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In May of that year, Japanese submarines were mounting an attack on Sydney harbor in Australia, and Mexico had just joined the war effort against the Nazis.
Meanwhile, in Paradise Township, 18-year-old Lee Huff had just graduated from what was then Paradise High School, and he was on his way to fight fascism in Europe. He would lose his life to that fight.
Though more than 60 years have passed since Huff's enlistment, his supreme sacrifice for his country is not forgotten: On Thursday, Paradise Township, along with surviving members of Huff's graduating class, began a search to find Huff's relatives so that what is believed to be his class ring — recovered from the site where his plane crashed in Austria during World War II — can be given to them.
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"How many of you remember Lee Huff?" Ken Beane, organizer of Thursday's reunion luncheon of graduates of Paradise High School, asked while speaking at the event at Revere Tavern.
"Lee Huff gave his life for his country," said Beane, speaking to a crowd of more than 200 Paradise High School alumni, the oldest of whom graduated in 1927. "We're doing our best to try and honor that, as well as to bring a measure of comfort to any surviving family members who might still be living here in Lancaster County."
After graduating from high school, Huff enrolled in the U.S. Army Air Forces (the precursor to what would become the U.S. Air Force in 1947). After being stationed in Europe, he was sent on missions over Austria, which had been annexed by Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime in 1938.
Huff was killed in a midair collision, Beane said.The remains of Huff's aircraft lay undiscovered in Austria until 2005, when a search team discovered them — as well as a class ring, engraved with the name Leegrand H. Kohler. His body wasn't found.
Beane said the military has the ring and will keep it until surviving family members can be found.
The name Leegrand H. Kohler has searchers stumped. His friends knew Huff only as Lee Huff.
"We know that Lee's mother married a man named Bill Ax, but (Ax) didn't adopt Lee. We're not sure, but maybe when Lee was a student at Pequea Valley he might have been using his mother's maiden name or maybe his (biological) father's last name," Beane said.
"We're just not real clear right now about the whole Huff/Kohler connection," he said.
Through his mother's remarriage to Bill Ax, Beane said, Lee did have a half-brother named Herb Ax, who later moved to Ephrata.
"But that's where the trail goes cold," Beane said.
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Beane said that, if efforts by the township and Huff's graduating class fail to turn up any clues, the ring will be donated to Paradise Township to be put on display in the Paradise Township building as an example of Huff's heroism.
"This is a puzzle, no doubt about it. We're just happy to be able to do something to … give this back to the family," Paradise Township supervisor Dennis Groff said after Thursday's reunion luncheon.
"Folks like Lee are the history of this township," he said.
"We're very, very proud that his roots are here."
Anyone with information about Lee Huff or about surviving members of his family is asked to contact the Paradise Township office at 768-8222.
