Now available: Hardcover edition of Wintercut

My father and I began writing this book shortly after the birth of my first child, Samantha. Dad was facing the prospect of soon losing his eyesight to glaucoma. He intended, through the telling of these stories, to pass on some of our family history while still able to do so. Samantha was the fourth Sam Damren in a heritage that then stretched over nearly one hundred and thirty years. Dad was forty-four when I was born. His father was in his mid-fifties at Dad’s birth. I was twenty-nine when Samantha arrived. To my mind, the writing of these stories would connect family bonds that had their gestation in the Civil War.

Dad’s life was a rollercoaster of events. His father, Samuel Gilbert Damren, was a wealthy Maine businessman. Dad was the last of five children from his father’s two marriages. He was born in 1906 in Auburn. Despite a nearly fatal childhood illness, as a young man Dad became an accomplished athlete. In the 1920s, he was recruited by Ohio State as a running back for their football team. In his first starting season, an opposing lineman stepped on his ankle, severing his Achilles tendon, and so ending his athletic career. Instead of continuing his college studies, Dad moved back east. He became a professional musician and played trumpet with the Ziegfield Follies, Rudy Vallee and with the Beauparlant Orchestra. I still have some of his recordings. The family business, comprised of lumber, box factories and home construction, survived the Crash of 1929. A few years later, as a result of a scheme of wide-scale embezzlement by certain relatives assisted, as it later turned out, by a local judge, the family’s wealth was irretrievably lost. Dad quit the music business. Through social and political connections, he became an official with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. As a self- taught auditor, he rose in the ranks of the RFC and became friends with many in the Washington crowd. Years later, when I was growing up in Ann Arbor, Dad at times received calls from U.S. Senators and Congressmen whom he had first met in the 1930s.

At the onset of World War II, Dad joined the Red Cross and traveled to London where he remained throughout the war. Ostensibly, he was a Red Cross official. Secretly, he worked for the government. As a part of these activities, Dad arranged for, and delivered, shipments of currency to the French Resistance. He also assisted English security personnel in the selection of locations outside of London for a number of high level meetings between Allied political and military leaders. His own residence in London was utilized for similar meetings. Through these assignments and others, Dad came into contact with many of the political and military leaders of the times. Of more direct importance to family history, he met my mother. She was a farm girl from Michigan. Like him, she was also a Red Cross volunteer. Dad left government services after the War. He and Mom married and moved to Ann Arbor in the late 1940s where they started life anew. I was born in 1950.

Despite the breadth of his experience, when Dad decided to provide some family history for his grandchildren, he did not choose to talk about athletics, life as a professional musician, Washington insider stuff or the War Years in London. Instead, I learned that the events that raced, and greatly defined, his life, were those which occurred long ago in Maine. It is these events, and the confidences he kept for decades, that are recounted in Wintercut.