At military records center, recovery from 1973 fire continues
By STEVE GIEGERICH
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Published: January 30, 2012
NORTH ST. LOUIS COUNTY — Debra Griffith didn't know where to turn when her father, a Korean War veteran with a failing heart, asked to be buried at a military cemetery near his boyhood home in Indiana.
With her parents long divorced and the family scattered across the country, Griffith had no clue where to find the records attesting to Lewis Lower's military service — or whether they even existed.
She turned the problem over to her husband, who learned of another hitch in granting Lower's final request upon contacting the National Personnel Records Center in north St. Louis County.
The file may have been among the millions destroyed 39 years ago in a fire that burned for two days through the sixth floor of the building in Overland the center once occupied.
The near-impossible task of restoring the charred documents that survived continues to this day — a labor of love and duty for archivists either too young to remember or, in some cases, not even born when a significant chunk of America's past went up in smoke.
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