Word: abbotts
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...first American prisoners of war will be home this week; others must wait a little longer. As families prepared for the happy and difficult reunions to come, TIME Correspondent Christopher Byron visited the home of Air Force Major Joseph Abbott in Alloway, N.J. There Joan Abbott and her seven children, who appear on this week's TIME cover as symbols of a moving national moment, were getting ready for his homecoming. Byron's report...
...youngest Abbott, Matthew, now six, was born a week before his father shipped out to Thailand in 1966. He knows from his older brother Joseph, 13, and his sisters Joan, 16, and Dorothy, 14, that Daddy made good snowballs, "hard packed ones that wouldn't fly apart in the wind...
...years have passed. It is a long time in which to keep memories alive through various stages of interest (and lack of interest, for that is the way of even the most loving children). Joan Abbott has done it well, pretty much alone. "Joe and I agreed when we got married that I'd be a real mother -so that's what I'm doing...
Joan and Joe Abbott bought this seven-room house in August 1966, just before Matthew was born. Joe left behind an unfinished project-a willow tree to be planted in the backyard. After he was gone, Joan turned it into a family test of hope. They tried many times to get a willow to take root. The trees kept dying. Finally, two years ago a root took. The omen was, of course, good...
Despite her busy days, Joan Abbott remembers the first 2/2 years after Joe's capture, when he was neither dead nor alive, just M.I.A. She remembers November 1969, when an antiwar group brought back a list of prisoners from Hanoi and Joe was recalled to life as a P.O.W. She saw Joe on television then, being paraded before microphones in Hanoi. Most of all, she remembers the whiplash of last fall, when peace was at hand and then suddenly the hand was gone. Before that promise faded again for a while, Joan decided Joe would be home before Christmas...