BY KRISTA RAMSEY
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Independence Day means more than a three-day weekend to Bert Sells of Wyoming. It means more than picnics and good seats for fireworks. It means more than the idealized view of Colonial days as ruddy-cheeked, robust men with muskets and tricorn hats.
Bert Sells takes American independence personally. He has a right to. He can trace his family history back seven generations to two men who fought for it.
John Sells was a Pennsylvania soldier who left his young family to serve, and to die, at Valley Forge. George Eby, from New York, was one of about 100 men to brave hand-to-hand combat to drive the British from their fort at Stoney Point, on the Hudson River. He, too, did not survive.
"I don't have any of their writings, but what they felt, they felt strongly," he says of their sacrifice.
Fighting for a dream
Mr. Sells feels it, too, looking back at men who share his name or form his lineage. Men who left what they had, to fight for what could be. He knows that the fighting wasn't pretty back then. There were no smart bombs, no ground-to-air missiles. Enemies weren't blips on a radar screen, and there was no way to win a war at a distance.
"They didn't have the comfort of tanks and special uniforms. They wore tattered uniforms and were ready to get up in the middle of the night and fight," he says. "It's the readiness to defend their country, that's the important thing."
Minutemen is a name that has come to mean a great deal to Mr. Sells. In June, he was presented the Minuteman Award at the national conference of Sons of the American Revolution. It is the group's highest honor, given only to six members each year.
Mr. Sells earned it for his efforts to raise more than $1 million and recruit men for the 27,000-member organization, which preserves the memory of, and promotes interest in, the Revolutionary War and early American history. He received the award from his brother, George Sells of Albuquerque, N.M., a former Minuteman recipient.
Bert Sells is a longtime member of Sons of the American Revolution, whose members must prove they are descendants of a participant in the Revolutionary War. This year he has assumed a national role, as the group's treasurer general. At 81, he still does whatever he can for his club, traveling to national conferences and speaking to schoolchildren about their history. He wants Americans to know how their country was formed, and at what cost.
He wants them never to forget George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, towering figures of the Colonial age. And he wants to give them a reason to remember men like John Sells and George Eby, who gave their lives for a country -- and an ideal -- that was, for them, still a dream.
"What they did still stands," he says of those men.
'Extraordinary gifts'
Mr. Sells was never asked to give his life for his country, just to live in it daily in a decent and productive way.
He tried to sign up for World War II the day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Because he was an aircraft engineer, an industrial deferment kept him out. So he labored long and honorably in engineering, helping to design components for aircraft gas turbines. After a lifetime career at General Electric, he was inducted into the company's hall of fame for his work to make jet travel a reality.
His daughter, Mary Sells of Boston, describes her father as "an ordinary, patriotic man with extraordinary gifts for giving."
It is probably much the way John Sells and George Eby would like to be remembered, and perhaps George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as well.
There will always be something to be said for men and women who take pride in their country's history and contribute freely to their own times.
What they do, as Bert Sells knows, remains standing to the end.
Krista Ramsey's column appears on Saturdays. Write her at 312 Elm St., Cincinnati 45202.
RAMSEY ARCHIVE