The date is Nov. 20, 1944, and Charles Earnest is helping run telephone line from a barn that’ll serve as a regimental headquarters for the 26th Infantry Division. The Allies are advancing deep into Europe, and the 26th is set up in Northeastern France, relatively close to the German border, [...]

In his Gainesville home, Tilden Counts Booth rocks in a living-room chair as he walks through his 10 decades on Earth. Behind him on the kitchen bar is a dispenser for his go-to candy, M&Ms, and tacked above are cards from his 100th birthday celebration in August. As he details [...]

It’s the night of Dec. 6, 1941, and Cass Phillips and friend Bruce Smithy are winding down the Saturday evening out with two lady pals. The two men, quite new to adulthood, are Navy radiomen for PBY Catalina seaplanes, which take off and land aquatically and patrol for enemy boats [...]

Music floats through the air of the Bloch Center arena near the docks of Pearl Harbor on this Dec. 6 night. There, the bands from the battleships Pennsylvania and Tennessee and the old transport and support ship Argonne are playing in the latest round of the months-long competition Battle of [...]

When Morris Mixson started working as a stockroom clerk in the University of Florida’s chemistry department in 1948, he did so under chemistry curator Burton Otte. Glad to have work after his time in the war and a few odds and ends after, Mixson became a protégé to Otte. He [...]

Francis “Dutch” Scholtz played a late gig with his dance band that Saturday at an officers club and didn’t get back to his barracks until 1 a.m. This was nothing new for the skilled pianist and private in the U.S. Army Air Forces. Officers would often have their wives with [...]