- This event has passed.
February 24, 2021 @ 5:00 am - 6:00 pm
Park City Museum will host a Zoom Lecture called Letters from the Front: With the Ski Troops in Italy from January 1945 – July 1945 given by Sydney Williams on Wednesday, February 24th from 5-6 p.m. (MT). Please contact Diane Knispel to register for the lecture 435-574-9554 or email her at education@parkcityhistory.org.
Sydney Williams wrote a book called Dear Mary which was published by Bauhan Press in 2019 and is about letters his parents, Sydney M. Williams, Jr. and Mary Williams, wrote to each other during World War II. Sydney M. Williams, Jr. joined the American Army in 1944 and served in the 10th Mountain Division in Italy until his release in 1945. All during that time he wrote letters home to his beloved wife, Mary. The letters are personal, but important in a few ways. First, his father’s letters are an eye-witness account of what was happening on the ground, written by a 34-year-old, Harvard graduate, Army PFC and the father of four children. Second, his mother’s letters provide a sense of what was happening on the home front, interspersed with comments on the children and the animals (horses and goats) she had brought with her from their home in New Hampshire to her parents’ home in Connecticut.
Sydney Williams was born in January 1941 and remembers his father boarding the troop train in New Haven that would carry him to Texas where the 10th was then training. Sydney grew up in New Hampshire and graduated from the University of New Hampshire. He served in the U.S. Army Reserves and worked on Wall Street for forty-eight years, retiring in 2015. Sydney also has published two other books of essays, “One Man’s Family” and “Notes from Old Lyme.” Another book of essays, “Essays from Essex” is supposed to be published by Bauhan this fall. He has been married to his wife for fifty-six years and has three children and ten grandchildren.