Baptism & Christening 101

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Arlington A. “Jim” Schuchart does not remember many details of his time in Germany in the 89th Infantry Division.

As he’s fond of saying, “that was a long time ago.”

But the 85-year-old World War II veteran recalls the day he got hold of a piece of German parachute with clarity, pride and a devilish smile.

Private First Class Schuchart was somewhere between Arnstadt and Kahla, Germany, the day his group captured a downed pilot.

“It was a little town. We were riding in a truck through Germany,” Schuchart said, seated at his dining-room table in his house on Race Track Road outside Abbottstown. “When a plane flew over and started strafing us.”

Understandably, the lineman and his comrades bailed out of the truck, taking cover in a ditch. Soon an Allied plane caught up with the Luftwaffe fighter.

“To this day I’ve never seen anything like it - the fight between those two planes,” he said. “Well, the Luftwaffe was shot down, and a parachute came down.”

Naturally, Schuchart’s group took the German prisoner, but Schuchart eyed the pilot’s parachute.

“I said, ‘Hell, I want that silk!’” Schuchart said. “And we weren’t supposed to do these things, but we did.”

So he grabbed a section of the parachute as a souvenir.

After returning to the states, Schuchart married in 1947, and his mother told him she wanted to make the silk into a baptismal dress and matching slip.

“She was a sewer,” Schuchart said of his mother.

The dress, a striking cream color with white embroidered flowers, could hardly be compared to a parachute.

And although Schuchart and his wife, Marie, had only boys, two of their three sons wore the heirloom.

Until recently, though, Schuchart forgot he had the dress. The heirloom sat in the Schucharts’ attic, wrapped in cloth and tissue paper, in a white department-store box with the words “Do Not Throw Away” scrawled across one corner in blue pen.

That’s Jim’s story, anyway. His wife Marie disagreed.

“No I knew where it was,” Marie Schuchart said scolding her husband.

Jim laughed and said, “all these years, you know.” Memory is a funny thing.

Add to the 50-odd years the dress has been in storage the fact the Schucharts moved from Hanover to Baltimore - and then to Abbottstown in 1984 - and it is not hard to see why Schuchart might have misplaced his memory of the dress.

But what to do with it?

“A lady up the hill said I should sell it on eBay,” Schuchart said, but he did not seem keen on selling the heirloom. “I want to take it to a special laundry.”

Or perhaps an antique dealer would know how to clean 52-year-old German parachute silk, he said.

“I’d hate to part with it,” Marie Schuchart said of the possibility of selling the dress.

Even if their children don’t plan on having more children, the Schucharts said they hoped to pass the dress along.

Marie Schuchart said she asked their children if they wanted the dress, but she has not yet heard back.

Contact Brendan West at bwest@eveningsun.com.

by BRENDAN WEST
Evening Sun Reporter
Evening Sun
Article Launched: 08/01/2007 08:48:9 AM EST
http://www.ydr.com/yorkcitysuburban/ci_6515742