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The State of Missouri recently dedicated the Alex M. Petrovic Reading Room in the main floor of the State Archives in Jefferson City, a room named after my father.

In the mid 1960s my father, with the personal support of Harry Truman, as a member of the Missouri Legislature sponsored legislation to create the Missouri State Archives. Records management in Missouri prior to the State Archives was done by, as my father is fond of saying, periodic capitol fires. Recently, original documentation on the Dred Scott case was discovered among the Archive’s collections.

My father was part of the generation who went off to the far corners of the world to secure it against fascism, and when he and his contemporaries did so and came home, they went about their lives as if it was all in a day’s work. No complaints, no what’s in it for me, no inner child whining on endlessly in sea of bounty. We don’t have to read Homer or look at Brady photographs to find heroes: these men are still among us; they are our fathers.

Every Veteran’s Day I call him and tell him “Dad, thank you”.