V-E Memories A Child’s Memory And A Purple Heart Keep George Alexander Alive For Juanita; Now She Is Looking For More

In the picture, the little girl wears a Purple Heart on her wool coat.

Her face is frozen in grief. The father she barely knew, dead somewhere in Europe. Her mother, who had just pinned the medal on her, stands sternly in the yellowed newspaper photograph. Its dateline is December 1944, Wellpinit, Wash.

Juanita Alexander Ramirez was 8 years old when her father was killed during World War II. Even talking about his death now, tears stream from the 58-year-old woman’s eyes.

“I still hurt deep in my heart for him,” she said, dabbing a tissue to her face. “I never grieved. No one did.”

For her, George Alexander was a mystery. A mystery locked in the deep memories of his relatives, most of whom are now elderly or dead. Locked in survivors from his battalion, locked in the U.S. Army’s records.

“I need to find him for his memory’s sake - and for mine,” she said. “I need to make things right.”

For half a century, Alexander’s identity has been his name on a picture, signed “Daddy.” The postcard-sized portrait was taken of the Spokane Indian man in London right before his battalion left for the front.

He was 27 years old the day he left Wellpinit. His four-year marriage to Ramirez’s mother soured long before he left. His wife had moved to Keller, Wash., with the children.

Ramirez holds on only to a child’s memories. The last time she saw him he was in uniform. She ran from her grandparents’ house to meet him and he cradled her in his arms. Before he left, Alexander bought 20 $100 U.S. Savings Bonds and established a trust fund in her name.

After he was killed, no one talked about him. Her mother - bitter, Ramirez speculates - closed the file on her old love.

No one reminisced about how he walked, how he talked, what things he loved to do. No memorial was held. No one told his daughter where in Europe her father died.

She wondered if he had a proper burial.

“I was never satisfied with the answer, ‘He died in the war,”’ she said. “It was like he never existed.”

Growing up in Keller, Ramirez daydreamed about her father.

When she graduated from high school, she imagined him standing in the back of the Wilbur High School auditorium waving to her. The savings bonds he bought paid for Ramirez to go to business school in Spokane. She then married a military man.

“I was tired of poverty,” Ramirez said. “I wasn’t going to stay home and have babies. I knew girls who did that. I wanted to see the United States. I wanted to travel.

“But when I left, I knew I would come home again. I knew I would find him.”

Over the next 20 years, Ramirez had four children and lived in Texas and Hawaii before coming home to Spokane in 1972.

“I wanted to look for my father,” Ramirez said. “But the time wasn’t right. At first I wasn’t near home. When I came home, I had no time to spare.”

Ramirez married her present husband seven years ago. Last spring she retired, and this year her youngest daughter got married.

In December her husband, Ricardo, told her, “It’s time to pursue your dreams.” That was shortly before the 50th anniversary of George Alexander’s Dec. 9, 1944, death.

Ramirez opened her antique bureau filled with keepsakes. She lovingly dug until she touched the case holding Alexander’s Purple Heart. She opened her father’s portrait. She searched the scrapbooks for newspaper clippings.

Then she began asking questions. But her family’s memories were buried under too many years. Her brother, 15 years older, couldn’t remember. Her aunt Nancy Lowley, an elder on the Spokane Reservation, never knew many of the details. Her father’s sister is in a Davenport, Wash., nursing home, unable to communicate.

At the same time she started taking a Salish language class on the Spokane Reservation, which is a 30-minute drive from her Indian Trail home. It was part of rediscovering her father - who spoke to her in that language. It’s still the language her father speaks in her in dreams, and the one her grandparents insisted she learn as a girl.

Through the class she met the people in the Wellpinit Veterans of Foreign Wars post. In March she got a telephone number that led her to the American Battle Monuments Commission.

She called it at 8:30 a.m. on March 27. Her notebook was filled with questions she had waited a lifetime to ask. Over the telephone the answers started flowing.

Private First Class George Alexander was in the 759th Tank Battalion. He died fighting near Henri-Chappelle, Belgium, and was buried in a U.S. Army cemetery there.

It will take up to a year for the Army to locate paper records about Alexander’s particular job in his company, what they were doing in the months before his death and how he died. But even the sparse information delighted Ramirez.

“I was so happy,” she said. “If I could have I would have reached across the country and shaken hands with that lady on the phone.”

Through the monuments commission she has ordered fresh flowers to be placed on his grave this Memorial Day. She’s expecting a color lithograph of the cemetery including a photograph of her dad from the monuments commission’s office in the Paris Embassy.

As a survivor of a war veteran, she has applied for a free passport. She and her husband plan to visit Belgium next spring.

“I feel like I’ll be able to move on in peace, once I’m reassured that he is in a safe place.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: MILITARY CAN ASSIST IN SEARCH FOR RECORDS It can feel like an impossible task to track down records after half a century. But the U.S. Army, other branches of the military and some private associations work with survivors to find important paperwork. Sometimes a name, a hometown and a date of birth can open the door to military records. Other times more details like a military personnel number, a division and battalion are necessary. Some offices to call for information: The Military Records Center in St. Louis: (314) 263-3901. The U.S. Army Military History Department, Division of Historical Services in the Pentagon, (202) 761-5413. The American Battle Monuments Commission in Washington, D.C., (202) 272-0537 and (202) 272-0533. For information about sending flowers to a serviceman’s grave, write The American Battle Monuments Commission, The Paris Embassy, PSC 116, ATOAE09777. The American WWII Orphans Network, a private, nonprofit organization for children of WWII veterans, with 1,000 members. For information call its founder Ann Mix at (206) 733-1678 or its public relations coordinator Anne Black at (202) 232-6088 or write P.O. Box 4369, Bellingham, WA 98227. Kara Briggs