DIXFIELD – A Jehovah’s Witness living in New Jersey recently helped two Maine sisters learn more about their brother, who died in Europe in World War II.

In the process, he also helped a Florida friend find some peace.

Howard Liverance, the Jehovah’s Witness, found the sisters through an Internet search, but along the way the Dixfield librarian, the Bible, a shoe box and an aging photo inscribed “To Jim” all played a role.

Sisters Frances Carlton of Dixfield and Hazel Kennedy of Mexico met with Liverance Oct. 18, a meeting that seemed destined from the start.

“I was tickled to death,” said Kennedy when she learned that her brother’s old friend wanted to contact them. “But I thought, ‘Why wait until you’re 81 years old to go looking for us?'”

Here’s how it happened.

Liverance met Jim Saunders, 80, of Palm Harbor, Fla., in 2001 as part of his religious work. As a Jehovah’s Witness, “We’re pretty much known for our random, house-to-house preaching efforts,” Liverance said.

A friendship ensued. Last year, while talking with Saunders, Liverance was sharing some Bible verses dealing with Jesus resurrecting his friend Lazarus.

Liverance asked Saunders if – outside of Saunders’ wife, who had died eight years earlier – there were anyone Saunders would like to see again.

“I will never forget his reaction,” Liverance said.

Saunders pulled out a “shoe box full of whatnots” in which he found a small photo portrait, “clearly an airman who couldn’t have been more than 21 or 22,” Liverance said.

The photo was inscribed “To Jim” and signed “Don.”

The photograph was taken shortly before the death of Donald Savage of Dixfield. Savage’s death occurred just two months after the two men began their overseas tour of duty as B-17 gunners.

Liverance said Saunders told him the man in the photo was from Dixfield, Maine, and that the two had known each other for a year and a half after enlisting in September 1942 and “had become real tight.”

He learned Saunders had longed to reconcile the loss of his best friend by finding Savage’s parents or sisters.

Liverance said it was the photograph of Savage wearing his aviator’s helmet, goggles and leather jacket that led him to try to help fulfill the ill veteran’s wish.

“I was transfixed by the image of the kid in that picture. It was your typical head shot, but what really put the ‘hoo’ in me was the old-style flyer’s headpiece with the flappy wing things on the sides. And the way it made him look older, just like in all the war pictures,” he said.

Meeting the sisters

At his Clearwater home, Liverance looked up Dixfield in his road atlas, then later did an Internet search.

From the Dixfield site, Liverance learned town librarian Justina Nazar’s e-mail address. He wrote her to ask if she had any information about Savage or his surviving relatives.

“From then on, within 48 hours, you wouldn’t believe what took place,” said Frances Carlton.

The librarian got in touch with an exuberant Carlton, who phoned a stunned Liverance, and, later, a very excited Saunders.

“I still have to pinch myself at times,” Liverance said. “It’s like the Twilight Zone meets reality TV,” he said.

Since then Carlton, 80, and Kennedy, 85, have become fast friends with Liverance and Saunders.

Liverance, who moved to New Jersey to care for his ill parents, visited the sisters on Oct. 18, spending the day with them in Dixfield.

But it was through Saunders that they learned more about their brother, Air Force Staff Sgt. Donald Savage, who not only was a B-17 gunner but also a B-17 and B-29 bomber pilot.

The connection with Saunders has also inspired the two women to learn more about their brother’s short military life. Carlton has a small shrine of photographs and mementos of her brother in a bay window at her Main Street home. This fall Hazel Kennedy has busied herself in researching her brother’s life. Her goal: to write his history for her children by reading his war diary and old letters.

Down in Holland

On Oct. 29, 1943, 13 days before he died, Savage was stationed with the 8th Air Force, 94th Bomb Group, 331st Heavy Bombardment Squadron. In a letter to his mother that day, Donald Savage wrote, “I’m all right, and I’m coming home when my 25 missions are over with.”

Savage’s former B-17 crew with another squadron had been lost on an earlier mission, a mission that Savage missed because of a sinus infection.

That’s why on Nov. 11, 1943, he went out on a 331st Squadron mission in a B-17.

Although Savage’s parents initially received an Air Force telegram telling them their son was reported as missing in action over Germany in 1943, it wasn’t until Jan. 17, 1944, that they learned he had been killed in air combat.

A letter in 1945 from one of Savage’s crewmen, a prisoner of war who survived the plane downing, told the sisters their brother had gone to the plane’s radio room without his parachute after being wounded.

The letter writer, Lt. Robert Buker of Sandusky, Ohio, said Savage was told to go get his chute on, but before he could, an explosion wracked the plane, blowing everyone out of it except Savage and pilot Robert O’Hara.

The plane glided into Holland, crashing into a canal, where O’Hara and Savage were fished out by the Germans, Carlton said. Both sisters have visited their brother’s grave in the all-American Margaten Cemetery in Maastricht, Holland, since the war.

Neither they nor Saunders believe their health will let these three meet in person, although all desire to do so.

As for Liverance, he enjoys his role in the reunion and says he will always see the face from the photographic portrait, a young man from small-town America who went to war.

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