A stranger's Purple Heart holds a story of heroism and loss

Nancy Sasson was cleaning out her late parents' house in Miami, digging through clothes in a closet, when she found a military medal on the floor.

It was a Purple Heart, typically awarded to military personnel wounded or killed in combat.

Wow, she thought, I had no idea my father had received a Purple Heart.

Sasson turned the medal over in her hand, and realized she was wrong. On the back was engraved Irvin S. Grindrod.

She didn't recognize the name. Maybe he had been a friend of her father during World War II. She began searching the Internet, and soon realized that Grindrod wasn't an old Army buddy, though he had been in the service.

Grindrod was an Army captain, nearly a hundred years ago, who served in World War I. And he wasn't from Miami. He was born, raised, worked, and died in Philadelphia.

But, Sasson wondered, was the medal authentic? And if so, how did it end up 1,200 miles away, in her parents' closet in Florida?

Philadelphians supported President Woodrow Wilson when war erupted in Europe in 1914: The U.S. would help England and France by sending arms and equipment, not troops.

Mills in Kensington and Germantown churned out Army blankets, Baldwin Locomotive produced artillery shells, and shipyards in Camden and Chester worked full force.

The U.S. eventually entered the war, which exacted a terrible cost: By one global count, nearly nine million combatants killed and 21 million wounded.

None received the Purple Heart. At least not at the time. The decoration was on a 150-year hiatus.

Gen. George Washington established the award in 1782, directing that soldiers who performed meritorious acts could wear, over the left breast, a heart of purple cloth.

But after the Revolution, the "Badge of Military Merit" fell out of use. In 1932, Gen. Douglas MacArthur resurrected the medal - a purple enamel heart showing a profile of Washington.

Military personnel who had earned a Meritorious Service Citation Certificate in World War I could exchange the document for the Purple Heart. Those who had been wounded could swap their "wound chevrons," worn on the sleeve, for the new award.

Thousands of veterans applied to do that.

Later the award was authorized for any serviceman who was wounded, killed, or died a POW.

Today about 1.8 million Purple Hearts have been awarded, though no agency keeps a comprehensive list of recipients, according to Peter Bedrossian, program director at the National Purple Heart Hall of Honor in New Windsor, N.Y.

Often Purple Hearts were given in the field. Paperwork got lost amid the confusion of war. In 1973, a fire destroyed millions of documents at the National Personnel Records Center near St. Louis.

Sometimes, he said, a recipient's only proof of a Purple Heart may be the medal itself.

National Archives documents retrieved by the Inquirer solved one mystery: Grindrod's Purple Heart is legitimate, given "for services at Vichy, France."

They shed no light on what actions earned him the honor.

And they don't show the losses he suffered in life - two wives, children, a business, a fortune.

Irvin Sutton Grindrod was born on April 30, 1886, in a Philadelphia where the only constant was change.

That year, Fairmount Park was lit with electric lights for the first time. A cholera epidemic, though deadly, provoked a transformation in health standards.

In 1909, at 23, Grindrod was a student at the University of Pennsylvania, living at 33rd and Clearfield, records show, on his way to becoming an engineer. The Irvin S. Grindrod Co. did well; newspapers touted the firm's winning bids to build bridges and hospitals.

He joined the Knights Templar, the Christian fraternal group, and the American Society of Civil Engineers.

He wed - but, here, tragedy stalked him. In 1916, his 24-year-old wife, Alice, died in childbirth at Cooper Hospital in Camden, a news item showed.

The United States entered the war the next year. Grindrod, then 31, quickly rose to captain in the Army engineers, serving in Paris, St.-Aignan, Vichy, and Brest.

Even when the shooting stopped, the Army kept him. Grindrod wasn't discharged until almost a year after the armistice.

On April 19, 1919, he was awarded his meritorious citation, and in 1932 that was converted to a Purple Heart, records show.

Grindrod's descendants had no idea he had been honored, said a granddaughter, Jane Beck of New Paltz, N.Y. But she has documented other aspects of his life.

After the war, in March 1920, he married a second time, to Estelle Illensworth, a Philadelphia schoolteacher.

They wed at her family home in New Paltz. Illensworth wore a white satin gown and a string of pearls that was a gift from her groom.

The couple had three daughters. They also had money, a housekeeper, and a big English Tudor at Oriole and Silverwood Streets in Upper Roxborough.

But Grindrod lost everything in the Great Depression, Beck said. He drank heavily. By 1939, he was out of work and unable to provide food and clothing for his family.

His wife gathered the girls and moved to New Paltz. She told her husband she would return when he got sober.

He never did.

Grindrod died from alcoholism eight years later, at age 61, at Philadelphia General Hospital, which treated the poor. He was buried beneath a military headstone in Beverly National Cemetery in New Jersey.

After sorting through her parents' house, Sasson took the medal home to Massachusetts. Every so often she would search for what she was sure must be a family tie to Philadelphia, her mother's hometown. She phoned the Inquirer to ask for help.

Recently, she found a link, and maybe an answer: A 1942 military draft registration card on which men were asked, Someone who will always know your address?

Grindrod, then 56 and living in a Wilmington hotel, didn't name either of his sisters. He wrote the name of a woman, Henrietta Lerner of Philadelphia, who, it turns out, was Sasson's great-aunt.

Sasson doesn't know the relationship between the two. But she thinks that's where the medal passed between families, moving on until it landed, forgotten, on a closet floor.

Now the question is what to do with it. Sasson plans to ask Grindrod's kin if they want the medal. If not, she may call Purple Hearts Reunited, a Vermont group that honors unclaimed awards.

She's struck that at the end of his life, Grindrod, who served his country, had little to show for it.

"Perhaps," she said, "the Purple Heart was his dearest possession."

jgammage@phillynews.com

215-854-4906@JeffGammage