Author and radio essayist Jill Hunting presents “Finding Pete: Rediscovering the Brother I Lost in Vietnam,” a personalized account of a critical moment in U.S. history and a moving story of an altruistic youth who personifies what America lost in Vietnam, in a virtual discussion hosted by the Pasadena Public Library on Tuesday, May 17, 5 to 6 p.m.
“Finding Pete” is one of the great, untold true stories of an escalating war and a young man caught in its sights. It is also a portrait of a family’s struggle with loss, a mother’s damaging grief, and, most of all, a sister’s quest to solve a mystery and recover the connection with her brother.
Jill Hunting lost her only brother, Pete, a volunteer with International Voluntary Services and one of the first civilian casualties of the Vietnam War, two days after she turned 15. When their mother told Jill that Pete’s letters home had all been destroyed in a basement flood, the connection between Jill and her brother was thought to have been lost forever. Decades later, 175 letters surfaced,, and through them, and the sweethearts and many friends who had never forgotten Pete, Jill came to know him again.
A former food and wine writer and editor, Jill Hunting is also the author of “For Want of Wings,” the carefully researched story of the least known of Yale University’s four expeditions into the American West, led by eminent paleontologist O. C. Marsh, where Jill Hunting’s great grandfather, Thomas Russell, unearthed the bones of an 83,000,000-year-old dinosaur in western Kansas.
Hunting resides in Pasadena.
To register, visit https://pasadena.evanced.info/
The discussion is live on Zoom. When you sign up, please provide an email address where login instructions will be sent to you.
For more information, call (626) 744-4066.
