Remember Them
Manuscript complete.
George Farris Baker Jr. rode a horse to school in rural Oklahoma. Vera Joy Baker was up at 4:30 to work the fields. They fell in love in a 1950 Willys Jeep, with the family Steinway standing nearby, and stayed married more than sixty years. George became an Air Force fighter pilot and flew the F-100 into combat over North Vietnam. After his second tour, still raw from the loss of a young bunkmate, he wrote an essay called “Remember Them,” a plea to remember the kind of men they were. Nearly sixty years later that essay became this book’s title and its purpose. It is the ranch, the airplanes, the music, the fishing trips, four sons, and two people defined less by what they achieved than by how they served everyone around them. The Jeep and the Steinway run through the generations almost as characters, and both are still in the family. Drawn from nearly ten years of Vera’s own writing before her death in January 2026, from family memory, and from the record.