Postmarked “Lordsburg, New Mexico”— Did an Italian POW really deserve incarceration in Lordsburg!?
**During the Second World War, a POW camp was located near Lordsburg, NM, 39 miles southwest of my hometown, Silver City. Lordsburg didn’t have a great reputation among some of us Silver Citians, who summed up their feelings about the small city with four words: “Lord, what a burg!”
Silver City sits virtually on the continental divide, at an official elevation of 5,895 feet, or 1,797 metres. It’s only a handful of miles from he boundary of the Gila National Forest, the national forest in the United States and the largest such forest, where towering ponderosa pines, aspen, and trout streams draw visitors from around the world. If they’re arriving from souther Arizona or California, they’ll have to Some of them have to drive
I went to Lordsburg several times in the early 1950s, usually with my dad, who went there regularly, but not because he wanted to on sales trips; he was in the office supply business
Mrs. Strachbein would have been the most likely of my high school teachers to mention the POW camp that was located near Lordsburg, New Mexico, She taught history at Silver High School, but I don’t recall learning anything about the Second World War from her, even though it had ended only 16 years before.**
It’s not as if Silver City wasn’t [em]involved[/em] in the war: Battery G of the 200th Coast ArtilleryDr. Leon Bower, who taught American history at Western New Mexico University, never seemed to get past the letters of John Adams, not that I actually paid listened to him — the pigeons on the roof outside the classroom window were a great deal more interesting. So it came as a surprise to me, several years **
Question: Why did the U.S.S.R. commemorate William Saroyan with a stamp?
Answer: Saroyan was born in Fresno, California in 1908, but his parents were Armenian. In 1991, when the U.S.S.R. issued the Saroyan stamp, Armenia was the Republic of Armenia, one of the twelve original republics that made up the Soviet Union when it was created in December, 1922.
