One of Margot Clark-Junkins’s earliest memories was being drawn to her grandfather’s desk in Rye.
As a budding artist, she was entranced by his art supplies. Her grandfather, Sidney Olson, was a writer who published dispatches of World War II in Time and Life Magazines. He went on to write briefly for Hollywood and then pursue a highly successful advertising career. But when her grandfather died, her mother, Whitney O. Clark, opened the desk, and its contents took on a whole new meaning.
Inside, mother and daughter discovered a treasure trove of living history.
Slowly and over time, the dispatches and diary entries of Olson, who was one of the few World War II correspondents who followed the front, emerged, as did a picture of the 19-year-old war correspondent’s adventures. His stories of the war’s last 18 months included accounts of destruction, death, disarray, and despair, and were published in Time and Life magazines.
His daughter and granddaughter knew his story should be preserved for posterity. But the more they read, the more they knew that what they were seeing was information the whole world should see. The result is the recently published, “Following the Front — The Dispatches of World War II Correspondent Sidney A. Olson,” edited by Clark-Junkins.
Clark-Junkins and her mother were taken by the immediacy of her grandfather’s writing and his letters back to his family. “In this trip I will case the whole world … in the meantime, it’s a dark and miserable world and there’s not much fun anywhere,” he wrote.
In late December 1944, Olson crossed the Atlantic by boat, arriving in Scotland. He stayed in London for three or four weeks, visited two bomber groups outside of London, and then made his way to Time Inc.’s Paris office. From there he took a jeep and flew in short hops all over Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany, making it as far as Innsbruck in Austria, before racing back to Paris to see if he could witness the Nazi surrender at Reims. He was in Paris for VE Day, and he flew back to the U.S. by way of Newfoundland at the beginning of June 1945.
He was so spent by his experiences that he no longer wished to cover the war in the Pacific.
Clark-Junkins and her mother determined that they needed to collaborate to fully understand this body of work and make this history known.
They made a plan to meet at the dining room table once a week. “I lived a four-minute walk away from my mom,” said Clark-Junkins, who grew up in Rye and is an art historian who raised her family here. Her father, Allen M. Clark, was formerly a co-publisher of The Rye Record. She and her mom stuck to their plan for five years, meeting once a week.
As they unearthed the dispatches held in the desk for so many years, they were struck by the stories of battles, but also of life’s ordinariness.
“How could anyone help liking this noble old town and its kind people?” Olson wrote of his time in London. “Every night I set off to the theater, armed only with flashlight and a little nerve, and arrive safely through the dense fogs and the dim-out, usually under escort of bobbies, dogs and citizens, all intensely interested in helping me get wherever I want to get and thence safely home again. The great delight is to ask the most frigid-faced Londoner a direction, confessing absolute helplessness, and watch him thaw out until his glasses get all steamed up with cordiality, as he tells you exhaustively how to get there. The best phrase they use is: ‘Then you’ll come to a turning. Well, deny yourself that, and take the next turn.’”
Their project began as a way to preserve family history, but quickly evolved. “As an art historian, I knew about the importance and necessity of research,” Clark-Junkins said. During the pandemic, she followed the trail of Time Inc. papers donated to the New York Historical Society and Harvard University. And while the work was difficult because of Covid restrictions, she managed to find numbered dispatches that had been missing from her grandfather’s desk.
She shared “eureka moments” with her mom as they moved closer to putting “Following the Front” together.
One thing that struck Clark-Junkins and her mother was the reminder of what time really meant in that era. While Olson was right there, following the front, he was cut off from larger world news, even the news of his family. In his letters, he encouraged his family members to follow Time and Life magazines to see if any of his dispatches appeared. In today’s world of instant communication, the contrast was striking. Olson was living and reporting at the front, where history was made before it was reported.
In his diaries, he noted that he knew about the Manhattan Project as early as 1944; he stumbled upon the infamous stand-off between two tanks in front of Cologne’s cathedral, and in January, 1945, he was stuck in a frozen marsh in Holland, along with a dead soldier, while tanks fired at each other.
Each dispatch is a combination of the mundane — finding food, getting rest — and the difficult — traveling through war-torn Europe. In May, 1945, he wrote, “I arrived last night from Innsbruck after a long drive through the Alps, Harz and Vosges Mountains in a seven-passenger town car of best German make which a German Colonel was kind enough to surrender to me ….” That was followed by, “I saw the final surrender of the last group actually fighting American armies.”
In “Following the Front,” Clark-Junkins captured one of the most harrowing aspects of his work as war correspondent. The family knew that he had been with the first group allowed into Dachau Concentration Camp in Munich when it was liberated. In the book, his dispatches and diaries convey the grim scene for new generations to read. As his group entered the camp, he wrote, “They began to kiss us and there is nothing you can do when a lot of hysterical, lice-bitten half-drunk typhus-infected men want to kiss you. Nothing at all. It’s no good to explain that you’re only a correspondent.”
Clark-Junkins said that her work as an art historian helped her do the deep research needed to bring the dispatches together. She dreamed that new generations of students could learn from the chronicles of her grandfather, who was close friends with Time publisher Henry Luce and, as an ad executive, worked with Lee Iacocca on a team designing the Mustang.
The book is published by Rowan & Littlefield, a publisher with special interest in schools and libraries.
Sadly, Clark-Junkins’s mother and collaborator did not live to see the book published. The same day they learned the book would be published, she also found out that she had a terminal cancer diagnosis.
Together they savored the work and the legacy of their father and grandfather, who followed the front. As he wrote on April 26, 1945: “The Collapse of the Nazi Empire is a fantastic show. The spectacle is so massive, so rich with gargantuan ironies, with miseries, great and small, and so charged with terror and laughter that the words fail you. Surrounded by death, walking through the brick dust that once was historic, you find yourself chuckling at a drunken Russian who is solemnly trying to bicycle home to Russia (via France) loaded down with an enormous roll of fine dark worsted suiting. Many of the things you see are quite simply unbelievable. You can either clutch your Army haircut in despair or just ignore the whole staggering scene, much like the worrywart correspondent from the Midwest who goes through blazing ruins quite oblivious to the blood … anxiously seeking only the names of soldiers from Iowa.”
Clark-Junkins is glad that the child drawn to her grandfather’s desk and his art supplies became the adult, who with the help of her mom, unearthed never-before seen history and brought her grandfather and his dispatches from the front to future generations.
Clark-Junkins will discuss her grandfather’s dispatches and her book on Wednesday, Nov. 20 from 7 to 8 p.m. at the Rye Free Reading Room. Copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing.