The Story Of The Bracelet
Everyone was always asking about the red bracelet Michael Jackson wore around his wrist. It was a friendship bracelet that was given to him, and he was told he had to wear it until it fell off.
He wanted to have a bracelet like it made to give to the crew of the This Is It tour to solidify the unity in the project and to remind us to heal the world.
Mid-June that year (2009), Michaels make-up/hair artist and dear friend of mine, Karen Faye came to me and asked if I would be interested in doing it.
I jumped at the chance, and quickly designed a piece made of silver and nylon, to look like the friendship bracelet he had requested. It said Heal The World on one side and Love, Michael on the other. Karen showed it to MJ and he love it! Unfortunately, soon after, the world suffered the enormous loss of this talented man.
Karen participated in the preparing of his body for burial. After he was lovingly dressed, she tied the bracelet he had chosen, around his ankle. I would like to do something here that might be special, personal and meaningful for you, his fans. I want to offer you a copy of the piece I made.
When I say copy, I mean that I have make another original, approximately the same size, and shape, with the same words. I will manufacture small batches of this caste silver and nylon bracelet for you. They will still be put together by hand, and with love.
A Wartime Gift Holds The Story Of A Man’s Life
Dolores Wells Mistretta packed up bits of her life she’d long ago tucked in closets and stacked on shelves, a lifetime of memories she could no longer carry with her.
The great-grandmother and her husband were soon to move from their condominium in Fort Myers, Fla., to an assisted-living apartment nearby. Their apartment would be pleasant but small. They wouldn’t be able to take everything with them.
So, over the last few months, she had meticulously sorted through her possessions, keeping the necessary and the precious, tossing the junk, selling the rest at a yard sale.
But one item didn’t fit any of those neat categories. On the top shelf of her bedroom closet, she found a box that held an almost-forgotten keepsake a golden bracelet crafted of rectangular links holding a medallion etched with the initials WJS. My God, Dolores said to herself on finding it. How long has it been? She dangled the gold-plated bracelet from her 90-year-old fingers and saw the date engraved on the back 3-19-41.
WJS was Army Lt. William J. Bill Sexton, a soldier who’d been stationed at Camp Shelby just outside her hometown of Harrisburg, Miss., in 1942. Dolores searched out a photo album that turned up snapshots of Bill one with the two of them playfully cuddling by an evergreen. In it, she wore a long skirt, a white blouse and a sheer scarf that hung loosely around her neck.
She was tugging on the rolled-up sleeve of Bill Sexton’s Army uniform. They both wore smiles as wide and sparkling as the rapids on the nearby Okatoma River. Bill squinted, happy, well, happy as anyone could be during wartime. Dolores thought about the man in the faded black-and-white photographs, wondered where he ended up, how his life changed after the war.
His old bracelet, like a lot of the things Dolores found packed away, was of no use to her anymore. But it might be, she thought, to him, if he somehow was still alive, or his family. “I didn’t know how I would ever find him, if he was even alive, she says now. I thought I might give it to his family. Wouldn’t that be nice?
When A Bunch Of Them Were Getting Sent Out
Dolores’ late mother, Julia Wells, had introduced her and Bill. Wells worked in the supply room of the Army base. She was a civilian seamstress, hemming pants and shortening sleeves for the uniforms of the newly enlisted men. Bill worked there, too.
On Sundays, Wells often invited him and other GIs over for supper Southern fried chicken, with lemon pie for dessert. Bill was a good-looking Irishman with slicked-back hair who always wore a fancy watch and a pinky ring.
He talked about riding horses back home in Chicago and the kind of life he might be leading if not for the war. He was always welcome at the Wells home for Sunday dinner.
On warm summer evenings, Bill would often escort Dolores and her sisters stunning in their formal dresses on the mile-long walk to the dances held at the USO. Dolores would go there every night but Sunday. Bill, with two left feet, never joined the girls inside. But sometimes, at the end of the night, the girls would find him sitting on the curb near the graveyard.
He knew we were afraid to walk by there, Dolores says. So he’d wait to walk us home and then catch the last bus back to Camp Shelby. She spent time alone with Bill just once a long stroll to the movie theater in town to catch a Sunday matinee. We weren’t dating, but it was kind of like a date, Dolores says. Afterwards, we stopped at a coffee shop for sandwiches and coffee.
Maybe he was sweet on me, but I was working too hard and liked to dance at the USO. I didn’t have time for boyfriends. Life moved quickly back then, she says. Courtships ended quickly. Love seemed unlikely. The only thing a girl from Harrisburg could count on was that boys from Camp Shelby were headed to war. Sometimes, they’d leave on the dawn train.
When a bunch of them were getting sent out, Dolores says, we would all go to the railroad track and wave to them. On June 10, 1943, Bill’s name was added to the muster roll of the USS Chateau Thierry, a Navy warship used to transport troops overseas. He was headed for London to serve with the Army Signal Corps at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces under Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower.
By then, Dolores had left home and enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps the WACs. She signed up because her father, a World War I veteran named Raymond Wells, wasn’t shy about telling her and her four sisters, If I had some boys, they’d all be in the military.
Before leaving the States, Bill returned to Chicago and married Adele R. Olson, a gal he knew from the neighborhood, at St. Angela Church in Austin on June 26, 1943. He was 25. She was 23. Dolores by then Private First Class Dolores Wells was stationed at Fort Devens in Massachusetts in 1943 when Bill came to see her. Their visit was short, friendly. The way she remembers it, Bill was shipping out from Boston the next day.
When it was time for him to leave, they shared a nice stroll to the gate. He stopped and gave me the bracelet and asked me if I’d keep it for him until he came back, Dolores says. Maybe he had intentions. If he did, I never caught on to it. I was 21. That was the last I saw of him. Never even got a letter. Now, so many years later, Dolores thought Bill’s family should have the bracelet. If only she could find them.
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