---

COURTESY PHOTO Ralph and Barbara Willette.

---

Journey into crawl space
yields family treasures

IMAGINATION is a good thing, but when you're a kid, the smallest noise or insect can form the basis for a monster film that plays in your head. So it would be natural that the comfortable Maine home I grew up in by day would turn into a house of horror by night. My siblings and I often dreamed up creatures that might lurk behind the cubbyhole doors in our bedroom walls. If not the bogeyman, there would be, at the very least, an abundance of creepy crawlers.

That feeling never went away, even now that I'm raising my own family in Wahiawa.

During a recent visit home, my younger brother -- who still feels the same way -- insisted that we venture into the dark abyss to satisfy his curiosity about what was hidden in those secret spaces. Armed with flashlights, he urged me -- as the oldest child -- to go first.

My father is a retired mortician, and a morbid joke shared among young relatives was to beware of the dead bodies he hid within the house. In our determination to find all that was creepy, we opened an old chest, surprised to find it contained nothing scary, but a rather a treasure of family memorabilia.

First we pulled out bills and tax records, receipts and a mortgage deed for $3,000, the cost of our grandparent's first home. We found photographs of my grandparents -- Ralph and Barbara Willette -- as well as aunts, uncles and lots of people my mother couldn't identify, dating to the early 1900s. From these paper records, we could reconstruct my grandparents' lives.

AS MY YOUNGER brother, sister and I rummaged through what most people consider junk, I was overwhelmed by the nature of human connectedness; now matter how distant we might feel, our lives are rooted in past human relationships.

During our journey into the crawl space, we found our grandmother's prized possession, a guitar. As a little girl, I'd heard countless stories of how she had sung on a morning radio show with her sister Pauline.

Obviously, the instrument meant the world to her. In storage the guitar had been rigged to an old shotgun as a booby trap. Of course, the gun wasn't loaded and was just intended to scare any potential thief away, but we still handled it carefully.

We also found my grandfather's old pipe and gun collection. Many of his old photos had him posed in a soldier's uniform, pipe in hand or in his mouth. We felt much closer to him as we held the items in our hands.

We learned about my mom's school days through journals and yearbooks, including notes to her high school sweethearts, and photographs at various ages that painted a picture of her youth.

We found the drum she used in the parades as a drum corps member. That led her to tell us stories of the corps' antics during road trips -- how they would drop pennies and water balloons from balconies above the streets of New York City, how they would place giant cigars in the toilets for the maids to find and how they would sneak out of their rooms after a lock-down.

The best finds were two small trunks neatly tucked in the back corner of the crawl space.

These petite chests contained all my grandmother's and grandfather's letters to each other during World War II. For us, their love story came to life all over again. Tears streamed down my face after reading a few notes that showed how much they were in love. The letters, written in 1941, talked of the war and how they didn't expect it to last very long.

Unfortunately, they were wrong. A newspaper dated May 7, 1945, gave me shivers. The headline read, "European War Ends! Reich Surrenders Unconditionally."

What was most surprising to me was that the war had touched our family members directly, yet we had never heard them talk about those years.

But suddenly, I felt as if I'd been transported back to that time and earlier. My siblings and I held ration books with stamps from the Depression. Each member of the family seemed to have received one, even my mother, who was a baby at the time. Each thing we picked up -- from baby shoes to bank statements -- told its own little story.

The experience of finding these long-lost treasures made me realize I didn't know much about where I'd come from. In the end we all felt a little more complete.

I've always been one to document things, which might explain the appeal of journalism as a career. But after this grand adventure, the importance of documenting lives past and present seems even greater.

I think I'll try to start a journal and a keepsake trunk for my son so that he can one day explore his own treasure chest from the past with his children.

---