By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
A regional author has penned a World War II book with a twist.
Glory Fagan’s book, Victory Vignettes and Voices, takes its jumping off point from the little-known Victory Vertical Project by the Steinway Piano Company, which shipped small, upright pianos to the GIs for entertainment during their down time.
“I found out that even my friends who were history teachers and historians knew nothing of this Victory Vertical Project,” Fagan tells KFEQ/St. Joseph Post during a recent book signing event at the Story Collective in downtown St. Joseph.
The Steinway Piano Company of Queens, New York tells the story of the Victory Vertical Project in a special website. The company shipped, even air dropped, small, lightweight, inexpensive upright pianos to soldiers and sailors in every theater of World War II to “improve morale and strengthen resolve.” The packages included sheet music and instructions on tuning. By the end of the war, Steinway had shipped 2,436 Victory Vertical pianos to three continents in olive drab or battleship gray.
Fagan, who lives in Cameron, began her research, some of which was very personal.
“And I reached out to lots of family and friends and they sent me stories of the veterans, their loved ones. So, I was able to weave all those together,” Fagan says. “I kind of likened it to a 20,000 piece jigsaw puzzle without a picture, because I had all these disparate pieces that I wanted to weave together. But music is kind of the uniting theme.”
Fagan uses bits and pieces from some sources to create fictionalized, composite characters. She weaves those with true accounts in the book to flesh out a story about World War II previously unearthed. Fagan says the focus is the Steinway program, but the overall theme is simply music.
“I also learned the stories of my family and friends, the stories that they had that they wanted to share before those are lost,” Fagan says, “because so many of the veterans are gone and even their children and grandchildren are aging."
Some stories hit close to home, very close.
“My own grandfather, I learned so much about his service after he died when we found some paperwork of all these things that he never spoke of, never spoke of, and he was at the Battle of the Bulge.”
That is a secondary theme of the book, telling the stories of veterans so reluctant to speak about the war. Fagan feels a sense of urgency to record those stories, before they are lost.
“There’s a gentleman here in St. Joe, Tommy Taylor, who turns 100 years old (Saturday) and I interviewed him,” Fagan says. “So, his story is in the book; not fictionalized, but as a true story.”
There are also the stories of Thomas Jurjevich and Theodore “Ted” Schoon in the book; all stories of veterans Fagan has preserved for future generations.
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