Rumors

He reminisces about his childhood in Newport, Kentucky. Cowens’ grandparents and aunt lived upstairs, in the same house as his parents and brother. His aunt would entertain with stories about getting to see Jim Thorpe (the only sports hero Cowens ever had) race with her own two eyes. Cowens thinks about that time; how his grandfather lived to see his 60s despite serving in World War I and then enduring the Spanish Flu, which killed as many as 50 million people across the world. “People are going to survive,” Cowens says. That’s true. But the coronavirus will still crash into so many different lives, and so far the mortality rate for those it infects is substantially higher in seniors with underlying health issues.

SB Nation

“It’s an American story, something I’m very proud of, the work that my grandparents did,” Kerr said. “It just seemed like a time when Americans were really helping around the world, and one of the reasons we were beloved was the amount of help we provided, whether it was after World War I, like my grandparents, or World War II. I’m sort of nostalgic for that sort of perception. We were the good guys. I felt it growing up, when I was living in Egypt, when I was overseas. Americans were revered in much of the Middle East. And it’s just so sad what has happened to us the last few decades.”

New York Times

The Kerrs were on the frontline of American relief after World War I. Stanley Kerr arrived in Aleppo in 1919 and began photographing, documenting, and rescuing Armenian women and orphans. He then transferred to Marash to take charge of an American mission. His memoir, The Lions of Marash, is set at this location and describes how the armies of Mustafa Kemal eradicated the Armenians from the new Turkish republic. Private American charity reached the Armenians first. In response to the massacre of over 1.5 million Armenians, philanthropist Cleveland Dodge formed the Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief. Former president Theodore Roosevelt advocated intervention, saying, “All Americans worthy of the name feel their deepest indignation aroused by the dreadful Armenian atrocities[a].”

Uproxx

Popovich wasn’t heavily recruited by colleges, so when he graduated high school at age 17, as the Vietnam War raged on, he followed the path of many other young men and entered a service academy — if nothing else to delay entry into the war and, if that time came, do so as an officer. Kreimborg, Purcell and Brown arrived the following year, from, respectively, Kentucky, Ohio and Wyoming. Purcell was assigned to the same four-room living alcove as Popovich, who promptly asked, “Do you know who started World War I?” Purcell responded that, yes, a Serbian had assassinated Austrian Archduke Ferdinand. “Yeah, and I’m a crazy Serb,” Popovich told him.

Dallas Morning News