Albert Woolson was a drummer boy who lived in Duluth, Minnesota. Like Hard, Woolson loved cigars, puffing through one after the other as he shuffled through hundreds of cards wishing him a happy birthday and roared out the lyrics to "Just before the Battle, Mother" during a radio interview the same day. From an article in Life magazine: “The townspeople know him as a deaf but high-spirited centenarian who romps with his 3-year-old grandchild, tramps up-stairs and down several times a day and still insists”—at 106—“on doing his own snow shoveling.”
There is a wonderful home video showing him in a chair with his grandchild in his lap, running her hands through her hair in front of a set of flowers that line the house. He’s wearing a blue, Mr. Rogers-styled cardigan over a shirt and tie.Woolsen was one of the two last surviving veterans of the Civil War. He lived long enough to have a home video of himself shot. Incredible.
On a side note, the author of this article questions why the First World War is somewhat overlooked when it comes to US history:
Reached by email, David Ekbladh, an assistant professor of American History at Tufts University, thinks that, in the United States at least, “the age of our connection [to the war] passed long ago …” in part because the First World War was a different type of war than those that followed and didn’t see the same ideological systems at play. “People talk of the Korean War as the forgotten war,” he says, “but even that conflict gets context as part of the Cold War, which itself is still remembered because it was a successful struggle against another side that can be seen as unsavory.”I stand by what I wrote several years ago, the reason is that WWI had to compete with the 1918 Influenza Epidemic.
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