I am a Professor Emeritus at Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In 2014 I established the Norman Lane Jr. Memorial Project (https://www.normanlanejrmemorialproject.org/), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to the memory of Marine 1st Lt. Norman Lane, a cousin who was killed in action in Vietnam on March 29, 1968. A Vanderbilt University graduate who was an outstanding student in the inaugural 1961 term of the Vanderbilt-in-France program, Norman attended law school at Vanderbilt for three years before opting to teach high school in my hometown of Brownsville, Tennessee, 60 miles from Memphis. In late August 1966, he entered Marine Corps Officer Candidates School at Quantico. He died in an enemy mortar attack on a Marine installation in Quang Tri Province, exactly one year after he graduated with The Basic School class 3-67 at Quantico.

In 2023 I published my biography of Lt. Lane, titled "A Time Past, Or What Might Have
Been . . . The Odyssey of Norman Lane" (https://book.normanlanejrmemorialproject.org/ and https://amzn.to/3neTfyK). As the noted author Carol Weston wrote in her review, “A TIME PAST, OR WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN… chronicles Norman’s too-short life and is both illuminating and heartbreaking. Professor Al Claiborne has written a wonderful biography that shines a bright light on a dark and devastating time in our shared history.” I produced a complementary nine-minute video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFsTxNDJjPk), “Finding Norman Lane: An Author’s Personal Odyssey,” that describes the nine-year research journey that led to the book.

A second major research project, “Owen Burgess, the 390th Bombardment Group (H), and ‘Old Memories,’” began in October 2019. An annotated index to the first 16 installments in this continuing series can be viewed here: https://tinyurl.com/Index-Parts-I-to-XVI. Owen Burgess was editor of the weekly Brownsville newspaper for more than 20 years, and the Burgesses were great family friends. But in his youth 1st Lt. Owen Burgess, Army Air Forces, served as navigator with a B-17 Flying Fortress crew that flew into battle over Germany and occupied Europe in the summer and early fall of 1943. Shot down over Germany that October, Lt. Burgess spent 19 months in two POW camps. The two most recent stories focus on the 8th Air Force missions to Münster, Germany (October 10, 1943) and Dresden (February 13-15, 1945) and can be read at http://tinyurl.com/October-10-1943 and http://tinyurl.com/February-13-15-1945, respectively. The project provides an excellent written complement to the Masters of the Air Apple TV miniseries (https://tinyurl.com/MotA-Apple-TV) that premiered over January-March 2024.

The year 2024 brought the stories of several family members who served in World War II to the forefront, and I produced four videos in that context. Three serve as memorial tributes to young men who died in that war, all during 1944: 2nd Lt. Glen Ferguson, the husband of my mother’s first cousin Helen Thornton (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slZiE1bkuL0), T/4 Robert Claiborne, my father’s closest brother (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbSL8jhm_Tw), and Tech. Sgt. Marion Thornton Jr., my mother’s closest first cousin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1oIn3cqaZY). A fourth video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rwh6ZVNhBg) provides an homage to Paul Windrow of Brownsville and several of his good friends, all of whom served in the war.