by Maria Amador
WESTFIELD — For some, the events of the past are best left there, to be recounted only in memory. For David Holdridge — a Vietnam veteran who went on to do humanitarian work overseas for forty years — the past is the present subject. In retirement, he has dedicated himself to writing with urgency and in great detail about his life, much like the authors he once tried to mold himself after as a young adult.
In direct and inexplicit ways, war has been a factor in Mr. Holdridge’s life since before birth. His parents met during the World War II while his father Henry, a poor soldier from the Bronx, was stationed in Australia. That was his mother Helen’s home country. She worked there as a war-time nurse. Before them, his great-grandmother on Henry’s side, Molly Rutherford, was shipped to treat soldiers in the Boer Wars not long after becoming a nurse at 15.
Mr. Holdridge spent the first nine years of his life in Australia, where his father supported the family through his work in the airline business. At ten, he was sent to live with his grandmother Mabel in New York, “because I created a disturbance in the house and my sister [Ruth] had just come out of a long time in an iron lung” after contracting polio.
Though Mabel was poor, having raised Henry ….
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