The bracelet: Wartime gift finally returned to family 68 years later
BY MARK KONKOL Writer at Large/ mkonkol@suntimes.com December 25, 2011 10:26PM
Updated: February 11, 2012 8:02AM
For 68 years, Dolores Wells Mistretta held on to a gift from a soldier she knew a lifetime ago — a golden bracelet of rectangular links fixed to a medallion with the initials “WJS” etched on it between angel wings.
In 1943, Army Lt. William “Bill” Sexton had asked her to keep the bracelet until he returned home from World War II. He shipped out, and she never saw or heard from him again. Now 90 and living in Fort Myers, Fla., Dolores found the bracelet tucked away in a box while packing to move with her husband to an assisted living apartment. It got her wondering about what ever happened to the young man — always laughing, always happy — who had befriended her family while stationed at Camp Shelby near her hometown of Hattiesburg, Miss. She thought Bill’s family might like to have his bracelet. But she didn’t know where to find them. All she remembered about Bill was that he came from Chicago.
a gentleman
William Joseph Sexton was born in Chicago on Feb. 12, 1918. His father worked for the telephone company. His mother was a homemaker. He had two brothers.
As a young man, Bill was an expert horseman. He even did some trick riding for crowds at the Chicago Amphitheatre. And not just on one horse. Bill would ride two horses, with one foot on each. Back then, he worked for a leather manufacturer and often wore spurs that jangled.
But Bill’s urban cowboy life ended in March 1941, when he was drafted by the U.S. Army to fight in World War II. Then 23, he got his draft notice on St. Patrick’s Day — two days before the date engraved on the bracelet. A year later, he was stationed at Camp Shelby, where he met Dolores’ mother. They became fast friends.
On the transatlantic voyage to London, soldiers weren’t allowed on the ship’s deck during daylight hours. Instead, Bill and his shipmates were given experimental radiation treatments intended as a sunlight supplement, he’d tell his family later. In England, Bill survived the German “buzz bombs” that wiped out entire London neighborhoods in June 1944 in retaliation for the D-Day invasion of Normandy. He was awarded the Bronze Star, though it’s not clear why or where he received it. Most of his duties at the “Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces” were classified, so he didn’t talk much with his family about what he had done there. He did tell them that the buzz bombings were the scariest days of his life. He kept “before” and “after” photos of war-torn London — and a few snapshots of the cocker spaniel he adopted while stationed there. As the Allied Forces pushed deeper into Europe, Bill was transferred to France. While serving there, he developed skin lesions blamed on infected sweat glands and was sent home for treatment. He was discharged from the Army on March 20, 1946, and settled back home — five years and three days after being drafted.
Dolores’ good life
Just before Halloween in 1943, shortly after Bill gave her the bracelet, Dolores was introduced to an Army medic from New York named Richard Mistretta, the son of a Manhattan grocer. They met just weeks before Mistretta would be deployed overseas. It was time enough for them to fall in love. On Jan. 1, 1944, they married.
While her new husband was overseas, Dolores, who’d served in the Women’s Army Corps, was discharged and returned to her parents’ home in Mississippi. She told her mother about the bracelet and asked her to keep it for Bill until he got back.
When Mistretta came home from the war, the couple moved to New York City, where he got a job as a supervisor at a meat company, and Dolores worked as a secretary at Valley Stream North High School on Long Island. They raised two children.
Dolores and her husband retired on the same day — Oct. 22, 1979 — and moved to Fort Myers.
After her mother died in 1981, Dolores returned to Hattiesburg to clear out the family home before it was sold. Her sister found the bracelet in a dresser drawer. She packed it up, took it home, put it in a box with her stamp collection and put it away, on a shelf, in a closet.
Not ‘a happy
person’
Back home, Bill moved his family to Skokie. He worked in the Loop for a time at the Harry Davies Molding Company, which made knobs, handles and ashtrays. At night, he took classes at Northwestern University.
He and his wife, Adele, had two daughters. He was promoted to manager of planning and controls and labor relations. But he wasn’t the same guy his wife knew before the war. In 1956, Bill and Adele divorced. The girls lived with their mother and didn’t see their father much.
Bill met nursing assistant Shirley Ann Turpin while getting treated for skin cancer lesions at Hines VA Hospital. They married and moved into a modest A-frame home in Logan Square. Bill was 40 when their son, also named Bill, was born. They went on to have two more children — a son, Tim, and a daughter, Kim. Bill was never home much. He worked full-time and took business classes at University of Chicago but never finished a master’s degree.
Some of Tim Sexton’s boyhood friends in Delavan would ask about his father’s face. “I told them it happened in the war,” Tim Sexton says. “Some kids were rude about it. Some parents were really nosy about it. Dad was very sensitive about it.”
In 1971, Bill got passed over for a promotion and quit his job. “My father was well-read and educated, but he thought he knew everything,” the younger Bill Sexton says. “He had trouble with bosses.”
In time, he found work as a janitor and bus driver for the Victor C. Newman Association, a charity that offered classes and job-training for mentally disabled people. Sometimes, he supervised people who packed fishing-tackle boxes that were sold at discount stores. He was overqualified but satisfied that he was helping people. “My dad loved teaching people things,” Tim Sexton says. But money was tight, and that caused tension at home. He stewed over the bad cards he felt life had dealt him and berated his wife for not keeping the house clean. To make ends meet, his wife took a job as an EKG technician at Illinois Masonic Hospital. She got promoted to supervisor, with a big raise. The money helped the family but bruised Bill’s ego. His pride — and his fondness for Ballantine Ale — made it tough to be around him. “My dad wasn’t a happy person,” says elder son Bill. “I don’t really remember him being really happy. He probably drank more than he should have.”
Tim resented them for that. He moved in with his father in an apartment. It created a bitterness between the siblings that still lingers.
Bill would go on to work at the driver’s license facility on Elston Avenue on the Northwest Side — a patronage job earned by volunteering as a 33rd Ward Republican precinct captain. Later, he got a job as state tax collector. He retired in 1981 and moved to Wisconsin.
He died in October 1982. He was 64.
‘A gift they’ll
never forget’
After Dolores found the bracelet, she searched the Internet for Bill but struck out. Her friends in Fort Myers, many of them Chicago natives, suggested she contact the Chicago Sun-Times. So Dolores stuffed some photos of Bill and a letter explaining things into a manila envelope. The first of Bill’s children to hear the story of their father’s bracelet was Kimberly Sexton Kunstman, who lives in McHenry. She confirmed her father’s identity by reading his Army serial number from a military document. For a few moments, she exuded the excitement of a lottery winner. It didn’t last. The end of Bill’s life, like the end of his second marriage, was a messy and traumatizing thing for his youngest children. His boys had argued about whether to sell their father’s ’79 Trans Am, who would have to pay the taxes on the summer home, and how they’d split up his jewelry, photos and Army memorabila. Kimberly says she “got nothing.”
“There’s just a lot of things between us, especially after our father died,” Tim says.
But it was time for Bill Sexton’s bracelet to go to his children. Dolores sent it to Chicago, asking a reporter to pass it along. “It’s been so long. I’m glad the bracelet is gone.”
On Dec. 16, though, when it was time for the siblings to come claim their father’s bracelet, only the older son, Bill, showed up. “Maybe it’s better this way,” he said. “No fights.”
“Thank you very much,” the son said out loud to the woman in the picture.
“It gives me another little piece of my dad I didn’t know because he was the way he was,” he said. “It’s nice to know he was happy at some point.”
For him, that was enough. On Dec. 17, he gave the bracelet to his sister so she would have something of her father’s life to remember him by and to cherish. Over beers, Tim Sexton had told his brother he agreed that their sister should have the bracelet. “I don’t think she deserves the bracelet,” he said later. “But it was easier to say it was fine. If I would have said what I really think, we would have got in an argument.” But he kept his lifetime of bitterness bottled up inside. He’s the most like his father that way.
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