r/OldSchoolCool

Photo by Jean-Marie Périer at Long Island Airport. James Brown became the first African American to own a private jet when he purchased a Learjet 23 in 1966 for $713,000.

This is my father, T/Sgt. Burton "Pat" Christenson of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne.

His wartime service would later be immortalized in Stephen Ambrose's Band of Brothers and the HBO miniseries, where he was portrayed by Michael Fassbender.

But when this photograph was taken, none of that existed.

The war was finally over.

He had spent more than three years overseas.

He had jumped into Normandy behind Dick Winters.

Fought through Holland.

Survived Bastogne.

Entered Germany.

Helped liberate one of the Kaufering concentration camps.

And stood on Hitler's Eagle's Nest.

Then he came home.

He took off the uniform and quietly returned to the same job he had left in 1942, climbing telephone poles and splicing cables for the telephone company.

He married my mother, raised three sons, and almost never spoke about himself.

But after dinner, something remarkable happened.

Night after night, for nearly forty years, he sat alone at a drawing board surrounded by wartime journals, military maps, photographs, and reference books, painstakingly reconstructing the war exactly as he remembered it.

If a date didn't match...

If a road wasn't quite right...

If one detail couldn't be reconciled...

He simply kept researching until he found the answer.

He wasn't trying to become famous.

He was trying to leave an honest record before the men who remembered those days were gone.

By the time he finished, he had created forty-six combat drawings that Stephen Ambrose described as "almost priceless." Dick Winters thought so highly of them that he had copies enlarged and sent to the Band of Brothers production team as historical reference while the series was being developed.

Growing up, I just knew him as Dad.

Looking back now, I realize the greatest lesson he ever taught me wasn't about war.

It was about humility.

He never believed that what he had done made him extraordinary.

He believed that remembering it accurately was simply his responsibility.

Sometimes I wonder how many extraordinary people we've all walked past without ever knowing what they carried with them.

Photo by photojournalist Lee Lockwood in Havana, Cuba, 1965. At the time, the Beatles' music was banned from Cuban radio and television.

Photograph by Boris Lipnitzki

This was against Chris Evert-Lloyd, a 18 times Grand Slam winner, at the WTA Hilton Head Island 1986.

In 1988 she won World Athlete of the Year after completing her historic Golden Slam by winning all four Grand Slam titles and Olympic gold in the same calendar year, which no athlete has ever been able to achieve since.*

* Serena Williams, Rafael Nadal, Andre Agassi (her husband) and Novak Djokovic have achieved a Golden Slam over the course of their careers, but not all in the same year.

Photo by J. Dutkevych. Yabluniv is located in the Kosiv District, Ivano-Frankivsk region.