The portrait of a World War II soldier.
(Two, actually, but wait.)
A black and white photo with “Florence Govern, George Weitz, January, 1945” written on the back.
A call from the Cobleskill Wal-Mart parking lot.
And Kate Weaver, a dogged SUNY Cobleskill employee who finally pulled it all together for a reunion Thursday, that really?
Left the biggest mystery still a mystery:
What were Florence Govern and George Weitz to each other and why did Ms. Govern have a portrait of Mr. Weitz (two, actually) tucked away in the basement of her West Main Street, Stamford home?
Rob and Kay Noxon have been looking for that answer since even before 2017, when Ms. Govern–Ms. Noxon’s Aunt Florence–died.
As Mr. Noxon told the story Thursday, he and his wife found the mystery portrait(s) when they were helping Aunt Florence clean out her home before her move to Robinson Terrace and then, their home in Florida.
Aunt Florence identified the man in the painting as George Weitz and left it at that, Mr. Noxon said; it wasn’t until after her death that they found the black and white photo of the two of them in her papers--“They look awfully happy, don’t they?”--and then found Mr. Weitz’s photo in a 1937 SUNY Cobleskill yearbook that Aunt Florence had also kept.
With not much more than that to go on, Mr. Noxon said he was sitting outside the Cobleskill Wal-Mart last summer–he’s from Roseboom and they still have a camp on Canadarago Lake--when he started Googling “Weitz + Cobleskill” on his phone.
On a whim, he called the College’s Office of Community Advancement, which includes the Alumni Association, and then drove back to camp for the portrait, delivering it to Vice President John Zacarek, just trying to get it back to Mr. Weitz’s family and hoping someone there could help.
Ms. Weaver picked up the job–and the story–from there Thursday, hitting mostly dead ends at first.
College archives mentioned a George Weitz, she said, but there was no way of knowing if it was the same man and little else to go on.
Ms. Weaver kept looking–with George looking on from his portrait, propped up against her office wall, she joked–until, amazingly, she found a photo of George posing in a field with bags of black dirt onions from Pine Island, New York in a book celebrating SUNY Cobleskill’s 2016 centennial, hitting what became paydirt.
“I’m intrigued by mysteries,” Ms. Weaver said. “That portrait was a good reminder to keep at the task.”
Ms. Weaver got in touch with the Drowned Lands Historical Society in Pine Island.
That led her to a longshot phone call to a Gary Weitz--but it was the right call:
Mr. Weitz, who lives in the Poconos, is the oldest of George’s three children and though he never answers the phone and joked he was feeling especially grumpy the day Ms. Weaver called, he said he never doubted that the call was legit.
He asked Ms. Weaver to email him a photo of the painting; as soon as he saw it, he said, he knew it was his dad.
“I knew my dad years later, when he’d been beat up by life,” Mr. Weitz said, his voice breaking.
“I didn’t know him like this. As a young man…that’s exactly how I looked at 23.”
George died in 1974.
Mr. Noxon said Aunt Florence never wanted to talk about the man in the portrait––she never married, never had children—nor about the unidentified soldier in a second, similar painting.
“She had her heart broken a few times,” he said.
It wasn’t unusual for World War II soldiers to have their portraits painted and then send them back home, but why George ended up in Florence’s basement is still a mystery; that black and white photo from 1945–remember, he was in the 1937 yearbook–is the only other link the families have found.
Plus, Mr. Weitz said, his parents married six months after the 1945 photo was taken.
Aunt Florence taught phys ed, at SUNY Cobleskill and at high schools, Mr. Noxon said, and she loved to dance; neighbors remember her as “a character,” and when the nearby Rexmere Hotel burned in 2014 and Florence had to be evacuated to the Stamford Fire House, Mr. Noxon said she had all of the firemen in stitches.
As for the second soldier in the second portrait?
Mr. Noxon joked, “It’s up for grabs” and told Ms. weaver, “Kate, you’ve got another job.”
But then, as Mr. Noxon and Mr. Weitz talked, Mr. Noxon shared a photo of the second painting–and Mr. Weitz recognized someone he knew: his father, from yet a third painting, one that his brother has of their dad, older and thinner, but almost certainly his dad.
The college and the Noxons are now working to reunite the Weitzes with the second portrait too.