To all the veterans reading baseball musings, thank you for your service and your sacrifices. I’m thinking of my dad today, one of a declining number of WWII veterans. He recently lost his best friend John, also a WWII vet. The two knew each other for 83 years. They served as best man at each other’s weddings.

My dad has been talking about WWII more lately. One of the stories I had not heard before involved a ship of refugees. Dad was in the south Pacific, in the quartermaster corps. A ship came in with refugees, and my dad went on board as part of the resupply. I asked him where the refugees were from, thinking it would be somewhere in Asia. He said they were eastern Eurpoean, mostly from Poland, and they were headed for the United States and Mexico. I wondered why they were coming the long way around. He said they had walked to India to get a ship to the western hemisphere. Amazing what people will do to survive, and how little has changed.