The Paper Trail

Oertel's leadership must have stood out, because he was chosen to become a commissioned officer, a rank achieved by only one of every 20 draftees in his division.

During more than 12 months of advanced training, Oertel would have had a few chances for much-needed home leave. Soldiers headed to war were granted "pre-embarkation furloughs," and it was during one of these visits back to Washington, possibly for Christmas 1942, that the 23-year-old in his crisp Army uniform met a blond, blue-eyed 19-year-old hometown girl who had recently graduated from Calvin Coolidge High School in Northwest. She was quiet, a bit introverted, and loved to draw elaborate pictures in art class. George and Louise apparently met at a dance at a USO club, according to her sister, Martha Hopping Keith of Bartow, Fla. The big band sounds of Sammy Kaye, Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman would have been in the air, along with the excitement of young love in an unfolding, chaotic world.

MY HEART ACTUALLY FLUTTERED when I opened my e-mail at The Post on a Monday morning and saw I had received a message from George "Sandy" Lang. It was a short introductory note saying that his cousin Danny Hopping had told him about "relics" found in the house that used to belong to his maternal grandparents. Lang said he was a big fan of a cable television show called "If Walls Could Talk," which traces the history of long-lost artifacts found in people's homes. "It is unreal that you have found items I would very much appreciate having!" he wrote.

"George Charles Oertel was my biological father and was killed in Italy when I was only six months old, neither of us ever having seen the other, except in photographs. I was born Jan. 8, 1944, at Walter Reed Hospital and given the name George Charles Oertel III . . . I know very little about my biological father, as these things were not talked about in those days. I would very much like to have anything which belonged to my father or mother," who died in 1981 following kidney disease.

"It's amazing!" Sandy Lang exclaimed when I reached him by telephone that day at his home in Altamonte Springs, just north of Orlando. "I was told I had a father that was killed in the war, but I didn't know much because Mom never really talked about it much because she felt it wasn't appropriate." Lang, who had just turned 60 and recently retired from a career in construction and at IBM, said he had learned from his grandparents over the years that his birth father had a been a star athlete and a soldier, but he had few details.

"It surprises me that it was left in the attic," he said of my find. "I imagine it was put up in the attic by my mother, and she didn't want to think about it.

"Since I've retired, I've been thinking more about my family," he said, "how there is so much I don't know about, and I ought to try to study it."

I told him that I had made it my mission to find out as much as I could about his father, and that once I was done, I would come down to Florida to give him all the materials.

GEORGE OERTEL JR. AND LOUISE HOPPING were so smitten with each other that soon after they met, they planned to elope and marry immediately because George was about to be sent overseas, according to Martha Keith, at 62 the youngest of Louise's five siblings.

"My sister told my oldest sister, Andree, that they were going to elope. And Andree ratted on them," she recalled with a laugh, "So the parents said, 'No. You are going to have a wedding.' " Both families were Catholic, so the young couple was married by a priest at the Walter Reed Chapel on March 9, 1943. They had known each other for only a period of months. "It was," said Keith, "a wartime romance." Their black-and-white wedding photos, copies of which I obtained from Lorraine Oertel, are wartime classics. In one, Lt. Oertel and his father-in-law are standing proud and straight in their matching Army dress uniforms. The smiling bride is wearing a sensible gray suit.

The husband and wife look poignantly young and happy. Within weeks of this photo, they would conceive the son that George Oertel would never meet. Several months later, while stationed at nearby Fort George C. Meade, Lt. Oertel would fill out an Army-issued last will and testament, naming his new wife as his heir. The young couple never had a chance to live together.

Shortly after signing his will, on September 7, 1943, 2nd Lt. George C. Oertel was transferred to meet up with his new unit, the 88th Infantry Division, 350th Regiment, 3rd Battalion. That all-draftee division had been training in the swamps and tropical heat of Louisiana and Texas in preparation for combat in the Mediterranean. Now the 88th was being transported in October 1943 to the massive military port at Hampton Roads, from which the division would soon ship out to the war in Europe.

The Hoppings never really had a chance to know Oertel very well, but he met a key requirement of a family that was steeped in the military. George Oertel's new father-in-law, Andrew D. Hopping, had served in the American Expeditionary Force that fought in World War I in France, where he met and married a young French woman, Gabrielle Decaux. After the war, Andrew and Gabrielle Hopping remained with the Army in Europe, and their first daughter and son, Andree and Daniel, were born in France. They returned to the United States in 1923 to Cape Elizabeth, Maine, where Gabrielle Louise Hopping was born during the first of their many domestic military postings.

Brig. Gen. Andrew Hopping, who was chief of the Army Quartermaster Supply Division, was a 1935 graduate of Harvard Business School, and helped to coordinate supplies and operations for the war in the Pacific. After World War II, he was assigned to the Pentagon (when he purchased our house) but was later transferred to Japan and the Philippines, prompting the Hoppings to sell the house in 1947.

"George was a very, very good-looking young man," recalled Louise's sister Andree Hopping Shills, at 84 the oldest surviving family member. She cannot recall much else about Louise's brief courtship and marriage. But both Andree and Martha remember that the newly widowed Louise and her baby moved with the family in 1945 from Northwest Washington to Silver Spring. I reached Andree by telephone on a Sunday at her home in Winter Haven, Fla. I asked her if she had any recollection about the Silver Spring house. "I had my own room, like a bedroom-porch. It was upstairs and a very light room . . . and my sister's room, with the baby, was the room you had to walk through" to get to her own room, Andree said.

I told her that I was calling her from the very same room where Louise and her baby, George C. Oertel III, had lived. It is now my home office since we remodeled the upstairs and eliminated our little "sun room" where, it turns out, Andree used to sleep.

Andree and Martha, who were accustomed to moving constantly as a military family, both have hazy but warm memories of the house, which then was heated by a coal furnace that had to be fed by hand. The kids would help their mother with English, since she had only a rudimentary vocabulary with a heavy French accent. Their father, a gentle, quiet man at home, would sit in a chair in the living room and read aloud newspapers and novels to his wife, while she did household chores and ironing.

Two years after George Oertel's death, Louise remarried and moved to Florida with young Sandy, nicknamed for his bright blond hair. Louise took with her some keepsakes of her dead husband, but left behind others. "I'm sure they stored things in the attic and just forgot it," Andree said. "It's a shame."