A Secure Home

After an unseemly sale and the long pursuit to keep a promise to the mother of twin soldiers who were killed in action, a Western Illinois University alumna’s family has donated precious family heirloom World War II medals to WIU Archives to keep them safe once and for all.

by Teresa Koltzenburg

It was just before Veterans Day last year that a gratifying end to what Western Illinois University alumna Carol Armstrong Kuchan calls a “bitter story” was on the horizon. The tale begins in the early 1990s, with the selling of precious World War II family heirlooms, Purple Heart and Silver Star medals, awarded both, posthumously, to Ipava (IL) natives, Private First Class Otis “Bill” W. Vaughn and Sergeant Archie “Wid” W. Vaughn.

The Vaughn twins were Kuchan’s uncles, and they were killed, together, in action Sept. 11, 1944, near Verneville, France. The chronicle concludes, after a long, frustrating endeavor to get the medals back, with a kept promise — one that Kuchan made to her grandmother, her uncles’ mother — and with a secure home for the medals at the Western Illinois University Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections Unit.

In November 2010, Kuchan’s cousin, Allyson Vaughn, came across the missing medals during an online search she was conducting to find information about her father, Perry, who also fought in WWII. Kuchan said her cousin keyed in the phrase “twins, killed in action, Verneville, France” via an online search engine, and “up they popped — photos of the twins, displayed with their medals.” In the months between late fall 2010 and late spring this year, Kuchan and her family regained possession of the medals; the twins’ great nephew, Brian Huff, paid a collector $15,000 to get them back. On Memorial Day, Kuchan and her family announced the donation of the Vaughn twins’ Silver Star and Purple Heart medals to WIU Archives in a ceremony at American Legion Post 6 in Macomb.

“During the family comment section of the Memorial Day ceremony, my brother asked me to explain how we lost possession of the medals, and I said, ‘That is just such a bitter story, and I don’t want this to be a bitter day.’ Basically, the moral of the story is this is what happens when money comes into the picture. The medals were sold for $25 in 1991 by [an in-law], unbeknownst to any of us in our family until nearly a year after the sale. That’s why I decided if I ever got the whole collection together, it was immediately going to be put someplace safe, so I would never have to worry about this happening again,” she said.

In addition to the families’ donation of the medals, the collection includes the Vaughn twins’ obituary, photographs, memorial letters, citations from Franklin D. Roosevelt and Henry Stimson and other personal military items. Kuchan said it was her family’s long-standing connection to Western Illinois University that ultimately led them to choose WIU Archives as the safe and secure home for her uncles’ collection. Along with Kuchan, who graduated from WIU, many members of the Vaughn twins’ family attended and graduated from Western.

“My two sons Micah and Adam Kuchan graduated from Western, and my son Adam will complete his master’s degree in education at Western in December. Other family members who have graduated from Western include the twins’ great-nieces, Kim Armstrong-Vlad and Julianne Lindskog, as well as their great-nephew, Neil Armstrong. Their niece, Nancy Huff Lindskog, earned her master’s degree there, too. My husband, David, and my daughter, Kara, also attended Western, as did Brian Huff. So our family has a long association with the University,” she explained. “I am very grateful to Western for the education that my family and I received there.”

At the Memorial Day ceremony in Macomb, University Archivist Jeff Hancks accepted the collection on behalf of WIU. As of this month, with the remaining paperwork filed and the processing of the collection complete, the Vaughn twins’ medals and the record of their sacrifices have officially become part of the historical collection in WIU Archives, Hancks said.

“Our archives unit is dedicated to telling the history of our region, so when we come across truly unique stories like this one, we get excited,” Hancks explained. “When Carol called me and told me the story about her uncles’ deaths and the collection, she asked me if this was the kind of thing the WIU Archives would be interested in obtaining. While we don’t usually accept non-paper items — we encourage those to go to museums — we made an exception for this collection. We were interested because there are other materials to accompany the medals, including newspaper clippings; letters of sympathy from people living across the United States who read the story that ran via the Associated Press and other wire services back then; and other paper-based materials to give proper historical context to the medals.”

As for Kuchan, now that her uncles’ medals are secure in the WIU Archives, she finally has peace of mind knowing they will always be accessible to her family members, as well as to WIU students, history or military buffs or just members of the general public. She now has also fulfilled her vow to her grandmother, Mrs. Guy Vaughn, who was the mother of Bill and Wid Vaughn, and who Kuchan said asked her to keep the memory of her uncles and their sacrifices alive.

“As far as I know, they are the only twins killed together in action, so that’s a unique aspect in terms of a World War II story from our region. I also wanted students at my alma mater to be able to see the men who fought in The Red Diamond Division as real people and to get a sense of what WWII was like for the families of servicemen. All six of my grandparents’ sons served in World War II, and three were casualties,” Kuchan explained. “But most of all, I’ve been able to keep my promise to my grandmother, who used to say to me every Veterans and Memorial Day, ‘Don’t forget about my boys,’ and to my uncle, who had no idea the medals were taken from the collection before he entrusted it to me.”

The Western Illinois University Archives and Special Collections Unit is located in the Leslie F. Malpass Library, sixth floor, on the WIU-Macomb campus. The unit is open 8 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Mondays-Fridays. For more information, contact Hancks at (309) 298-2717 or via email at JL-Hancks@wiu.edu.

Author’s Note: This article appeared in an issue of “Western News,” the alumni publication of Western Illinois University, as well as on the website of Western Illinois University. I wrote it while I was employed at Western Illinois University in the department of University Relations.