Mary Catherine “Katie” Wilifred “Winnie” Higdon was one of two younger sisters of Uncle Ted. He wrote many letters to Winnie while he was serving in the U.S. Army in World War II. Winnie saved his letters to her. Winnie also saved Uncle Ted’s reinterment flag and his dog tags. Katie died, and several years later, Cy Zinner, Katie’s husband, died as well. Katie & Cy’s daughter Jill Zinner brought these family heirlooms with her to her new house in Louisville, Kentucky, after cleaning out and boxing up personal effects from her parents house when Cy died.
My wife Nell and I visited Jill’s house several years later, and Jill and I went through about 20 boxes of stored materials in her basement looking for the memorabilia in the first image below, except for the photograph. For this online memorial to Uncle Ted, I scanned and read all 19 letters we had at the time and transcribed those letters into a very easy to read format by typing them. The I.D. dog tags were already saved in a plastic case by Winnie. The reinterment flag was in relatively good shape, but had some damage due to age and some damage due to insects. The photograph was scanned and sent to me by Robert “Bob” Higdon about a year later. I did a little clean up work on the scan and verified that it was Thomas Theodore “Ted” Higdon and his two younger sisters. For more details on each of the family heirlooms, click on the photo image thumbnails below.
Jill’s plans for these memorabilia are to display them on a wall in a room she is renovating in her house to be her home office. As she gets older, she is driving less and doing medical consulting through tele-medicine connections.
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