 without receiving the Purple Heart and it broke my heart to know that nothing could be done to help this genuine American hero obtain what he justly deserved.

Therefore, the recent NPR story about the sailor rejecting his medal was rather ironic when compared to that of George Nichols.

We should all be appreciative for the service of both these men and in my opinion, they both deserve the Purple Heart and our respect. <