Her dad returned in letters - with some great advice

All her life, Mary Mithun has had only two possessions by which to remember her father, Dr. John Grotting. He died when she was 10 years old.

Mithun has cherished these mementoes: a photo of her as a 4-year-old on her father's lap, and a letter he wrote her at camp when she was 9, assuring her he would take good care of her dog and giving some wise counsel.

"He told me to 'be a good camper,'" Mithun, of Deephaven, explains with a smile. "That was all the advice I ever had from him, and I've tried to make it my motto."

Until recently, Mithun had only sketchy details of her father's life. She knew, for example, that his parents were penniless Norwegian immigrants, and that he had risen from poverty to become chief of staff at what is now Abbott Northwestern Hospital, a post he held when he died at age 52.

So when a battered old box of family artifacts surfaced in her aunt's basement a few months ago, Mithun raced over, hoping to find a little something to add to her meager collection. Instead, she discovered hundreds of her father's decades-old letters, sorted into bundles and tied with yellowed string.

"My dad emerged from that box," says Mithun. "Forty years later, he's alive again."

As Mithun began to sift through the letters, her dad's inner life and life's journey slowly came into focus. He told her in his own words -- if indirectly -- about his ambitions, his frustrations and the moral convictions that had shaped his character.

As a 16-year-old writing in the depths of the Depression, for example, he thanked his parents for a long-anticipated Christmas gift -- getting his shoes resoled. As a World War II Army plastic surgeon stationed in Paris, he confided his frustration as he struggled to "patch up" an endless line of young soldiers disfigured on some of the war's bloodiest battlefields.

One of Mithun's favorite letters, dated Aug. 16, 1945, allowed her to share her father's rapture on VJ, or "Victory over Japan," Day. "When news came that the war was over, his transport ship turned around and headed for home," she says. "American submarines were surfacing all around him -- they no longer needed to hide. My dad described a concert on deck under the stars that night as 'the closest he'd ever come to heaven.'"

John Grotting, says Mithun, has become one of her closest advisers: "In his letters, he's speaking to others, but he's also speaking to me. These days, I get advice from my dad on everything from how to raise my middle-school daughter to the best time of year to catch bass."

Mithun has added to her newfound knowledge by using the Internet to track down people who knew her father in his early days. She recently had lunch with Kellogg Olson, now 92, of Spring Lake Park, who last saw her dad in 1932. The two were schoolmates at the now-defunct Pillsbury Military Academy in Owatonna, which Grotting attended thanks to the charity of a wealthy acquaintance.

A letter her father wrote from an Army hospital in Paris launched another search. It contained a clipping from Stars and Stripes, the Army newspaper, about a soldier her father described as "the best patient he ever had" -- Staff Sgt. Alfred Bell. Bell lost nine fingers and one eye in a brutal firefight during the Battle of the Bulge. When his dangling last finger impeded his ability to fire at German attackers, he impatiently ordered a medic to cut it off with a bayonet.

Mithun tracked down Bell's son, now a police officer in Dallas. Then she identified the man who had rescued Bell -- a staff sergeant named Aurio Pierro. She called Pierro at his home in Lexington, Mass., and read the dramatic Stars and Stripes account of the battle. "We both shed tears," she says.

One of Mithun's greatest pleasures has been completing her father's unfinished business. A few months ago, she discovered that in 1944, a bottle of perfume that her dad had sent his sister -- her aunt -- for Christmas had been stolen in France. She tracked down the perfume, L'Origan by Coty, on eBay and gave it to her aunt for Christmas -- "63 years late," she says.

"Today, I know my dad so well I find myself having conversations with him," says Mithun. "To him, I was just the little, skinny, goofy-haired girl in the back seat of the station wagon. Now I know I'm really my dad's girl. I know how much we would have enjoyed each other."

Katherine Kersten kkersten@startribune.com

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