Last week, I wrote a piece about my grandfather's experiences during World War II. It was a series of stories and anecdotes that were at times inspiring and at times horrifying, a narrative that saw my forebear escaping death too many times to count.
It was a tale of survival that I'd heard piecemeal all of my life, one that I'd finally formalized in my head into one single narrative when I'd read Ivan Goldstein's memoirs titled "Hard to Forget, Harder to Remember."
The article drew positive feedback from a wide range of friends and contacts, including family members, city contacts and the subject of the story, my grandfather.
As I was compiling info and finishing interviews for the weekly edition on Monday, I received a call from Lee Tulper, the owner of a jewelry shop in Denver.
He claimed connections to my elders.
"I was the delivery boy in your great-grandmother's jewelry shop," he said. "My father, Isadore, was the watchmaker."
Lee went on to say that he had known my grandfather; indeed, he had enlisted in the military with him at Fort Morgan, and he had been in a fraternity with him at the University of Denver.
Morgan had his own stories from the war, tales that he only hinted at during our brief conversation. He had trained to serve in the Pacific, but, like my grandfather, had ended up serving in the European theater. He'd witnessed horrors of his own, having liberated a concentration camp at the end of the war.
Though Tulper said he'd seen my grandfather years ago during one of his yearly trips through Denver, Lee said that he hadn't known the details of my grandfather's experience during the war or of his fate after their time together in college.
It was seeing my story, and the attached picture, that would provide an update.
In an age of immediate gratification in the news industry, in a media environment that seems to encourage second-by-second updates and similarly ephemeral content, the experience was a boon.
Connecting one of my own grandfather's old friends via the power of print was a ray of hope in a profession that's had its share of grim news during the past year.
The power of old-fashioned print reporting hasn't been obliterated entirely, it seems.
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