By Jaxie Pidgeon
When her father died in 2014, Anne Keene searched for memorabilia to display at his memorial service.
Upon looking through his hidden keepsakes, she found a scrapbook filled with photos of Jim Raugh from 1943 when he was a batboy for the Cloudbuster Nine, a World War II team of fighter-pilot cadets at an elite Navy training school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
At 10 years old, Raugh picked up bats for some of baseball’s biggest names. Among those were Red Sox left fielder Ted Williams and shortstop Johnny Pesky, along with other big-leaguers who were also pictured in the scrapbook.
This discovery caused Keene to realize how little she knew about her father and the Cloudbusters. To her surprise, nobody had written about the team. She set out to write a memoir in her father’s honor by tracking down the remaining fighter-pilot cadets who donned the Cloudbuster Nine baseball jersey.
Through a simple Google search and a phone call to a local newspaper, Keene located the team’s last-surviving player, right-handed pitcher Ivan Fleser. At the age of 96, he represented her final chance to sit down with a Cloudbuster.
Meeting him required a 1,300-mile flight to his home in Marshall, Michigan. His rare stories and mementos dating back 80 years made the trip worthwhile.
“To talk to a human being and look at a human being in the eye makes a story completely fly off the page,” Keene said. “It's up to you to take what you find and connect the dots.”
Fleser’s only child, Deborah Aditays, was unaware of his war experiences until 1978 when she was in her early 20s. In 2014, Fleser shared his story with his small-town Marshall United Methodist Church community.
If not for this meetup with Keene in March 2016, Fleser’s war-time stories could’ve remained unknown to those outside of his immediate circle. Thanks to Keene, he and his Cloudbuster Nine teammates’ legacies can live on.
Keene’s 408-page book, “The Cloudbuster Nine,” was released in May 2018, just before Fleser died in July 2018. Her inspiration, initially a tribute to her father, ended up putting names to faces of the baseball team that helped win World War II.
“I think the key is just trying to do the best we can to preserve the past,” Keene said in an interview with the National WWII Museum. “It’s really our roadmap to history.”
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