Writing a book is a lot like building a house. You build the basement — in Michigan anyway — then the frame, then the roof.

You’re not done there. Next, you install electrical wiring, plumbing, toilets, showers, drywall, and cabinets piece by piece. You build separate rooms and a garage.

You’re not finished yet. You install carpeting, paint the walls, finish the flooring that isn’t carpeted. Then add furniture and artwork to finish off each room piece by piece.

Then you need to make memories that eventually become fantastic stories told for years to come.

That is what writing a book is like.

The tricky part is — you need to know how to write; fortunately I do.

When I delved into a project just over a year ago writing a book about my wife Sue’s father Haig and his military experience in World War 2, I didn’t realize the magnitude what it would take to write a full-length, non-fiction book. I knew it was going to take a lot of research and work and I was prepared to do so.

Now, I’m a trained writer and college-trained journalist with 12 years of professional writing experience working in newspapers in the 1980s and 1990s. When I took on the task around January 2024 of writing about Haig Derderian, I didn’t really know how far the story would take me. After all, he’s the father-in-law I never met. I never shook his hand, spoke with him, or even heard his voice until a few months ago when I found a 30-plus year-old VCR tape with him on it talking and playing a banjo at a concert in Dearborn, MI, in 1988.

In December 2023, I found a treasure trove of documents in our basement of Haig’s letters, documents, and collectibles from when he served in World War 2 in the 714th Tank Battalion in the 12th Armored Division. After finding this and doing some research, I decided I was going to write a book about his experiences in World War 2.

Initially, I thought I would only write about his wartime experiences. Haig and more than 17,000 of his fellow soldiers trained in 1943 and 1944 at United States Army military camps to prepare to go somewhere over seas and fight Germany or Japan. This was an enormously captivating story to tell.

But as I delved deeper into Haig’s story, I discovered he was a professional musician, playing the banjo in bands for all of his adult life. Playing the banjo was his passion. I also discovered he was a beloved elementary school teacher for 22 years in St. Clair Shores South Lake School District on metro Detroit’s east side. He was a devout, faithful Christian in his Armenian Congregational Church and he served as the church’s choir director for more than a decade.

Haig also was a devoted husband to his wife Shirley Derderian, and a loving father to his children David, and Sue, my wife.

Unfortunately, Haig passed away in March 1990 when Sue was just about to graduate with her Bachelor’s degree in psychology from Grand Valley State University, near Grand Rapids, MI. Sue was just 21 years old when Haig died from prostate cancer at 72 years of age.

Sue knew her dad. But, she didn’t really know her dad. Because Sue was young when her dad passed away, she didn’t really learn about his upbringing, his childhood stories, and details of his personal history.

However, Haig did document his personal story amongst more than a thousand photographs, written letters, and personal documents that he began collecting since 1925. That’s the earliest record that I found from him.

He saved virtually every printed program from musical concerts and banjo jamborees in which he played. He saved all records from when he was a teacher from the time he started in the 1960s to when he retired in the 1980s. Haig saved every hand-written “thank you” note from his then-current and former students when he retired in the mid 1980s. There were more than 100 notes.

In the 1980s, Haig began an immense project trying to find the genealogy of his family’s roots from Armenia and Turkey. He soon learned his family settled in Boston, and he saved every letter that he wrote to family record bureaus in Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, where he was born in 1917.

Haig created detailed family photo albums and scrap books full of family history that tell story after story.

He also left behind more than 40 letters that he wrote to his parents between 1943 and 1945 while he was stationed as a soldier in World War 2 training at U.S. Army camps and also fighting the Nazis in France and Germany.

While I never spoke to Haig, never shook his hand, never held a conversation with him, never looked him in the eye or had a drink with him, he told his story to me through all the documents, photographs, letters, and mementos that he stored in more than a dozen bins and boxes that now sit in my basement.

The World War 2 story that I thought it was going to be changed during the course of writing this book. It became so much more.

Through my research, I discovered my father-in-law as the student, the soldier, the devout Christian, the choir director, the professional banjo player, and the teacher.

The book will be published through Amazon in 2025 and it is nearing completion.

Here’s a sneak peek: the Prologue to The Father-in-Law I Never Met and His Lost Story.

Enjoy!

Prologue: Unraveling the Lost Story

How do you tell the story of a man you’ve never met? How do you weave together fragments of an 80-year-old puzzle, with pieces scattered across continents, stored in museums, and buried in forgotten corners?

These were the questions I faced as I began the daunting task of piecing together the life of Haig Derderian, a World War II American soldier from the United States Army’s 12^th Armored Division — a man who was not only a stranger to me, but someone whose life story had faded with time.

Who was Haig Derderian? That was the question that gripped me when I set out to discover more about the father-in-law I never met. He was the father of my wife, Sue, whom she lost much too early.

I married Sue, his only daughter, on August 31, 2007. She spoke of him often with love and reverence. His life was tragically cut short by prostate cancer in March 1990, just as Sue was about to graduate from Grand Valley State University with her psychology degree. Their paths diverged at a crucial time: her future just beginning as his life ended.

For years since his death, Haig was a name, a figure known only through Sue’s memories. She told me about her father’s kindness, his warmth, and his unwavering love for his family. Like my own father, Chuck Varcie, Haig was someone people adored, a man who made the world around him better simply by being in it. But just as Sue never had the chance to meet my dad, who passed away from oral cancer in 1998, I never met hers.

Haig had been a teacher at Avalon Elementary School in Saint Clair Shores, Michigan, for 22 years before he retired. He was also a gifted musician, a professional banjo player who had entertained countless audiences for nearly 50 years and sang in and directed church choirs. He performed professionally for years across Michigan and the U.S. with his Dixieland banjo bands. Music flowed through his family’s veins; his sister, Rose Suzanne Turbyfill (Derderian), had a long and distinguished career singing professionally with the New York Metropolitan Opera.

Yet, of all the things Haig was, one of the most mysterious to Sue was his service as a soldier during World War II. He had rarely spoken of it. All she knew was that he had fought in Germany, served in a tank unit, and, as whispers suggested, helped liberate concentration camps. The details, however, were elusive.

In late November 2023, my wife and I sat together watching a colorized documentary on World War II battles in Europe. It stirred something in us, and we began talking about her father’s military service. Sue recalled attending 12^th Armored Division reunions as a child in the 1970s and 1980s, dressing up for the elegant balls and mingling with her father’s old Army friends, including Robert E. Hunt and his wife, Eleanor. Both were good friends of Haig living in Sterling Heights, MI. But, beyond those fleeting memories, her father’s wartime story remained locked away.

Determined to learn more, I began an investigation that would last for just over a year. It started with a simple act of curiosity. On December 1, 2023, I went down to our basement, searching for inspiration for a blog post I was writing. There, among the tall shelves, I discovered a green plastic bin coated in a thin layer of dust. Inside lay a treasure trove: old documents, letters, photographs, a Purple Heart, military awards, even his dog tags — all relics of Haig’s past. Each artifact was a piece of a puzzle, waiting to be assembled.

As I laid out these pieces, day after day, on our kitchen table, a story began to emerge. Haig had served in the 714th Tank Battalion, Company B, part of the 12th Armored Division, famously known as the “Hellcats.” From November 1944 to May 1945, they had fought in some of the most intense battles of the European theater, liberating cities in France, crossing into Germany, and helping free prisoners from Nazi concentration camps, including Dachau and Landsberg, a sub-camp of Dachau.

But my research only deepened the mystery. As I sifted through letters and military reports, the magnitude of Haig’s story became clear. His unit had fought in pivotal battles, including Hitler’s final major offensive – Operation Nordwind – in the Battle of Herrlisheim, France. This tiny French town was nearly obliterated, with over 1,200 soldiers from the 12th Armored Division losing their lives and thousands more injured. One of the 714th Tank Battalion’s companies was nearly wiped out, losing all but 5 tanks. Haig’s story wasn’t just about the war — it was about survival, sacrifice, and the weight of history.

I approached this project as I would any journalistic assignment. With over a decade of experience working as a journalist for newspapers, I relied on research, interviews, and diligent fact-checking. I contacted historians, visited the U.S. National Archives in College Park, MD, went on a fact-finding mission to France and Germany and retraced the steps of Haig’s tank battalion, and interviewed surviving veterans. It was an overwhelming process, but through it all, I began to reconstruct Haig’s wartime journey — a story hidden in dusty files, memoirs, and long-forgotten photographs.

I never met my Father-in-Law and because he died when my wife was only 21 years of age. She didn’t know a lot of details about his life. So, I continued digging through boxes and bins in the basement where Haig stored letters, files, photographs, and memoirs hidden for years that told his story. He just needed someone to piece it together and write his story for him.

Early in life, Haig was a gifted student who used that gift to become a professional musician playing the piano, guitar, and banjo — all by ear and self-taught. He was a man who dedicated himself to God through his Armenian Congregational Church. Haig was an educator — earning a Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree from Wayne State University in Detroit — and taught elementary school for 22 years in St. Clair Shores’ South Lake School District.

After retirement, he dedicated his remaining days to genealogy, feverishly tracing his family’s roots from Armenia and Turkey to the United States.

Haig was also a family man. Married to his wife Shirley since 1962, he had two children whom he adored — David and my wife, Sue. He was very active in David and Sue’s lives and my wife remembers her dad fondly.

”Everyone loved my dad. He was always entertaining people and playing his banjo whenever he could,” she recalled. “I remember he would invite his friends who played the banjo to the lake that we lived off of in Shelby Township (MI). They would play for hours and all the neighbors around the lake would come outside and listen to them play.”

During this investigation, each step of the way, I felt the presence of Haig, a man who had carefully documented his life in thousands of loose pieces of paper, letters, and files. But, he had left his wartime experiences largely untold.

I felt as though he had left behind clues, hoping that one day someone would come along and piece together his story. And so, this book, The Father-in-Law I Never Met and His Lost Story, is my attempt to do just that.

Through his own writings, the recollections of his fellow combat soldiers, my own research, and numerous interviews with 12th Armored Division veterans and their families, I hope to bring to life the story of Haig Derderian: the soldier, the musician, the teacher, and, most importantly, the father my wife adored.