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Welcome to Six Minute Stories, where you hear the writing of new voices and experienced writers whose submissions appear in the anthologies of the Personal Story Publishing Project. In our new season, you will hear stories from our 13th collection. Free find links to Six Minute Stories and to the Personal Story Publishing Project at randalljones.com Everybody loves a good story.
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We hope you enjoy this one. A Visit with Uncle Gilbert by Jennie Ford In 2018, I visited Florence, Italy. I was thinking of my dad's best friend, his brother Gilbert. Gilbert was two years older than my dad. During World War II, Gilbert was in Italy. During that era, Italy experienced two fascist authorities, first under Mussolini, then under German occupation. Italian partisans fought a persistent guerrilla warfare against the Fascists. Allied military forces worked their way slowly northward from their 1943 toehold in Sicily. The two anti fascist forces helped each other. In August 1944, partisans inside Florence fought occupying German forces while Allied forces outside of town also attacked. The Germans left the city. Today, sites of specific war atrocities are marked throughout Florence with plaques. Some memorials are embedded in the buildings and passageways with splashes of brightly colored marble designed to resemble the splashed blood from a machine gun. Death of a Part in the railway station. A sculpture formed of rails twisted together into a knot expresses that citizens will never again be shipped away to die in camps. Gilbert had intended to be a pilot during his military service. When he completed high school after 11th grade, his parents knew he could use a little more maturity. Soon Gilbert was attending the Citadel for an extra year of finishing school. Surely he was also fine tuning his jitterbugging and bar cruising in Charleston. When the war came, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. Gilbert washed out of pilot training because of poor depth perception, the army said. Daddy laughed. The army just didn't know that Gilbert's dancing and drinking didn't help him. The next morning on the airfield, however, the army did figure out that Gilbert was a great people person. They sent him to Oxnard, California. His job was to teach the Link Trainer, a ground based way for pilots to learn instrument navigation. Gilbert was a good teacher. He did well. Meanwhile, everyone wrote letters. My dad, Wills and Gilbert kept in touch about each other's activities. Their mom, Kapke also kept everyone in the know about family doings. Wills finished his extra year at a military academy, entered Clemson, turned 18 years old and began his own pilot training. Their two younger brothers also soon enlisted. Their stepfather, Papa, changed roles from being head of the County Selective Service Board to re entering the army himself. Gilbert heard about events around the world as the war continued. He was disquieted. Every day he trained men to go into combat, to risk their lives. Meanwhile, Gilbert sat comfortably in safety. This bothered him so much that he decided to transfer to a role that would send him into the military action. His supervisors tried to talk him out of it. They needed him, and the pilots needed Gilbert's training. But Gilbert insisted he could not send others into dangers that he was not willing to face himself. In early 1945, Gilbert arrived in Italy with his fellow bomber crew members, waiting to be sent on a mission. He wrote to Wills and to his mom, letting them know vaguely how it was in this new place, joking and asking for their news. On August 11, 2018, I took a taxi to the Florence American Cemetery on a small country road about 10 miles outside Florence. I read the taxi's meter and reached to pay the cost of the ride. The driver would not accept full payment. I did not understand why, but I saw he was firm in that point. We gestured because neither spoke the other's language. I thanked him, still not understanding his decision. At the cemetery, I sat with Gilbert's grave. I remembered how, even in his 90s, my father told stories about Gilbert. I noted who Gilbert's neighbors are now, in case I could learn something about their stories. I walked to the monument and the great campaign map that formed the cemetery's centerpiece memorial. I wondered about my grandmother's decision to have Gilbert buried here. Leaving the cemetery, I crossed the road to the bus stop sign. I flagged down the bus into town. I held out the €2 bus fare to the driver. He turned his head towards me, glanced at the coins in my extended hand, and shrugged his shoulder. He would not take the coins. He released the brake and the bus rolled along. I stood again, confounded, then thanked the driver, pocketed the coins, and found a seat. By chance, a few days later, as I wandered Florence, I looked up information about a memorial plaque. I learned that on August 11, 1944, Allied forces liberated Florence from German occupation. I had gone to the cemetery on August 11. The locals know that date. They honor it. They value it because it gave them freedoms that they live to this day. They do not forget the price. My uncle Gilbert paid his gift to them, his continual gift to me. Copyright 2026 Jenny Ford. Words and their friends fill Jenny's days. Sometimes they come in a well organized, dignified gathering so that Jenny can inquire about the spellings and meanings of the ones she hasn't met before. Other times, however, they spill out and fly by quickly, as if they flew out of the window of a speeding car. Jenny likes to imagine what those words might have been, try out using them and guessing their derivations. A fascinating thing is that you can rearrange words over and over, and Jenny keeps doing that. Every time out comes a different story. Real stories. Jenny shares her little post office box on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, with many words and hopes to keep on doing so.
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Thank you for listening to another six minute story. You can read them all in the 13 anthologies of the Personal Story Publishing Project. Find the link to our online store@randalljones.com
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that's R A N D E L
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L Jones dot com. There you can listen to over 500 stories shared through 13 seasons of our six minute stories podcast.
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And remember, everybody loves a good.