One of the greatest weeks of my life was the week David McCullough came to teach a one-credit course at Hillsdale College in 2006. McCullough, the great writer and teacher of history, held forth on the craft of writing, led us in a discussion of a primary source reading from the pen of John Adams, and held office hours with the largest gathering of students I ever saw in the faculty office building. I realized then that some people make more of a difference in a week’s time in the lives of people around them than many others make over the course of years. David McCullough made a profound difference that week and over his 89 years.
One of the bits of advice McCullough shared with us at Hillsdale, and that I’ll never forget, is advice that was handed down to him from Thornton Wilder when he taught at Yale: if there is something you want to read, and it isn’t written, go out and write it.
Not long after college, I took that advice and began work on a project to document the experience of my hometown in Washington State during World War II. I knew there was a narrow window of opportunity to talk to men and women of the World War II generation, so I talked to as many as I could. I interviewed 120 veterans, friends, and family of men who were killed in the war, and Japanese-Americans who had been interned in the local fairgrounds. When I wondered if I was spending too much time on the project, I thought back to the advice of David McCullough, and of Thornton Wilder before him—I knew I needed to learn about the “Greatest Generation” and what it took to win the Second World War, and I knew I needed to share what I learned with others around me. I published Puyallup in World War II in 2018.
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