Diane Covington-Carter’s essay in the LA Times, June 2, 2019, has won a Lowell Thomas award in the 2020 competition. The Essay, “Dad’s Stories Resonated”, tells how her father’s stories of his time in France during WWII, shaped her life. At the 50th anniversary of D-Day, which she attended to receive a medal in her father’s honor, she was able to find the French orphan Gilbert, who her father had unsuccessfully tried to adopt.
Her memoir, which tells that story, Finding Gilbert, A Promise Fulfilled, won a Gold award from the SATW Western Chapter in 2109.
Here are one judge’s comments on her essay:
“A daughter’s devotion to her father’s more-than-50-year-old memory of an orphan he met in France shows that love makes anything possible. Diane Covington-Carter tracks down Gilbert with nothing more than his first name to meet the boy (now a man) her father wanted to adopt during the war in Normandy. “When I told him, my father had never forgotten him, he wept.”
The fact that she “adopts him and his family” as her own brings her father’s story full circle. She manages to comfort his widow as Gilbert comes to the end of his life too.
Click here to read the essay.
BATW member Tom Wilmer has also won a silver Lowell Thomas award for his NPR piece: “The Haunted Lighthouses of Door County, Cheese, Cherries and Family Resorts”. Click here to hear.