Cool Sports Car For Girls images today

A few nice sports car for girls images I found:

Redwood Lodge Country Club


Image by brizzle born and bred
We look back to the time when Redwood Lodge was the Ashton Court Country Club

I wonder how many club members who go swimming there, or use its extensive modern gym facilities, know that Redwood Lodge Hotel and Country Club on Beggar Bush Lane was originally built as a lodge for Sir Greville Smyth's ornithological collection.

The wealthy Smyth family, who had lived at Ashton Court mansion for some 400 years, were forced to sell their extensive estates just after World War II, and John Ley, the then owner of the popular Glen dance hall on the Downs, jumped at the chance to start a country club in the lodge.

This and many more interesting stories about the early days have come to light during a £15 million refurbishment programme by present owners Folio Hotels.

They tell us exactly what John Ley got for his money and the changes he made to make the club one of the most successful in the country.

See Link Below

www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/4259907307/

Built in 1898, the "Bungalow", as it was known, was quite stylish in an Arts and Crafts sort of way, with carved stone fireplaces and wooden panelling.

Luckily, it's still very much intact and still an integral part of the club's facilities.

Next door in 1950 was a plainer wooden building, built in the Twenties by Lady Smyth's daughter as a children's wing.

In the countryside but just outside the city, the location on Failand couldn't have been better, and some 20 years later the club, still run by the same family, could claim to be the largest of its kind in the country.

The cost of membership, at present £120 a month for a family, was just over £10 a year.

But visitors were also welcome to play a game of tennis for between two shillings and sixpence (12p) or use all the facilities on a Saturday for 10 shillings (50p).

Fifty years on the attractions on offer seem very old-fashioned.

In fine weather, you could go for a leisurely stroll around the rose walk or the deer pond, later to become an outdoor swimming pool.

On the front lawn, for the more active, there was a choice of putting or tennis.

Inside, apart from the lounge bar and dining room, could be found a sun lounge, a ballroom, a card room (later converted to a dining room due to lack of use) and a television room.

Scantily-clad students from Bristol Old Vic Theatre School found temporary work here as cigarette and flower girls and cloakroom attendants.

Ten years on again and there was parking for some 200 cars.

There was also a new entrance porch, a new ballroom bar and a new bandstand, plus a dining and cloakroom extension.

Outside could be found a new greenhouse, teak garden furniture for sun lovers and a cedar wood tennis pavilion for more active members.

There was also something of a novelty – a "tuck shop" extension for snacks and the like.

By 1970 – something of a heyday in the club's membership – there was parking for 700 cars.

As well as relaxing and being entertained, members wanted more activity, and the club, moving with the times, offered a choice of two open- air pools, one heated indoor pool and 10 tennis courts, three of them floodlit.

There were also 10 squash courts, four badminton courts and an indoor bowling green, opened by Clevedon's bowls champion David Bryant.

A big treat was saunas in the changing rooms.

If this wasn't enough, there was table tennis and a four-table billiard room. For quieter times there was a 10-table bridge room.

The Ranch House with its classic Sixties wood-slated ceiling (it's still there but painted white) offered both early evening cinema and later a disco.

The ballroom, which hosted cabaret, was also available for dinner dances and private functions.

Local singer Anita Harris, Terry Hall's Lenny the Lion, comedian Derek Roy and Welsh singer Ivor Emmanuel were just some of the stars gracing the cabaret stage throughout the Sixties and Seventies.

Conferences and other corporate events were also catered for.

Lunches and the occasional cabaret were available in the sophisticated Garden Room along with self-service buffet plus entertainment.

In the evening you could enjoy an international cordon bleu menu which included such delicacies as caviar (45 shillings – £2.25) and turtle soup (five shillings and sixpence – just over 25p).

A cup of coffee here wasn't cheap – it would set you back two to three shillings (10p to 15p).

The Sports Room was open from noon to midnight with liquor licensing for the club being until 2am, something unheard of by the city's pubs which were kept to strict licensing arrangements, even for Christmas and New Year.

The room had been designed by none other than that much esteemed local architect Raymond Stride.

For those wanting a quieter, less active life, there was a relaxing lounge with a colour TV – a rare treat in the early Seventies.

Dave Young, a 59-year-old maintenance worker from Bedminster, joined the country club – then owned by local entrepreneur John Pontin of the JT Group – in 1977 as part of a team of six.

Their brief included looking after the 16 acres of woods and gardens – something now done by a contractor.

"I originally came as a temporary worker recycling the bottles, but stayed on," he told me.

"I'm now the longest serving member of staff."

Had he seen many changes?

"There was very much a family atmosphere among the workers in the Seventies. Now with changes of ownership, its more corporate.

"I remember the big snooker tournaments we used to have here, along with the big names in the sport such as Alex 'Hurricane' Higgins."

The snooker hall, which could hold 200 and really put the club on the map, is now a restaurant.

"We've also had big stars staying here," said Dave.

"I remember Bruce Forsyth arriving in his Rolls-Royce – he used to play golf over the road – and comedian Jim Davidson when he was with HTV's Alison Holloway. Tommy Banner from The Wurzels is also a member.

"I get some perks – I've got club membership and I can stay at cheap rates at other hotels owned by the same group.

"With people's changing lifestyles there are more members here in the evening than there used to be and more families."

Roy Rahamn, now 72, is another club old-timer.

"I originally came here in 1976 as head waiter," he explained. "Then I left, but I came back and now work part-time as a casual in the catering section doing breakfasts."

The current club manager, Gordon Riddell, arrived here from Dublin a year ago after 20 years in the hotel business.

He's now overseeing the refurbishments which will see the number of bedrooms increased to 175.

In the past, the country club has belonged to both Whitbread and Corus.

Have you any memories of Redwood Lodge when it was the Ashton Court Country Club?

1005 E Street, NW (demolished)


Image by rockcreek
Crown Bar and Grill, 1005 E Street, NW (Henry J. Blauvelt, 1906, demolished 1996 w/facade preserved) ca. 1988.

The crew gutting this building solved a 30 year old mystery in 1996:

Washington Post – January 5, 1997

DISCOVERY MAY END A 30-YEAR MYSTERY – BONES BELIEVED TO BE THOSE OF VANISHED SOLDIER

Ruben Castaneda, Washington Post Staff Writer

American cities were exploding in race riots. Lyndon B. Johnson was president, and the Vietnam War was escalating. The District’s budget was so healthy that it was growing annually by millions of dollars. The date was Aug. 1, 1967. At Fort Myer, in Arlington, Pfc. Allen Lee Adams failed to report for duty. The Army declared Adams, 20, absent without leave, and he was never heard from again.

Nearly 30 years later, the question of Adams’s whereabouts apparently was answered the week before Christmas. A work crew demolishing a vacant downtown building at 1005 E St . NW found a human leg bone and pelvis in a pair of jeans. Inside the pants pockets, police found dog tags and other Army identification belonging to Adams.

Homicide detectives and Adams’s parents are all but certain that the young private was slain and that his body was placed in the now-demolished building. DNA testing will tell for sure whether the body is Adams’s, authorities say.

One mystery solved, another opened: How did Adams die? If he was killed, who did it, and why?

The discovery brought a measure of closure to Adams’s parents, Elizabeth and Darrel, who live in Hickory, N.C., but it also brought another layer of grief, piled on nearly 30 years of longing and heartache.

"It’s been absolutely one nightmare that’s never-ending," Elizabeth Adams said. "You go to bed each night and you think, Maybe I’m just dreaming.’ And you wake up the next morning, and it’s the same thing." For all those years, Elizabeth and Darrel Adams clung to the dwindling hope that Allen Lee, one of four children and their oldest son, would reenter their lives. To no avail, they tried to get the Army to look for their son, or, later to get the TV show "Unsolved Mysteries" to do a segment on him.

The building where the bones were found had been vacant since the late 1980s. Demolition workers were tearing it down to make way for an office building when they discovered the bones just after noon Dec. 18. At the time Adams disappeared, the building had the Crown Bar and Grill on the first floor and the Apex Billiard Parlor on the second. The third floor was vacant, and there was an attic above that, said homicide Lt. James Boteler, who is leading the investigation.

It is likely the body was on the third floor or in the attic until the demolition brought it down amid rubble, Boteler said. Police investigators summoned forensic anthropologists from the Smithsonian Institution to comb the rubble for more remains. The anthropologists were unable to find other evidence, and some of the rubble had been hauled off by the time they got to it. Although the cause of death has not been determined — and may never be, forensically, given the dearth of physical evidence — police are required to investigate all unexplained deaths.

Adams was last seen by family members in late July 1967, when he visited his parents in West Palm Beach, Fla., and other relatives in Indiana. Boteler theorized that Adams may have gone to the billiard parlor to shoot pool and gotten into a dispute there. Elizabeth and Darrel Adams said their son enjoyed playing pool.

People who owned and ran businesses in the neighborhood during the 1960s said that the Crown Bar and Grill was a popular lunch spot for federal workers and that patrons of the nearby National Theater went there for evening meals. "It was a neighborhood place. It wasn’t a rough crowd," said Richard Danker, who owned a restaurant near the site where the remains were found. "It was like Cheers.’ Everybody knew everybody."

It is that kind of neighborhood coziness that police hope will help them discover what happened to Adams. "We’d like to talk to anyone who owned, worked in or frequented the two businesses that were in the building" when Adams disappeared, Boteler said. Detectives also are awaiting Army records that may help them find people who were soldiers in Adams’s engineering company.

Meanwhile, the Adams family is doing its best to cope. At Christmas, Allen Lee Adams’s siblings — Beverly Adams Peterson, 56, David Adams, 48, and Pamela Adams Rockwell, 36 — gathered at their parents’ home. They remembered their brother, how he doted on Pamela, then held each other and cried. He would have been 49.

At the time Adams was reported AWOL, the Vietnam War was wrenching the country apart, and many soldiers were deserting. A month after declaring Adams AWOL, the Army discharged him dishonorably. Through the decades, Elizabeth and Darrel Adams never wavered in their belief that their son was not a deserter. After all, he had reenlisted a couple of months before.

"I asked him once, What if you have to go to Vietnam?’ " Darrel Adams said. "He said, That’s part of the deal: If I have to go, I’ll go.’ He said he’d do his duty." Soon, they should find out whether the body in the building is their son’s.

On Monday, a nurse will draw a blood sample from Elizabeth Adams. The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology will conduct DNA tests, comparing the genetic material in the bones with that in Elizabeth Adams’s blood. Results are expected within the month.

Elizabeth Adams has shifted from hoping her son returns to hoping the story of his death is revealed. She said she will petition the Army to clear his name if there is evidence he did not desert. "I hope and pray that somebody will remember something and help the police," she said. "I haven’t known for 30 years, and I might never know."

Washington Post – May 22, 1999

BURIED IN THE PAST – After 30 Years, Elizabeth Adams Finally Knows Her Son’s Fate. But His Life Remains A Mystery.

Frank Ahrens, Washington Post Staff Writer

It was Elizabeth Adams’s 64th birthday, and Christmas was coming. On the cool afternoon of Dec. 18, 1996, she hung holiday decorations inside her red brick home in Hickory, N.C., and waited for her older daughter to swing by. They were going shopping, to buy Mom a birthday present.

Just as her daughter came in the front door, the phone rang. Adams picked up. Birthday wishes from a friend, she figured. No. It was the police calling, from Washington, D.C.

Mrs. Adams, they said. We found your son Allen’s billfold and dog tags here, in the pockets of some bluejeans. We found them in the rubble of a building that’s being torn down. And we found some bones. We’re 99 percent sure they’re your son’s . . .

The policeman’s words stopped making sense to Adams. She handed the phone to her daughter. Sat down. Began to cry. All she could think was: Thirty years. My son has been missing 30 years. Now they’ve found him. And they’re telling me he’s dead.

"I liked to went crazy," says Adams, now 66 and retired to South Florida with her husband, Darrel, 71. "I mostly remember crying for an awful long time. People asked me, ‘Why are you crying so much? At least now you know.’ I told them, ‘Now I don’t have any hope. As long as I didn’t find him, I had hope.’"

On Aug. 1, 1967, Pfc. Allen Lee Adams, 20, went missing from Fort Myer in Arlington. A month later, the Army gave him a less-than-honorable discharge. For three decades, his mother had written hundreds of letters–including ones to each president–trying to find her son, the oldest of four children. Now, a bulldozer had given her the terrible answer.

Even after Allen Adams’s remains were found–and received a military burial with honors–his mother kept up the fusillade of letters, now to police and prosecutors. One caught the attention of local prosecutors. A homicide detective is on the case. A grand jury has convened. Suspects have been identified. The case will be profiled on national TV tonight.

In the course of the investigation, Elizabeth Adams has learned some disturbing facts about her son. Things she didn’t know–or didn’t want to know. Maybe soon, she can find out the truth about her son. Wherever it may have been hidden.

The Scene of the Crime?

Detective Clarence Muse, a D.C. homicide investigator, is discussing what kind of man Allen Adams was. Typical 20-year-old, he says. Liked cars, interested in girls. Is there anything else?

"Just he had a bad temper when he got to drinking. He got into a couple of scraps [in the Army]. He happened to be drinking when got into problems a couple of times," Muse says.

In 1967, the nation was in turmoil over the Vietnam War. But Adams, a supply specialist, demonstrated no internal conflict about the war. He had left high school early to join the Army and had recently reenlisted. He’d already had a 16-month tour in Korea and told his father–a Navy man in World War II–that if he were ordered to Vietnam, he would go. Adams didn’t seem like the deserting type.

On July 31, 1967, Adams left Fort Myer for downtown Washington. He ended up, police think, at the Apex Billiard Parlor at 1005 E St. NW, one floor above the popular Crown Bar and Grill. The building’s third floor was empty.

That area of downtown had been a destination for soldiers and sailors since World War II. A Marine barracks was a few blocks away. There were restaurants, shops and peep shows. The Apex had its share of scuffles, police say, but it wasn’t a rough joint. The Crown Bar and Grill catered mostly to a lunch crowd. There was a rotisserie in the front window.

Muse believes the soldier was playing pool and got into a fight that turned fatal. The killer, or killers, dragged him out of the pool hall and up the stairs to the vacant third floor, where they shoved his body into the ceiling or a wall. The Army declared Adams AWOL when he didn’t return to the base that night. On Aug. 30, it "dropped him from the rolls . . . as a deserter," reads a letter to his mother.

In December 1996, a demolition crew was razing 1005 E St., which had been vacant since the late ’80s. The work halted when someone spotted a grayed, flaking femur, wrapped in shredded jeans in the shovel of a bulldozer. Nearby was a pelvis. The other bones may have been lost among the chunks of concrete and plaster.

The pants were full of documentation–Adams’s wallet, dog tags, a watch, money, papers–a promising guide for investigators, says Ken Kohl, the assistant U.S. attorney assigned to the case. "There are clues from the paperwork of the people he came in contact with and the things he was doing on the day he disappeared."

‘The Smell of Rats’

But the contents of Allen Adams’s pockets didn’t answer a lot of questions. The cause of death, for instance, is tough to determine, given the lack of physical evidence. Equally perplexing is why no one noticed the body upstairs. After all, it was summer in Washington–what about the stench from a decomposing corpse?

"I don’t have an explanation for that," says Muse, a 30-year police veteran, "knowing what I know about dead bodies." There were never any rumors about a body upstairs, report tenants of the time. But one did tell Kohl: Sometimes the building had "the smell of rats."

There’s another key question: What about witnesses? That’s where Kohl pins his hopes of ending this mystery. "Over the years, people make admissions," he says. "Friendships that may have kept witnesses silent no longer exist."

The grand jury has started to hear evidence. Kohl’s office has subpoenaed Army records, and Muse has a list of about 35 people who knew or worked with Adams whom he hopes to interview. He has a couple of suspects. Both Kohl and Muse are confident it was a homicide.

"People don’t die of natural causes and hide themselves in the walls of a building," Kohl says.

Not the Son She Knew Perhaps more disturbing to Elizabeth Adams than the unanswered questions are the unanticipated answers. It revealed to the grieving mother that there was much about her son she did not know. She didn’t know about his drinking. She didn’t know about the fights. And she didn’t know about the consequences of the two.

In a photograph of Allen Adams that his mother has, he is kneeling beside a row of tents in a khaki uniform. He is trim and confident-looking. On his left sleeve are two chevrons, designating the rank of corporal. But the Allen Adams that died in 1967 was a private first class.

"I think he had hit an officer or some such thing," says his mother. "I asked Detective Muse about it and that’s what he told me he had found out. It wasn’t too serious; they always take your stripes." So. Cpl. Adams was busted down to Pfc. Adams. For striking an officer. And his mother only found out three decades after his death.

"The kids are not going to come to me and say, ‘I’m in trouble,’ " Elizabeth Adams says. "But we didn’t ever have any serious problems with the kids." But this seems unlike her son, Elizabeth Adams says. When he was a boy growing up in West Palm Beach, Fla., where the family lived at the time, Allen was into fishing, not fighting. Sure, he and his brother, David, tussled a bit, but no different from any other brothers. As a young man, he was good to his two younger sisters. He got good grades and never was sent to the principal’s office.

"I was very, very, very strict with the kids," says Elizabeth Adams. "They knew that if they got in trouble in school, they’d be in more trouble when they got home."

One Burden Too Many

Every morning after Adams rises, she reads her Bible for consolation. It’s not hard to see why. As the oldest of 12 children growing up in the hills of Kentucky, she "learned to cook as soon as she could see over the cookstove," says her younger daughter, Pamela Rockwell, who lives in Indiana. Adams had her first child when she was 14. As a wife in Florida, she helped her husband build their new house.

"I was hanging drywall when I was 13," laughs Rockwell. "She taught us how to do this. I could hang drywall and paint and lay carpet. I thought all mothers knew how to do this." But her oldest son’s disappearance was one burden too many.

"The possibility that Allen was dead–that was never acceptable conversation in our house," says Beverly Peterson, Elizabeth Adams’s older daughter. "It caused her such pain that she really could not speak about it. "You could see a gaping hole there. Just a pain," Peterson continues. Rockwell describes another scene of her mother failing to cope.

"She would get a long-distance call and it would be staticky and she couldn’t tell who it was, but she knew it was him," Rockwell says. "She made it up in her mind that he was alive and either had amnesia or was somewhere where he couldn’t get home." Maybe Allen had a parachuting accident that resulted in a broken leg; maybe he’d hit his head, too, the mother rationalized.

Kohl would like to solve this case, mostly for the sake of the mother. "We owe it to Mrs. Adams," Kohl says. "The Army said their son was a deserter and they experienced the shame of that, of being treated as the family of a deserter."

He began working on the case a couple of months ago, thanks in part to the efforts of WTOP radio reporter Paul Wagner. Wagner covered the discovery of Allen’s remains, befriended Elizabeth Adams and, when she asked him for advice, suggested she write to the U.S. attorney’s office. Why not, she figured. She’d written to everyone else.

The case landed on Kohl’s desk. He contacted Wagner and told him: We need some national publicity because the homicide is 30 years old and the people who knew Adams are probably spread out all over the country.

So Wagner called "America’s Most Wanted," the Fox TV show that seeks to hunt down criminals by telling the stories of their crimes, sometimes with re-creations. The show is popular with law enforcement officials, who see it as a way to cast a nationwide dragnet. The show bit on the Adams mystery. The episode is scheduled for 9 tonight.

In an April 1967 letter to his mother–three months before his disappearance–Adams writes of the beauty of Washington’s cherry blossoms, a couple of civilian girls he was interested in and so on. Then, toward the end of the letter, he says:

"I haven’t been in to [sic] much trouble lately. I decided to try and make something here because I’ve only got 18 months left in the Army before I’ll be trying to make a living as a civilian and I’ve been in enough trouble to make it difficult without getting into any more. I should have stopped to think a few years ago I know but it’s not to [sic] late I hope."

What did this mean? "We’ve been through that many times and I wonder what it means," Elizabeth Adams says, starting to cry again. "I thought it just meant he was ready to settle down and start getting serious. It never dawned on me that it might mean anything." She stops to cry some more. "I wish now I had asked him."

Photographer unidentified – Historic American Buildings Survey. 1988 color shot of this block.

New York Times – February 5, 1997

Long Missing and Misjudged, A Soldier is Buried

For 30 years Pfc. Allen L. Adams was branded a deserter, thought by the Army to be yet another soldier who had fled to avoid being sent to Vietnam. But six weeks ago, when workers in Washington, D.C., found human bones in the rubble of a building they were demolishing, that easy assumption was undone: the remains were those of Private Adams, and the authorities now believe that he disappeared in the summer of 1967 not because he had deserted, but because he had been killed.

This weekend, Private Adams was buried here with full military honors beneath a leafless willow in a section of a country cemetery known as the Garden of Peace. His parents, Darrel and Elizabeth Adams, who retired to Hickory five years ago, wept softly as seven soldiers raised M-16′s in a salute and a bugler played taps.

”It was a 30-year nightmare that just never ended,” said Mrs. Adams, 64. ”I always had kind of a hope in my heart, but I knew something terrible had happened to him. He was a good kid, and I miss him.”

Though the uncertainty is over, friends and family say many questions remain: Why was the body not discovered in all this time? Why did the Army not fully investigate Private Adams’s disappearance? Why did the Army assume that he had deserted, especially since he had just re-enlisted?

The police in Washington, meanwhile, face their own puzzles as they investigate a homicide three decades old. The task is particularly daunting because records have been lost and investigators recovered only Private Adams’s pelvic bone and one femur, encased in a pair of blue jeans. His dog tags and a wallet containing money were found in a pocket.

Private Adams was stationed at Fort Myer, in the Washington suburb of Arlington, Va., when he disappeared on July 31, 1967. His remains were found on Dec. 18 in the rubble of a long-abandoned pool hall that was being torn down to make way for a new sports arena. Investigators believe that he died shortly after disappearing from the base.

Positive identification was made in January by comparing DNA from the remains with blood taken from Mrs. Adams.

The case is like a trip back in time, to a decade dominated by an unpopular war.

Allen Lee Adams was the eldest of four children. He enlisted in 1965, nine months after dropping out of high school in Palm Beach, Fla.

He served at Fort Knox, Ky., and in Korea before being assigned to Fort Myer, where he was learning to work in a field that was just emerging: data processing. Three months before he disappeared, he wrote a letter to his family and told them about the amazing new computers he was working on.

”He enjoyed life, and he enjoyed challenge,” said his sister Beverly Peterson, who was 9 when he disappeared.

His family assumes that Private Adams had been in the building where his remains were found to enjoy one of his pastimes, playing pool. The building, vacant since the 1980′s, housed a pool hall and restaurant in 1967.

Investigators surmise that Private Adams’s body was hidden in the attic. They are looking for leads in property tax records and have interviewed the property’s owner at the time, but a fire has destroyed Army personnel records that would have helped them find soldiers who served with Mr. Adams.

The Adamses learned in August 1967 that their son, then 20 years old, was missing. Over the years, Army officials, still trying to track down a man they thought had deserted, visited the Adamses’ West Palm Beach home to see if their son had shown up. Once, a soldier waited in line at the dress shop where Mrs. Adams worked. When his turn at the cash register came, he said: ”Where’s Allen? I know you know where he is.”

The Adamses never believed that their son had shirked his duty, yet they wished that he would surprise them by coming home unannounced, just as he had done many times before when he had leave. The Army discharged him in 1983.

”What we did at the time was based on the best information available and the guidelines and rules we have,” said Lieut. Col. Anda Strauss, of the Army Personnel Command in Northern Virginia. At that time, the country was absorbed in a passionate debate over the United States’ increasing involvement in Vietnam. Many soldiers went absent without leave to avoid assignment there.

But Private Adams had not received orders to go overseas, and his father said his son had told him that he would go if he had to.

”He was a jolly sort who was connected to his family,” Mrs. Peterson said. ”He even called my mother from Korea on Mother’s Day. He didn’t miss sending cards. He came home every Thanksgiving and Christmas. They thought he must be dead.”

Nevertheless, Mrs. Adams spent 30 years searching for her son’s face in crowds and scouring letters received at her church from missionaries overseas for her son’s handwriting. When she heard once that someone had picked up a confused soldier, she wondered: Could it be Allen?

When word came that Private Adams was in fact dead, Mrs. Adams cried for hours.

”There was no hope left,” she said in an interview after the burial, crying again.

Sgt. 1st Class Andra Powell, who was part of the 14-member military honor guard here for Private Adams’s funeral, said of the 30-year military mystery, ”I wish it hadn’t started like it did.”

Sergeant Powell’s unit from Fort Bragg was here to make sure that the chapter ended with dignity. The family will get the back pay owed to Private Adams — the amount is not yet known — and ,000 from a life insurance policy, all with interest.

Sergeant Powell, 33, handed the American flag to Mr. and Mrs. Adams, who shuddered with silent sobs. He told them that it was presented on behalf of a grateful nation.

As the family turned to leave the grave, David Adams, born two years after Allen Adams and now gray-haired and retired from a job as a firefighter, stopped and tucked a piece of paper inside his brother’s steel-gray coffin.

It was a letter he had scratched out in the solitude of his pickup truck in the days before the funeral. He wrote about the times he had shared with his brother, the times he had tagged along. He, too, served in the Army, he told his brother. Now he wished he had tagged along one last time, on that night in the pool hall.

David Adams concluded his letter by saying, ”The Army might have given up on you, but your family never did.”

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