Leaving a legacy for the living
By BILL DUNCAN This is not an easy column for me to write. I had just finished editing a column for the April 5thedition of a magazine section for senior citizens written by Peyton Walmsley when the telephone rang. It was a call from his daughter, Kit, to tell me Peyt died. I had spent time with him only last Friday at the VA hospital where he was a patient. He happily told me he was going on a 72-hour pass to be with his beloved wife, Carolyn at their home in Linus Oakes in Roseburg. He wanted to give me his April column. As editor, I have decided to publish that last column as a tribute to a man who lived a full, exciting, if sometimes tragic life. He was one of the shining examples of those of us from Tom Brokaw’s Greatest Generation. When World War II involved the United States after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Peyt was working in a job that could have been considered vital to the war effort, therefore exempting him from service. Instead he enlisted in the Army, trained as a pilot and flew dangerous missions over the hump from India to China supplying the Chinese war effort against the Japanese invaders. He often talked and wrote about his experiences during those bleak early years of the war and how many times he and his crew faced danger. His last column was about one of those harrowing life and death experiences. It was as if he was leaving all of us a message that life itself is precious and to live each day as if it might be our last. The one thing I will always remember about Peyt was his upbeat way of taking whatever life dished out. And his life, right up to the end, was filled with tragedy. Once he wrote a column about the mail delays during his war years. He said it was his routine to date the letters and read them in sequence. He did that with every packet of letters he received. When he opened letter number five, he discovered his son had drowned back in California. Only recently, he was notified his daughter, Elaina Knigge, had been killed in a plane crash in Canyonville, Ore. Despite that blow he kept showing the rest of us that life had to go on. Both he and Elaina were in a writer’s group together, one that I teach. It was Elaina who talked her dad into taking an earlier writing class I taught through Umpqua Community College in Winchester, Ore. I recall one class exercise in which I asked the students to finish a story Somerset Maughan said in one of his notebooks that he had started but never could complete. It was a story about tea plantations in India and the exclusive club for the British colonists. One of the Brits never got mail from England, so he bought a letter from a fellow plantation owner. The plot thickens when the plantation owner demands to know the contents of the letter and the buyer refuses to reveal it. Peyt’s experiences in that country made him the class expert for the students as they developed the plot. Peyt remained a member of the class even after Elaina’s tragic death. His legacy is his courageous attitude in the face of adversity. He was truly an example for the living. (Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)
The Elderstatesman