Mission accomplished: First Lutheran 8th-graders find soldier’s relatives

For some students, history class tends to be among the least exciting. “Why do we have to learn about old, dead people?” “There’s no point in learning history—it already happened,” are a couple of recycled cliches that reflects students’ aversion to history. “(History) was just another class,” said Dean Scheele, principal and teacher at First Lutheran School in Glencoe.
That was before Scheele shattered that notion with his eighth-grade students after finding a World War II-era letter addressed to his father that he found filed away in a trunk with other remnants and documents from his dad’s time in the war. He found the letter 19 years ago, and decided it was time to do something more with it.
The handwritten letter inks an historical tragedy all too common for 400,000 World War II families: a mother mourning the loss of her son, looking for answers about the events and details leading to his death.
The author, Ruth Givens, wrote the letter mourning her son, Don Givens, who was killed in a training incident in Los Angeles after returning from co-piloting 30 combat missions in the South Pacific. The letter is dated April 17, 1945 — just five months before the official end of the war — and addressed to Dean Scheele’s father, Marvin Scheele, who was a friend and last remaining crewman to Don Givens.
Don Givens and Marvin Scheele worked closely, as Givens was a co-pilot and Scheele was a navigator for the 7th Army Air Force 11th Bombardment Group Heavy. They flew on a B-24 Liberator aircraft named “Sexy Sue II Mother of Ten” named after the primary pilot’s daughter.
For more about the students' efforts to find relatives of Don Givens, see the April 25 print edition of The Chronicle.