WWII Museum Doc Premiere
August 11, 2010
New Orleans, LA
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What you will see tonight is the realization of a father-quest
complete with fighter planes in battle, a fatherless child, a sad widowed mother. a war that took young men away and didn’t always return them, 3000 pages of love letters, and a telegram.
You will bear witness tonight to my legacy as the daughter of a father I never knew..
Part of that legacy was the letters written by my parents, a scrapbook that held the telegram, and a promise to accomplish 3 things:
1. To search for my father’s crash site “somewhere” in Germany
2. To find it AND
3. To bring him home
What you will see tonight is a mission accomplished. a promise kept, and a few hundred miracles along the way.
You will also see that I did not do it alone.
I asked for help in unlikely places and sometimes didn’t have to ask at all.
When a big time documentary film producer called me one day to find out if he could film my father’s story, neither of us knew how it would end.
In this film you will see only a small number of the people who helped me bring my father home.
A short list would include my husband, my four children and. in absentia: my mother and my father’s parents, and the pilots of the 428th Squadron of the 474th Fighter Group:
My father was the last man killed from their group, They never forgot the young lieutenant with a new baby.
One of them led me to a famous German Air Historian, Hans Guenther Ploes, without whom we would not be here tonight.
When asked once by a reporter why he helped me on this quest, he said, “Because she asked.”
He was only one of countless generous German people who picked up a shovel,made meals, provided beer, hospitality, and invaluable information along the way.
Another person you will not see in the film, WHICH AS BEEN SHOWN ON FOUR CONTINENTS SINCE 2006, is Kay Siering,
Kay is the producer of this film and the guy with the idea that this might be a good story to tell.
Because I was the speaker before Stephen Watson at an American WW II Orphans NETWORK conference, this U.S. premiere is happening in this auspicious setting tonight. AND thank you, Jeremy Collins, for your gracious hospitality, and Stephen, for suggesting this in Tucson.
The spirit of this place does MORE than honor our precious WW II vets, it gives my father’s story a place to rest.
But while I’m here, I’d like you to know something I learned along the way: The difficult might take a while but the impossible just takes a little longer.
On behalf of the mentioned and unmentioned souls who took this long walk with me -
Welcome to our vision of the Last Flight of
1st Lt. Shannon Estill.