This is an IHeart podcast.

And we continue with our American stories.

And not long ago, we spent some time at our great flagship station, W.HO in Des Moines, Iowa,

a giant stick in the middle of this great country, an I-Heart station.

And we've been on that station for years and telling stories.

We decided to have a storytelling contest and asked folks to send in their stories. We drove up to

Des Moines and, well, we did it in a beautiful restaurant with a few hundred people. And we feature

right now one of the women who submitted her story to that event about her father, Thiesel

Wax, who had a surreal encounter during World War II.

Here is Marilyn Jensen.

My dad, Cecil Wax, was the family storyteller.

He had an endless supply of stories about scratching life from the muddy

hills of Southwest Iowa. He passed on to my brother, Bill, and me the wisdom and laughter that

can improve almost any situation. He sprinkled humor like salt throughout his tales. Dad rummaged through his memory for any scrap of wit from his months of service in World War II.

He tagged that bleak era as Uncle Sam's all-expense-paid trip to Europe.

His blue eyes would twinkle and his dimples dance as he shared memories of times when he and his war brothers laughed together.

Like the night a delayed fuse bomb went off.

His buddy Hastings jumped into a ditch for protection and later discovered it was a trench left over from World War I,

which the Germans had been using as a latrine.

Dad would grin and say, talk about odor. We asked him to sleep alone in the truck cab for the

rest of the night. But this story lacks that dash of comedy.

This is the account of how a scared, farmer-turned soldier conquered a dangerous mountain road

...