RETURNING HOME.

Franklin Times, Volume XXII, Issue 59, 23 May 1932, Page 3

RETURNING HOME.

SHELL-SHOCKED VETERAN

FAILS TO REMEMBER PAST

After an absence of 11 years, Tobias J. Burke, shell-shocked World War veteran was re-united with his family at Philadelphia, United States, last month, but he still cannot remember who he is.

Burke, proprietor of a gasoline service station at Berwyn, a suburb of Chicago, under the name of "Joe Bond," arrived at the home of his parents, Mr and Mrs Patrick Burke, iu North Philadelphia and was identified by all his relatives as the longsought man.

He shook hands with each of them, then said:

'l'm sorry—l don't remember you" Burke stared closely at his father and his mother, who is seriously ill, and appeared _to strive hard to find some recollection of them.

To his five brothers, his sister and other relatives, who told them his name'was "Toby," he replied that the only name he knew was "Joe Bond."

"His mind is a complete blank as to everything that happened before the war," one relative said. "He has a strange, puzzled look in his eyes."

Burke, who is about 40, has a wife, Carrie, and son, James, 11, living with the sister, Mrs Mary Armstrong. His wife is ill and has not been told that he has been found.

Burke went to war from Philadelphia and served as a motor-cycle dispatch bearer with the 108th Engineers. He returned home, gassed and wounded.

He suffered nightmares and finally was sent to a hospital for nervous diseases, receiving £l6 a month compensation from the Government. He returned home in better spirits, but one night in December, 1921, he set out for a corner store and vanished. Burke was discovered through a chance encounter with a man who served in his outfit during the war. Burke wrote to his father, and a brother, David, a jeweller, went to Chicago to meet him.