While we were down in Mobile, we enjoyed a cool couple of hours in the Cotton City Antiques Mall.
I found some wonderfully hideous black-velvet paint-by-numbers of deer in the wilderness, a replacement butter dish in my favored Criss-Cross pattern (Laura actually found it), and an old book of Ghastly Ghost Stories, to broaden my campfire-stories repertoire.
But the best antique in the place was Dr. Sidney Phillips, aka Sid Phillips of Ken Burns’s The War and HBO’s The Pacific. He’s delightedly showing Laura where he is, in the photo on the title page of his book, You’ll Be Sor-ree! (He’s peeing in a bush, with his back to the camera! Right there, under the Y.) The photo was taken in 1942, while the U.S. Marines were resting in the field during the Guadalcanal campaign. Sid was only 17 years old.
Dr. Phillips also walked us through a vintage photo of his band of brothers, which was in the newspaper earlier that that week: “He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s mostly dead. Hell, they’re all dead,” he laughed. Yes, he laughed.
And he signed a copy of his book for our nephew Rollie, who is on an unwavering course for the Marines, as soon as he finishes college.
Can you read his inscription?
To Rollie — An American Patriot — 2 Timothy 1:7.
For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.
Semper Fi, Rollie.
ginnygram 
Rollie is reading it now and just a little stupefied that Doctor Phillips grew up here. All the talk about riding his bike around local sites just sort of amazes him. He was a wonderful man to meet, maybe I’ll be lucky enough to run into him again!