philip's musings

My life has been greatly impacted by movies… (one of the ways I would scratch my itch to be a professional actor)… 🙂   Especially movies about WWII…. I talked about that on my Audie Murphy sketch… as I worked my way thru what I wrote back on 9/15,  I realized why I did not want to go to Korea or to Viet Nam… they were different kinds of wars… no longer protecting our country from the evil invaders… now the wars were fought with no intention of “winning them”… they were all offspring of the “Dark Coins”… political, economic or whatever… it was a whole different set of emotions that went along with those very different kinds of wars… glad I have stopped wrestling.

In 1970, the movie  “PATTON” was released… it won all the awards… I thought George C. Scott was totally inside Patton… both of them are my heroes…. think it’s time to watch it again….  🙂

Thomas McCloy was a very special man in my life, although I never had the pleasure of meeting him.  At 21 years of age he enlisted to serve his country in the U.S.Army… it was  November 16th, 1942 …he enlisted for the duration of the war plus 6 months.

He had met Mary Donaldson and they were married before he was shipped overseas, where he was part of a reconnaissance team for the rest of the war, serving with Patton in Europe till the war ended in 1945.  On July 3, 1944 Mary gave birth to their first child, a little girl they named Ellen Ann McCloy.  He never saw his daughter until he came home from the war.  Tragically, Thomas died of cancer in 1964 at age 43.

I met his daughter Ellen in 1967… we were married in 1969…  Thank you Thomas and Mary… your daughter has been the biggest blessing of my life.

This is my sketch of Lian’s self portrait that I posted yesterday…. hope you enjoy it as much as I did creating it…. 🙂

Our grand-daughter Lian will be my first attempt at sketching a heroine… Lian is an artist… and… has been at the top of the family list in pressing me to sketch… both initially back at Christmastime and then again at my last birthday party…

First I would like to begin by posting her own drawing… it is a magnificent self portrait she did… that I will be working from.

I will attempt later today and tomorrow, to sketch her from this self portrait… we shall see what that will look like…. but it will never compare to this….  🙂

Enough of the evil one…  it is a time for heroes… so let me begin with the man who had quite an impact on my life when I saw the movie  “To Hell and Back”  in 1955.

Once I watched it, I finally understood what I had been feeling from December 7, 1941 until V-J Day… for those 5 years, all I wanted to do was get old enough to enlist in the Marines and help defend our country against the Japanese invaders… Let me digress for a moment to explain  V-J Day, since so many people I have met during the past 30 years had no idea what I was referring to when I mentioned  “V-J Day”…

Although there have been many people I could have selected as the epitome of evil throughout the years… in my lifetime… this was the man who most exhibited the life of the evil one… one of Satan’s  darkest ‘coins’….

Here is the personification of our Father’s love… His Name is Jesus… He rules the “Coin” of the Kingdom of God…