The Portrait of an Heirloom: Legacy and Continuity
Dr. Lester Ofner in uniform as an officer of the Illinois National Guard medical service, 1920s. Private family collection.
A family photograph becomes an heirloom when it is kept long enough to outlast the life it recorded and handled long enough to carry the next one. The sepia portrait of a young medical officer that opens this family's archive did exactly that, and the documents kept alongside it show, step by step, how the change happened.
How do family photographs become heirlooms?
Made in the 1920s, the portrait records a young officer in uniform.1 He faces the camera, buttons polished, the uniform sitting square across the shoulders, his posture composed rather than triumphant.
A photograph like this does not begin as an heirloom. It begins as a document. It becomes an heirloom later, and by ordinary means: it is kept rather than discarded, moved from one house to the next, looked at again by someone who never met the person in the frame. Retention, not rarity, is what does the work. What carries this portrait beyond sentiment is that the family kept the paper trail beside it, and the paper trail can be checked.
The Sepia Portrait, and the Life Around It
The officer in that portrait was Dr. Lester Ofner, a Chicago physician who ran tuberculosis sanatoriums, cared for veterans, and held a commission in the Illinois National Guard's medical service.2 In June 1917 he married Clara Pines. A 1917 newspaper reported that D. W. Griffith had sought her for his films and that she gave up that opportunity to marry.3 Their son grew up between those two orders, medicine and performance, and in 1942 he too sat for a portrait in uniform. He was Corporal Jarvis E. Ofner, of the 4th Infantry Division. In 1943 he married, and a year later he returned briefly to meet his newborn son before leaving for Europe.
Corporal Jarvis E. Ofner, son of Dr. Lester Ofner and Clara Pines, in uniform. Private family collection.
The Marks That Remained
He did not return. He was last seen on December 6, 1944, wounded, in the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest.4 His division had moved to Luxembourg, and when the Battle of the Bulge struck it on December 16, his company was all but destroyed and its records lost, so it was March 1945 before his family was told he was missing.4 For the next years the War Department wrote to his wife every few months, hoping, as one 1945 letter put it, to relieve her of the great anxiety she had borne.5
A German civilian found his body on September 1, 1947. It was buried as unknown. His own identification tags were gone, and another soldier's tags lay nearby, so for a time the grave carried the wrong name. What returned his own name to him was not the tags but the things themselves: a laundry mark recovered from a stained first-aid kit, a cartridge belt, a faded camp pass. In the newspaper's account, what human memory could not do, science did.6
His dog tags named the wrong man. The marks worn into his belongings named the right one. An object held his identity when the official record failed, the way a chair holds the wear of a returning hand and a photograph holds a face, not as a story any of them tells, but as a mark each one keeps.
What Came Home
He was identified on April 18, 1949, on what would have been the couple's sixth wedding anniversary. That summer, five years after he fell, he was buried with full military honors. The flag from his casket was placed in the hands of his five-year-old son. The boy would legally take his father's name.7
There is a photograph of that son a little earlier, swallowed by an oversized Army coat, the sleeves reaching past his hands. The coat had belonged to the father he would never know. What he inherited was not a narrative but a condition: duty, loss, and a name. He carried it forward not through memory recalled but through proximity endured, and in time he became part of the archive himself.
A child in his maternal uncle's oversized U.S. Navy coat, worn while his father was missing. All photographs courtesy of a private family collection.
A photograph becomes an heirloom one ordinary decision at a time. Someone keeps it. Someone carries it to another house. Someone refuses to throw away the letters beside it. Years become decades, and documents become inheritance. The people disappear. The objects remain, available to the living.
Object in this Journal
A family archive of photographs, newspaper clippings, and wartime letters, 1917 to 1949. These objects remain in a private family collection.
See the collection's antique writing desks and secretaries.
Related reading
The Child in the Army Coat · The Bench Was Empty: A Love Letter from 1919
Thoughtfully Collected. Quietly Shared.
Footnotes
War Department General Orders No. 76 (adopted for wear after December 31, 1918) prescribed the officer's olive-drab winter service coat in wool, in weights of worsted gabardine, serge, whipcord, elastique, or melton, on the pattern of the 1912 Specifications for the Uniform of the United States Army; National Guard officers wore the same uniform. A separate summer service coat of cotton also existed (War Department General Order No. 81, 1902), and the monochrome photograph does not establish which he wears. Source: A History of Officers' Service Coats, 1902–1924. ↩
Dr. Lester Irving Ofner (born August 7, 1889, in Greenwich, Connecticut; died 1940) was a graduate of the University of Illinois College of Medicine (1915). His 1917 draft registration card records him as a physician at the Cook County Tuberculosis Hospital, Oak Forest, Illinois, with no prior military service; the American Medical Directory (American Medical Association, 1921) lists his office at U.S. Public Health Service Hospital No. 30, Chicago, a Public Health Service hospital of the kind that then cared for First World War veterans; and the Chicago Tribune obituary (November 28, 1940) records his direction of tuberculosis sanatoriums in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Winfield, Illinois, and his association with the United States Veterans' Hospital in Chicago, and names his son, Jarvis. His military service was in the Illinois National Guard, where he was a first lieutenant in the 108th Medical Regiment (Medical Laboratory Section), commissioned November 7, 1923; that is the uniform he wears in the portrait. California physician registers place him in the state from 1933. See also The Times (Munster, Indiana), February 3, 1919; The Miami Herald, January 29, 1929; and The Signal (Santa Clarita, California), July 20, 1933. ↩
Chicago Examiner, January 27, 1917: "Love Laughs at Film Fame: Clara Pines Prefers a Home" and "Chicago Girl Offered Chance of Career on Screen Announces Engagement," family papers. The paper reported that D. W. Griffith, casting around the time of Intolerance (1916), sought Clara Pines for his films, and that she gave up that chance to marry Dr. Lester Ofner of Chicago that June. ↩
Los Angeles Examiner, Marjorie Driscoll, "Grave Yields Vet Identity" (August 1949), family papers. After its fighting in the Hürtgen Forest, the 4th Infantry Division withdrew to a defensive line in Luxembourg (around December 12, 1944) and was struck there by the German Ardennes offensive, the Battle of the Bulge, on December 16, 1944 (U.S. Army, "4ID and the Battle of Huertgen Forest," army.mil; 4th Infantry Division Association history). ↩↩2
Office of The Adjutant General, War Department, Maj. Gen. James A. Ulio to the soldier's wife, 25 June 1945, family papers. Ulio served as Adjutant General of the Army from 1942 to 1946. ↩
Los Angeles Examiner (as above). ↩
Los Angeles Examiner, "Army Rites for Unknown Hero" and "His Daddy Is Home" (August 1949), family papers; City of New York, Office of the Mayor, William O'Dwyer to the family, 25 August 1949. O'Dwyer served as mayor from 1946 to 1950. Burial place omitted at the family's request. ↩
