My New Years Resolution is to be more consistent with blogs and make them shorter while ranging widely over Josephy material and Josephy interests. I want to do this without being “gee whiz, look what Alvin wrote/did/said/ this time!” But to soberly address narrative history, Western history, Indian history, environmental history—Alvin’s things and the things Alvin leads us to.
But this week his cousin sent me most of a manuscript dated 1952 for a proposed television program about the first man to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, and I got an email from a grad student researching a WW II Marine named Peter Ortiz. Turns out there was a movie—“Operation Secret”—and, you got it; Alvin wrote the screen story….
Alvin came home from Iwo Jima to “sell the war.” The public was distressed that we’d lost 7,000 Marines taking a small bunch of rocks in the Pacific. Alvin, Indian flag raiser Ira Hayes, and a few others traveled the country