The Snyder-Wilson Connection: WWII and Today
The Roy Snyder family lived along the main road (now Minburn Road) west out of Minburn (near #6 on the map below) in the Raccoon River valley of Dallas County, Iowa.
The Clabe Wilson family lived south of the main road, half a mile on what is now Lexington Lane (near #7).
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During WWII their sons enlisted in different military services. After Delbert and Donald Wilson were married and attending a Naval School on the East Coast, Harold Snyder was in the Coast Guard was based in New York City. He’d met a girl at a roller skating rink in Brooklyn, and he married her. Harold hauled military freight up and down the Atlantic coast, so stopped in Washington, DC, to visit with the Wilson brothers, which they all wrote home about.
The summer of 1945, the Harold Snyders, with their one-year-old son, came home to see Harold’s folks.
The Wilson brothers’ sister, Doris, had married Warren Neal, and they also had a toddler. When Warren was sent to a base where families couldn’t go along, Doris and Joy returned to Iowa to stay with her parents, Clabe and Leora Wilson near Perry.
But they still visited with their former Minburn neighbors, the Roy Snyders.
One day they took photos of us toddlers together. Mom (Doris) had told me about the visit, that I’d lost my balance while holding a wooden block and hit the little Lee Snyder boy on the head.
Decades later, Lee’s wife Deanette sent me tiny copies of precious photos taken that day.
Photos taken at Snyders’ place, summer 1945. The two grandmothers are at the top right, Mrs. Snyder with her arms folded, talking with Leora Wilson.
The Snyders had two sons, Lee and Paul, who married two sisters, Deanette and Carolyn Ritzman, whose father Dean also served in the Army Air Corps during WWII.
Decades later Deanette and Lee Snyder made sure the Wilson family is remembered with a poster in the Forest Park Museum south of Perry (and north of the acreage which Clabe and Leora bought after all their sons had left to serve).
[image error]Deanette and Lee Snyder
[image error]Lee Snyder fabricated the stand for the Wilson family timeline display board when it was installed at the Forest Park Museum in 2018. Cousins’ widows, Elizabeth Wilson and Chris Scar, visited Forest Park Museum in 2019.
The two Snyder couples (both brothers served in the US Marines) were instrumental in making sure the Wilson brothers are remembered on the Dallas County Freedom Rock, which was dedicated at Minburn in October 2019.
[image error]Carolyn and Paul Snyder, Deanette and Lee Snyder with Paul and Carolyn’s granddaughters. Paul and Lee are both Marine Corps veterans.
