For thirty years, I have been staring at a picture on my wall.

I was just a little boy when Mrs. Douglas McArthur handed me an 8"x10" manila envelope with an image of her husband signing the treaty ending WWII aboard the U.S.S. Missouri. (It is the this exact picture which my staff just scanned and placed above on this blog.)

Today, September 2, 2005, the picture (at least the original) is sixty years old.

Even then, I knew that this photograph, personally signed by the general himself and key members of his staff, would become one of my most precious possessions.

My father had been so impressed by the manly leadership of both McArthur and Churchill that he named me after both men (i.e., “Douglas Winston Phillips”). He also made it a point to create an opportunity for me to spend an afternoon with the great general’s widow at her home in Norfolk, Virginia.

I will never forget how Mrs. McArthur — a woman who was born in the nineteenth century, lived in the twentieth, and would die in the twenty-first — took such an interest in a little boy who was named after her beloved husband.