At age 83, Anna Green Showerman can confidently declare “I’ve never liked fire.” Even the burning of brush or a smoking barbecue pit has always made the Batavia woman nervous.
As it turned out, fires also can be blamed for why she didn’t know more about her father, Army Staff Sgt. John William Green, an East Aurora High School graduate who was killed in action in Germany during World War II on Dec. 17, 1944, one day after his 21st birthday.
Showerman was only 3 years old when her mother, also named Anna, received that grim telegram. Unfortunately, a fire in their Aurora home burned most of the photos and memorabilia when she was a child. And decades later she learned her fallen father’s information was among the 16 million to 18 million records destroyed in the 1973 devastating blaze at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri.
The elder Anna Green remarried about five years after she was widowed, and Showerman’s stepfather, also named John (Roth) and a World War II Army veteran, became a devoted parent to the young girl.
Over the years, “we did not talk about him a lot,” she recalled of her dad, yet praised her mother, who died in 2010, for how well she “knew what to say to answer my questions so I would not have any more.”
As the years went on, Showerman was busy raising a family with husband Jeff. Then, as their children got married and moved on, she tried seeking information about her father but always ran into dead-ends. For example, in 1995 she reached out for help from government officials, only to be told about the National Personnel Records Center fire a couple decades earlier.
More years passed. Then in 2019, when Showerman went to the Kane County Government Building on Batavia Avenue in Geneva to pay her taxes, she noticed Jake Zimmerman’s office and decided to pay him a visit.
John W. Green – some of his military documents erroneously list his age at 22 – was recognized as a casualty of war on several Kane County and Aurora memorials, she told the superintendent of the Veterans Assistance Commission. But the medals her father earned had never been issued.
Zimmerman, whose own grandfather’s military personnel records were damaged but not destroyed by the 1973 fire, jumped into action.
Showerman “was actually one of our last in-person clients to come to the office before everything was shut down for the pandemic,” Zimmerman recalled, adding that, COVID-19 had a “snowball effect” on a lot of government services, with the National Personnel Records Center facing even more hurdles because its holdings were stored in paper format.
These military personnel records are currently in the process of being digitized, Zimmerman told me. But at that time they could only be accessed by climbing a ladder, pulling down boxes and manually going through names before a clerk could even process the information.
That’s why getting her father’s paper records, a procedure that normally would take two to eight months, turned into nearly 3½ years, he said.
And still, patience was needed. Once the documents arrived, another process began.
“While NPRC holds the records, they do not issue medals,” pointed out Zimmerman. “That duty falls to the Army’s Clothing and Heraldry Product Support Integration Directorate, which can take 18 more months to process a request.”
After a near-80-year delay, it was time to call on some high-powered help.
With encouragement from Zimmerman, the family asked a Congressional representative to intervene in hopes of escalating the priority of this case due to the long wait that had already been experienced by Showerman.
An inquiry was submitted through U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s office, said Zimmerman, “which successfully brought a quick closure to the case.”
And that brings us to an upcoming event in Batavia.
At 11 a.m. Tuesday, the veterans community is invited to VFW Post 1197 on River Street as the commander of the U.S. Army’s Rock Island Arsenal will present John W. Green’s family with his Purple Heart, Bronze Star and other medals.
Showerman admits that, at first, she was reluctant to make this long overdue presentation so public, but her four children and grandchildren convinced her otherwise. After all, it’s not only a way to recognize the ultimate sacrifice her young father made but is a compelling and important reminder of what so many Americans, including those in our area, gave so we can enjoy today’s freedoms.
Showerman certainly has enjoyed discovering gems, big and small, about her father, like the fact her six-foot nine-inch son Chris takes after the grandfather he never got a chance to know. A faded Beacon-News photo showing John Green – in the back row standing with a group of young men getting ready to go off to war – illustrates just how tall he was.
That news article, from April of 1943, is one of a handful of precious pictures and other memorabilia her mother saved, including a condolence letter from then-Illinois Gov. Dwight Green, and of course that cold Western Union telegram received March 20, 1945, three months after her husband was declared missing in action.
Now his daughter can finally add a hero’s medals to her memories.
Showerman is especially appreciative of Zimmerman, who worked so closely with her for so long to make this presentation possible. But all such accolades are pushed aside.
“This was all routine work on the part of our office. What was not routine was COVID and the wait times,” he insisted. “Mrs. Showerman deserves a lot of credit for the patience she had throughout this process.”
dcrosby@tribpub.com
