PARIS — Central Catholic graduate Michael Grady won gold at the Paris Olympics with Team USA Rowing, but that wasn’t the only memory made for his family during that trip.
It was the latest chapter in their emotional reunion with their missing loved one.
Michael’s father John Grady was named after that relative. His Uncle John Grady enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and disappeared while serving overseas in World War II.
“My dad always said John was his hero,” said the younger John Grady. “He was everybody’s hero and favorite kid.”
That’s essentially all John knew about his namesake for many years.
“My father said when the telegram came, my father brought the six siblings into the family room and told them John’s been killed. Everybody went up to their bedrooms and nobody ever talked about it again.”
For decades, Pilot Officer Grady’s story was a mystery, and a family was forced to move on without closure.
Fifteen years ago, John, who now lives in the North Hills, was determined to fill the gaps.
“I came across a brand-new website, and it had seven war graves in this little town in France, and they weren’t markers. They were actually little graves with tombstones.”
On one of those tombstones in Cugny, France was his uncle’s name. Baffled by what he found, John reached out to the site’s contact.
“He put me in contact with two other relatives who just found the site, and they started sending me all these documents and photos of my uncle that no one’s ever seen. It’s like oh my God.”
A family’s biggest question answered 70 years later.
Pilot Officer Grady and six others were attempting to drop supplies for the resistance in the early hours of August 10, 1944.
Their plane, the Halifax, was shot down over Cugny.
“The Nazis buried them in a grave, and very illegally, the French people came, dug them up, put them in a cemetery and gave them a proper burial with two Gestapo sitting there watching them knowing they weren’t allowed to do it,” John said.
Immense bravery that marked the start of something special.
Today, the few hundred people of Cugny treat the seven airmen as their own. Twice a year, leaders host a ceremony honoring them and those who buried them. John’s family has been to Cugny several times, but few visits were as special as the 80th commemoration last summer.
The Gradys attended the ceremony just a few days after Michael and his three teammates won gold just 90 minutes away in Paris.
All four medalists attended the ceremony in Cugny, where Michael was asked to speak.
Wearing his gold medal, he noted his family’s long journey to find their fallen hero.
“To end up in Paris on that anniversary is...there are some things that are out of this world and inexplicable,” Michael told Channel 11.
Falling into that category of inexplicable is the similarities between two family members who never crossed paths.
On the day of the commemoration, Michael was the same age, height and weight as his great uncle.
“To be able to stand there and have the blood of my uncle running through my veins, be the same size, same hair, same eye color and be a living testament to what he sacrificed is special,” Michael said.
A moment showing the sacrifice, commitment and legacy that reconnected generations. The Gradys saying they’re honoring the past by pushing forward.
“It made me want to not waste a minute of my life, having him go down at age 26,” John said. “I try to compensate for what he missed out on.”
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