By June Mathews
TRUSSVILLE — Donna Griffith remembers the date well. It was Aug. 13, 2005. She began the day at her job in the library at Paine Intermediate School. She ended it at an out-of-state funeral home, grieving the death of her father.
That morning she’d received a call from her stepmother, informing Griffith that her father had died at his home in Georgia and that his body was about to be cremated.
“I just thought I’d let you know,” the woman said.
When Griffith asked where he’d been taken, her stepmother was either unable or refused to give her the name of a funeral home. And while Griffith was unsure how long her father had been dead or how he’d died, she was certain that, if at all possible, she was going to see her father one more time.
“So I called (local funeral director) Jzyk Ennis, the only person I knew who knew anything about funeral stuff and told him what was going on,” she said. “Through his network, he found my dad and informed the funeral home that he had living relatives. So they put the cremation on hold.”
But if Griffith and her family wanted to see her father, they’d have to get there before the funeral home closed that afternoon. So Griffith, husband David, their three children and her brother hurriedly prepared to travel east.
By the time of her father’s death, Griffith’s parents had been divorced more than 20 years. Her father had remarried and gradually spent more time with his new wife’s family and less time with his own. But Griffith managed to stay in touch, and though he rarely told her he loved her, she knew he did.
“He was a man of few words, and usually if there was any affection initiated, it was someone else initiating it,” she said. “He might have said ‘I love you’ a dozen times, but there was always some goofiness going on. He’d stick out his tongue or make a funny face or some other off-the-wall stuff. He just wasn’t an outwardly affectionate person, but I knew our father-daughter relationship was secure.”
So when Griffith arrived in Georgia and learned there was to be “no funeral, no memorial, no obituary, no nothing,” for her father, she was heartsick. Though she and her family were ultimately able to pay their respects, not to pay tribute to him in some way didn’t seem right.
But she could get his service flag, she figured, a memorial his family was entitled to due to his service in the U.S. Air Force from 1951 to 1955.
Griffith, who once worked for the Veterans’ Administration, knew where to start but kept running into problems. First of all, her stepmother had failed to include any military information on the death certificate. Then the name on her father’s military records didn’t exactly match his name on the death certificate. Griffith was beginning to give up hope.
Then one day while volunteering with Trussville Fire & Rescue, she happened to mention her dilemma to Chief Russell Ledbetter, retired from the 117th Refueling Wing of the Alabama Air National Guard.
“I’ll get you that flag,” he promised.
“So I handed it all over to him then didn’t think a whole lot about it,” Griffith said. “I knew he was working on it, but I knew he’d have to do it when it was convenient.”
And she still wasn’t thinking a lot about it when her family threw her a surprise 50th birthday party last fall, and a big package turned up among the cards and gifts.
“It was my daddy’s service flag, and it was framed,” she said, tearing up at the memory, “and the glass on the front was etched with his service insignia and the dates of his service on it.”
But that wasn’t all. She was handed another big package, which turned out to be a framed display of duplicates of all her father’s medals and service bars.
“I knew they showed up on his records, but I never knew he was awarded with these things at some point. I’d never seen them,” she said. “I just boo-hooed, and everybody else was crying, too. They were the best gifts I could have received.”
Griffith will be paying tribute to her father, Al Santos, by sharing the mementoes of his military service at the Paine Intermediate Veteran’s Day Luncheon on Friday, Nov. 7.