 Thank you John, and since most of you are probably associated with the Navy, I just want to thank you for your service. It's a privilege to be here. It's a lovely setting and historic. And it's interesting that the gentleman that John just mentioned, the local son, was killed two weeks before the end of the war because that's the same scenario I have in this book for the main character's son. The main character's name is Cora Blake, and she's from D. R. Ile, Maine. And all the women that he mentioned are all from New England. So it's kind of a hometown story. I'm not sure, I mean, this is a more sort of professional audience than I usually speak to, so I may be repeating things you already know about the gold stars and the blue stars. That it was traditional since World War I to put a blue star in the window if you had a child in service, and they were called Banners of Honor. And if that child was killed, then you put a gold star over it. And the touching thing about these banners is that they were handmade. Mainly you could buy them in the store, but a lot of women just crocheted them or sewed pieces of fabric together, sometimes with elaborate tassels and decorations. And they are, you can still find them around. In fact, the cover for this book was inspired by a real artifact that I found at Bay State Military. And it was a piece of linen, just like this, with an oval in the middle. And it said, My Soldier Boy. And the moms would embroider those words, My Soldier Boy, and make a little sampler, and then put the picture of their son in the oval and then frame it. And the cover is extraordinary. Knopf did an amazing job on it. And they replicated the sense of texture that was present there. You know the stats about the involvement and the casualties. So of those 116,519 Americans who were killed overseas, about 30,000 are buried in the American cemeteries. Of those 30,000, almost 7,000 of their mothers made this journey. It's the first time in history that the sacrifice of mothers was officially recognized by the United States government. And these pilgrimages have never happened again. It was the result of specific legislation that was passed in 1929, but it took 10 years to get it passed. It was initiated by the New York City Mayor LaGuardia in 1919 as an effort to compensate the families for the loss of their wage earners. There were many parts to that effort, and the Goldstone Mothers Pilgrimages was one part of it. Finally, in 1929, Congress passed legislation that allocated $5 million for these pilgrimages, which was a lot of money in those days. You had to be eligible, and then you had to be found, well I guess you had to be found first, and then you had to be eligible, meaning you'd lost a son or a husband in the war. And then you had to be transported and organized. It was literally a military operation that was run by the War Department. Being the War Department, their records exist in triplicate, and you had to make some of those yourself at least. They are collected in the National Archives, where I did a lot of the research. In fact, I've been to every location that's in the book, including Musorgon, Verdun, and Paris. So included in those vast files of documents are the itineraries, the original itineraries that the Mothers followed, as well as what they call the Liaison Report, which is the report that the young lieutenant who was assigned to shepherd these women had to make every single day about every woman's habits. If they ate, if they had a headache, if they had a fight with someone, all of that had to be documented kind of a little like daycare or something. So it wasn't until 13 years after the war that some of these mothers had closure for the first time. It was also part of a joint effort by the more wealthy women. You know that in World War I, we lost a lot of elite educated youth, because it was believed that the war would be over by Christmas by the time that we entered it. So there were a layer of wealthy women who could go to Europe and see their boys. They actually were part of the group that went physically to Washington and lobbied to get this legislation passed on behalf of those who couldn't afford it. Now there was a big difference in the 30s, well, many differences in the 30s from today. It was a very divisive time, racially and ethnically. There was a lot of prejudice that was pretty open, and among that cultural attitude was segregation, and it's important to talk about it because otherwise it will be lost to history. But the truth is that the Black Gold Star Mothers were segregated from the White, and they went on tramp steamers while the White Mothers went on cruise ships, and they were given food that the War Department felt was more appropriate. All of that is woven into the book, as well as the divisiveness just between our five women. The five main characters are all from different cultures. We have Cora Blake, who's our librarian from Dear Isle, Maine. We have an African American seamstress named Selma, who works in a Boston factory. An Irish maid named Katie from Dorchester. You'll be happy to know I personally did the research in Dorchester. I went to church, church bazaars and hung out in the bars there and kind of got a feel for the neighborhood. We have a Boston Brahmin named Bobby Olson, whose family owns a railroad. And we have Will Amina from Proud's Neck, who is a former tennis star in a precarious mental state. And all led by Thomas Hammond. Now, since this is a forgotten, I'm going to come back to the situation of African Americans in a minute, but to introduce you to another important character, since nobody remembers these pilgrimages, the question is how did I find out about them? Well, I was lucky enough to be shown, again, a diary that was written by Colonel Thomas Hammond when he had just graduated from West Point Academy. He was one of the chosen young officers to accompany the Gold Star Mothers Tours. In real life there were about a dozen women in each group, but in the book there's five. And Thomas Hammond is a real person. His diary was shown to me by his son, Nicholas Hammond, who, when I mention him in another context, you'll know exactly who he is. He's an actor and writer and director, but when he was a child, he was a child actor, and he played Friedrich in the original Sound of Music. So Nicholas comes from a military family. His father, Thomas, and Thomas' father, Thomas West, were both colonels and both buried in Arlington. So my first introduction to the whole Gold Star Mothers Pilgrimage story was through the eyes of a 24-year-old boy who jotted down his observations in this Wanamaker's department store daybook. It's not a consistent narrative, but it's about 20 pages of handwritten notes, and many of them are pretty amusing, his point of view about these ladies and all their quirks, as well as his own experience of following in his father's footsteps, because his father commanded troops in Musargon. So there are many layers to that story. Just to return for a moment to the Black experience in World War I, the percentage of Black soldiers was really small, probably less than 10%, and they did not mainly serve in combat positions. That was segregated also, although there were two, the 92nd Infantry and the 93rd, who participated in Musargon. And overall about 800 Black soldiers were killed during the war, about 5,000 injured. And touchingly, the boys were buried where they fell, and there was no discrimination in the way they were buried, so Black and White are all mixed together in the cemetery. It was really the courage of these ladies to face the unknown that motivated me to write this book. It took me 25 years to write it, not consistently, because I would have been in a mental institution if that were the case. But because I also have a career in television and as a writer-producer, and I have a series of mystery thrillers about an FBI agent named Anna Gray, so I was doing other things and raising two kids. But I collected these little pieces as time went on. And what inspired me to keep going was the individual courage of these ladies to leave their hometowns, leave their husbands and children, and go off to the unknown. They traveled by themselves. They didn't know each other. The only connection they had was that their sons fought together and died together. In this case, it's the Yankee Division that all the sons were part of. And I also think that the sacrifice of women and more has been greatly understated, and so I wanted to bring attention and give a voice to that experience. Just to give you a sense of what Young Hammond had come to expect from his experience there, I want to read you a quote from the actual colonel who was in charge of this operation, Colonel Ellis, who said this to the young escort officers. You must consider the temper of the women and take that into consideration with the objective of the pilgrimage, which does not tend to be a calm mental condition. Many of them will become hysterical on the least provocation. And he went on to say, looking back, this was in no way a holiday or a pleasure trip, but on the other hand it was necessary to prevent overemphasis of the sentimental side in order to prevent morbidness or hysteria. So obviously they could face the guns of the enemy, but God forbid they should encounter a hysterical woman or 7,000 of them. Despite these dire predictions, many of the women had a great time. You know, it was the trip of a lifetime. They never would have gone to Paris without it. And they were very grateful. They wrote letters home and they came back and I have the transcript of radio speeches that some of them made. They had great food. You know, they were treated like queens in Paris. They actually wore banners that said, Gold Star Mother. And the French were grateful. The French, you know, participated in many of the ceremonies, the French Gold Star Mothers. And there's some very touching accounts of them together laying wreaths at the Arc de Triomphe. But I want to read you a little piece that's an actual letter from one of these ladies. One of the things I'm finding about Star for Mrs. Blake that's so gratifying is that it's helping people become more in touch with their own family history. And suddenly they remember the Blue Star or the Gold Star from their great-grandmother's window. And in this case, this is from a reader. It's an email I received last week whose memory was stimulated by reading that Cora and the ladies went to Europe on a ship that was called the SS Harding. That's true. That's one of the ships they went on. And he said, Why do I know the name SS Harding? So he ran up to the attic and he found his great-grandmother's letters. And in them he found what he remembered, which was a note written on stationery from the SS Harding by his great-grandmother. I just want to read you one thing that she said. Dear folks, we left Hoboken at noon today and expect to be in France next Wednesday. I was delayed at the French consulate's office in New York and reached the pier in time to see the ship one mile out. They had to take me to it in a tugboat and I had to climb up a ladder on the side of the ship. I've seen it done in the movies, but by golly I don't think Pearl White has anything on me. One other defining fact for the book that I discovered in the research is that World War I, like every war I suppose, created its own type of injuries that had never been seen before. You'll hear a lot about it. I'm sure many of you are well-read in the history, but it is often referred to as a war of technology because many new ways of killing people were invented during that time and one particularly effective combination was the use of poison gas and machine guns. The way it worked was that the Germans would lob these canisters of poison gas into the trenches and because the gas is heavier than air, it sinks. Then the soldiers are sent gasping standing up for oxygen and when they stood up they'd be mowed down by the other new invention of automatic machine guns. That resulted in a new spate of facial injuries that the world had never seen before. It's fascinating and one of the characters in this book is a victim of that kind of attack. His name is Griffin Reed. He's an American expat journalist living in Paris and he, like the real victims, underwent about 16 different operations in England where Sir Harold Giles was a pioneer actually in modern plastic surgery. They had to invent it as they went. And even when they were put back together, they were difficult to be seen in public. In fact, in England, they had special benches for these soldiers to sit on so they wouldn't scare little children. But those who were eligible and for who it worked were fashioned with a mask, a facial mask that was as thin as a calling card, well as a credit card. And it was made of metal and it was molded and fitted to the face based on photographs from before the injury. And then the metal was actually painted to match the skin tones. And it hooked on over the ears. It had sometimes a mustache attached and eyeglasses. And from a distance it was pretty good. In fact, these were done by artists, by sculptors who gave their time to that cause. And there was a clinic in Paris where an American sculptor went over there and worked with surgeons to fit these men. Also, the other thing that was developed during World War I was solving the problem of identifying and burying the dead. Because again, as John mentioned, we had multiple disarticulation due to these high-powered shells. And there were procedures developed during the Civil War to deal with battlefield fatalities. But we never had the situation of trying to return bodies overseas or, you know, this happening on foreign soil. So on August 7th, 1917, the War Department authorized the organization of the Graves Registration Service, which continued to operate until 1919 and even afterwards, even when the cemeteries were being built. If a man died in the field, it was the responsibility of his comrades to attend to his body by marking the spot, and that was often done with a crude cross and the dog tags. Later, the Graves Registration would go out there when it was more safe and retrieve the body and then either send it home or keep it there. Now, the decision about lots of these remains were moved around a lot, and it was obviously important to keep them identified. But at a certain point, it was up to the families to decide whether they wanted their remains buried overseas or brought home. And this was a hot, controversial topic of the day. Some people felt it was more patriotic to leave the soldiers where they fell as a statement of our commitment to our allies. And some people just could not afford the funeral expenses, even though the government would bring the boy home. That was an issue, so they opted to leave him there. And you'll read about what happened, what typically went through, well, what I imagine, went through the mind of a mother making that decision in a star for Mrs. Blake. Now, again, I had original material to use in portraying this process. They recalled a report of disinternment and reburial reports, again filed by the Graves Registration and their documents written by hand, and I guess they're the first sort of CSI documents that we have, identifying the soldier often by dental records or a description or parts of the uniform. In these reports, there aren't any photographs of the bodies. The other question that's been asked, that I've heard being asked, is why weren't the fathers included in this movement? And there's a historian named Lisa Boudreau who pointed out that although this legislation, I'm quoting, had endorsed the role of woman as nurturer and suggested a maternal bond that surpassed the paternal one, there's also an appreciation for the newfound power, influence, and status of these women that they gained in the fight. In other words, the maternal bond was commercial. It was a cultural fact. Mothers love their sons. Mothers are revered. Mothers are American. Mother love is American. And in the book, I hint at possible other reasons for these pilgrimages besides honoring them and the compensation, which are political. It was the depression. It was a strong symbol of a government in charge to be caring for these bereaved women. And also the American Legion had a large part in endorsing this because they were helping the Republican Party to get votes, so they were very vocal in endorsing the pilgrimages. And it's shocking to realize that not only did these women not have a voice in deciding about war, but they didn't even have the vote until the war was over, until 1920. So at this point, I usually read from the book, but this is not that form. So I'll just say that in writing this book, I've come to meet contemporary Gold Star Mothers, and that's been a privilege and an honor and incredibly touching. There are the two organizations that are very active today, the American Gold Star Mothers and the Blue Star Mothers. They're both on Facebook. And in fact, if you go to their websites, there are some, but take your hankies with you because these moms have made little videos about their sons, which just are very penetrating. And the moms that I've met are courageous and they're outgoing. They would like some more attention to their cause. Their mission today is still what it was in 1929 in the charter. The charter reads that no Gold Star parent shall go without a roof over their head or enough to eat. So today, the Gold Star Mothers work with veterans. And this group up in Northern California that I met, the regional branches are individually active in different ways. And what they've decided to do is every month they go to the local VA with a birthday cake and they celebrate the birthday of the vets who are there and they bring them a pair of socks each. So in closing, and we can take questions, I'd like to read a comment that was left by a Gold Star Mother on a blog. The blog is a book review blog called Book Snob and you can leave comments and this is what she said. As a Gold Star Mom, my only child was killed in Iraq in 2004. I appreciate the tears you shed for our children and for me and the other Gold Star Mothers. I need to back up and say that the reviewer said she cried at the end of the book and also she called it a cautionary tale for us to remember the mother-son bond and think about the newfound power of women in deciding the fate of their children perhaps. So this was her response. She said, I appreciate the tears you shed for our children and for me and other Gold Star Mothers. More than 12 years of the U.S. involvement in these wars, too many Americans do not know what a Gold Star is. This book can make an impact by telling the story and to educate readers on who exactly a Gold Star Mother is. Less than 1% of the country is affected by the wars but that 1% the military and their families are carrying 100% of the burdens of these wars. I'm glad you read the book. I highly recommend it. I don't see a Star for Mrs. Blake as a cautionary tale, however, but more as a persuasive acknowledgement of the incredible sacrifices made by the military and their families in times of war, a little-known concept in this day and age. So thank you all for being here today and thanks. So, questions? Yes, sir. Well, I'm not sure that they were cremated. You know, I think they were just brought back. You know, the remains were, but the decision was up to each family. Each family had cards and they would, is that what you mean? Yes. Yeah. I actually have that, those documents. The procedure was you'd be, you'd be contacted. Okay, this was just right when the son was killed. By the way, in the movies, you know, you see the mom get this formal letter, but it wasn't a formal letter all the time. It was, I have a copy of a letter that was just handwritten. In fact, it's in the book. It just says like, sorry to say, son, you know, private so-and-so killed, time and date. And it's like just a signature. I mean, a handwritten one-line note. And that was often the first notice that the mom got. Later, there might be something more formal. But that, it was shocking, but that's what it was. So you'd be notified. And then you would then get a form. It was a form. Like, check this box from the War Department saying, I declare my wish is to be A, son buried overseas, or B, brought back. And you would just check a box. And so it went. Yes, sir? Because actually, my son-in-law has an uncle who is in St. James in France. Oh. But the family had great controversy whether they were bringing home or not. I don't know how they resolved it. He's there. I've been to the grave. But the family still has sort of better memories. Who really was accepted as the authority to sign the box? Because I can see where a husband and a wife wouldn't necessarily agree. Absolutely. I guess they had to figure it out. One of them had to sign it. I mean, it would be a parent. It would be the closest relative, you know. But just at a father or mother? At a father or mother, you know, and I've always intuitively been the old-timer, when a mother is a closer bond, it would be much more significant for her to make the decision. You know, you're mentioning the vote when you talked a little bit too much. It has to be the authority. That's a very good question. Do you remember specifically what went on within the family? Or have you heard of it? I really know that. And it seems to me the moment. So it's sort of a psychological feeling. I can see where I would feel different in my wife. I'm sure that's true. Of course. I mean, there's no good answer, right? Yeah. It's very emotional and personal. No, the father, not formally, not formally. Although I'm sure that if they were able to, they would. You know, later in the later years, people go today, well, you know, families go and make those pilgrimages. And by the way, if you're ever interested, you can get Battlefield tour guides to take you out to the real Battlefields, which I did, which is astonishing. Because there's still unexploded munitions and German trenches. You know, the Germans were up there for almost three or four years building little trench cities. They actually had little railway cars and electricity up in the hills because it was close to the border. Which Battlefields did you go to? Have you been there, too? No, my father was there. Oh, really? Interesting. So he was a contemporary of Colonel Hammond. Yes, it was. Biggest battle in the war for us. Yes, ma'am. You mentioned earlier that, often discussed, as Phil had mentioned, so my question is, at that time, what kind of coverage was given by the making newspapers, if any, and publicized, is there, how did you, were you able to receive a compliment in real time? Yes, in real time it was big news. Very big news. Every small town paper listed the mothers by name of who was going and where they were. And often they wrote letters or published in the paper at the time. So if you go back in the archives of a small town newspaper or, you know, a large newspaper, you'll find, if you Google it, you know, or start looking, you'll find lists of who's on board of what ship. Yes, it was very big news. Yeah. I might just add that you mentioned the Bureau of the Guardian. I think it's that I didn't realize until I was reading something the other day that the Guardia was a fighter pilot and maybe Rick and Dr. Squadron. Can you believe that? Oh, my goodness. I didn't know that. You guys should live up here, but when we were kids, I lived in New Jersey and the old Guardia used to read the funny papers on Sunday mornings to everybody when the papers went on strike. I remember that as a kid. It was great. We thought very much of him and now I hear he was instrumental in this, you know, quite a character in his own way. Yes, indeed. A leader. Any other thoughts? Yes, sir. On the same topic of permission, how did the War Department handle the sheer logistics of bringing the soldiers home at the disparate commissions that would come from families for probably several years apart? I know. Well, you know, they kept records, I guess, the best they could. It's amazing to imagine that, but it's all handwritten records that hopefully were kept with the right remains. But I must say that that's a question that's raised in the book as well. I mean, even today, it's all handwritten records. Yeah. Well, you know, you think about it. I don't know if you all remember the only guys, the bonus, do you remember that? Yes, the bonus army. The guys all promised a bonus and they never got it. They never got it. And again, trying to, the paperwork involved in giving them bonus it must have been unbelievable. They had the troops that charged on the bonus guys there right there by the river in Washington. That's right. Right. I mean, charged out of the horses. And their tents, I mean, folks, it's hard for us even to sit here and think that what went on? I had a neighbor that he was killed by a Japanese neighbor in World War II. But his wife found out another friend who wrote and said, I understand here. Oh my. She was pregnant. She found out. Yeah. It's heartbreaking. Logistics, I mean, when you talk about it, one thing about bringing them back, trying to find the people, you made the comment that you had to find the mothers. Yes. A lot of these guys came in. I mean, during the depression, they didn't really have the associations. So they didn't necessarily have that kind of a record when they came in and wrote down that I lived in such a situation. Well, that's true. That's true. Well, thank you. Thank you for being here. I appreciate it.