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Students to deliver WWII helmet to widow

BOISE, Idaho — Rep. Walt Minnick, D-Idaho, has donated 300,000 frequent flyer miles to a group of southwest Idaho students so they can return a World War II helmet to the soldier’s surviving family members in Connecticut.

The 11th-grade international history students at Vineyard Christian Home School Co-op in Boise plan to make the trip next week.

“I am so excited,” 17-year-old Shalom Knight, of Star, told the Idaho Statesman. “It’s like we get to return this piece of this man’s life back to his family. It was a huge blessing that we could go.”

The helmet belonged to Anthony Malone of Middletown, Conn., who died eight years ago at age 83. He was a medic who wrote his name, company and Army serial number in the helmet.

Instructor Dennis Mansfield received the helmet in 1971 as a gag gift from his father when Mansfield was living in Michigan. For decades Mansfield carted around the helmet, which looks as though it dates to World War I, with a brim typical of that era.

When Mansfield began teaching this year’s international history class, which his son Colin attends, he was looking for ways to make history fun, and decided to use the helmet.

So Mansfield brought it to his students and gave them a mission: Find out about the man who wrote his name in the leather lining.

For two weeks, the students searched online, read a newspaper obituary and studied the military unit — the 16th Battalion Medical Detachment — to which Malone belonged to find Malone’s family, including his wife, two children and grandchildren.

Minnick earned the frequent flyer miles from business and campaign trips on U.S. Airways. The company waived some fees, and an anonymous U.S. Airways employee paid the taxes on the flights.

John Foster, a Minnick spokesman, said the school project to find Malone is an example of the work that goes “unnoticed and unheralded in our schools every day.”

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Information from: Idaho Statesman