Kansas Snapshots by Gloria Freeland - May 16, 2025

The gift of serendipity

People who know us are aware husband Art handles the logistics for our trips - when we go, where we stay, airline tickets, and so on. But some are surprised by the answer, "I don't know," when they ask what we will be doing.

Planning is important, but we are big believers in leaving room for the delights fate sends our way.

While it was my choice to travel 3,000 miles from my Kansas home to Costa Rica for a job when I was in my 20s, how could I foresee meeting a fellow Kansan there who would become my first husband. It was just chance. Or how would I have planned for the fact that Jerome had an unknown and inoperable brain aneurism that took his life just six years after our marriage?

When Art was a young man, he was visiting friends in Kansas City. One day while they were working, he was exploring and became lost. When he stopped to sort out his situation, he noted he was near a college that had advertised needing an electronics instructor. With nothing else planned, he decided to check it out, but with absolutely zero intention of living in Kansas. That was 54 years ago and he's still here.

In 1991, Art, his mother, and I were heading to the Autobahn in the former East Germany when we saw a small sign near the road indicating the family nearby had rooms to rent. Because it was late and we were tired, we decided to give it a shot. How could we have known that decision would lead to exchange students and deep connections with three families?

Our friend Jo was looking for a retirement home in the country away from her life as a Chicago banker. When she was about to toss in the towel, she found what she was looking for. She named her new-found rural Wisconsin home "Serendip."

A person certainly doesn't want to go through life making decisions with no forethought, but our paths are heavily influenced by serendipity. The trick is to be ready for it and figure out how to react to it.

Those previous examples led to life-changing outcomes. But others are more like flipping through TV channels and finding an agreeable program. Life is changed, but just briefly. I recently had one of these latter experiences that involved connecting two parts of my life that seemed quite unrelated.

One part began on a mid-spring Friday afternoon in 2008. It was approaching 5 p.m. and Kedzie Hall, where my university office was located, was nearly deserted. Two strangers, Harold and his daughter Kay, passed my door.

"Let’s ask her," he said.

What followed became the substance of my next column. In summary, Harold's brother Stanley had graduated from Kansas State University's journalism department before World War II. He became a bomber pilot, but didn't return from a May 10, 1944 mission over Austria. Some of the men bailed out of the damaged plane, but Stanley's fate was unknown, so he was listed as MIA - "missing in action."

Being in limbo was painful for the parents, a pain probably intensified by Harold also being a pilot. To avoid the pain, they avoided speaking about it while waiting and hoping. This may seem strange, but was a fairly common reaction. Even when Harold returned from the war, the silence persisted.

After all prisoners came home and Stanley wasn't among them, they knew he had died, yet the silence had become a habit - a way of dealing with a painful truth.

It wasn't until Kay, now a grown woman, was helping with a family clean-up and stumbled upon a trunk of Stanley's things that she learned she had an uncle she never knew. The visit to K-State was to find the memorial for Stanley and the other department graduates who had died in the war.

Learning about Stanley became a bit of an obsession for Kay. She contacted the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), whose mission is to account for all missing service members from this country's previous wars. In 2006, the location of Stanley's crash was chosen for excavation. Harold, his wife, Kay and other family members traveled to Austria, watching as the recovery team sifted through the site.

Stanley was not found, but artifacts - including a dime from Stanley's birth year of 1916 - verified it was his plane and it was clear he had gone down with it. As often happens in life, family members didn't get everything they wanted, but they got enough.

Kay would later write a book about the uncle she never knew. "Searching for Stanley: Unforgotten Hero of World War II" was published in 2011.

In about 2015, Art began a project accumulating basic information on all 300-plus fellows with Riley County connections who had perished in the war. That meant Stanley was among them.

He periodically goes through the list, looking for new information. Recently, when he came to Stanley's file, the place name Neukirchen jumped out at him. But why had it not caught his attention earlier?

The answer relates to the fall of 2023, when we and two friends rented a place in Payerbach, Austria as a base to explore Vienna and the area nearby. One day, quite on a whim, Art suggested we explore the mountains nearby. Near the end of our wandering was a village of a few homes: Vostenhof - Vostenhof by Neukirchen.

It meant nothing to us then. But 17 months later, while Art was looking through Stanley's file, there it was - the place Stanley's plane had crashed, the place the family had traveled to honor their long-gone son and uncle.

This quite-by-chance convergence of two tales - one about a foray into the beautiful mountains near Payerbach and another about a family and its loss - didn't change our life in any material way. Yet its unplanned nature somehow made it feel a bit magical and caused us to pause and reflect on both in a different way than if it had arisen by careful planning. That feeling was another small gift of serendipity.