PRIVATE HATHAWAY COMES HOME

Decades after he was killed in World War II, a soldier is reunited with his family

- Steve Goldstein

It was just another day in November 1944 when 12-year-old Wilma Hathaway rode home on the school bus in Hinesburg, Vermont. Just another day, that is, until the driver shared with the children what he'd heard through the grapevine: Pvt. Alwin A. Hathaway-Wilma's older brother-was missing and presumed killed in action in Germany.

Every eye on the bus swept toward Wilma, whose face turned rigid with shock. When the bus reached her stop, she leaped out and ran into her house, where she saw the horror of affirmation in her mother's face; Lola Hathaway had received a telegram from the United States Army. Wilma dropped her books and ran out the back door into the woods.

As Wilma Hallock, nee Hathaway, recounted this long-ago memory from her daughter Starlene Poulin's home in Williston, Vermont, where she lives, the 90-year-old widow did the same thing she had done 78 years earlier: She shook with sobs.

Hallock describes her brother as "something of a daredevil" who had a tendency to "get into mischief."

"He was so tall. He used to walk me to school and taught me how to throw a fastball-which came in handy when I got mad," she recalls. "Alwin was a good brother."

Alwin was drafted in February 1942, "as soon as he turned 18," Hallock says. "My parents didn't want Hitler taking over-but they didn't want to give up their son, either."

Mother and daughter agreed that Pvt. Hathaway looked smart in his uniform, and Hallock says he had a serious girlfriend he met in England whom he intended to marry and bring home. But he never came home.

The wages of war are paid in blood, tears and body bags. Loved ones in their prime, once bursting with bravado, are sent home in flag-draped coffins. But what happens when Johnny is not marching home because he can't be found? When, as in the case of Pvt. Hathaway, he's presumed dead, but there is no body?