My wife can tell you that I am not a big Hollywood fan. I have never liked its glitz and money-hungry lifestyle. As a result, she is lucky to get me to a movie more than once or twice a year.

But, recently, fortunately, she did talk me into it. We went and saw Tom Hanks in a movie about a troubled, older man who has lost his wife, is contemplating suicide, but who is saved from it by neighbors who reach out to help.

Though I still have my phobias about Hollywood, I have to admit that I usually make an exception when it comes to Tom Hanks. He not only is a good actor; he is a good human being.

I met Hanks once. It was a year or two after he had starred in the movie, Saving Private Ryan. At the time, I was involved in helping create a National World War II Memorial in Washington. Not only was our organization tasked with finding a site, developing a design and then building the Memorial–Congress had also given us the responsibility of raising the money from private funds to build it.

In terms of the fundraising obligation, Senator Bob Dole and Fred Smith, Chairman of the FedEx Corporation, had agreed to head up the capital campaign to raise the funds. Yet, we needed a recognized voice to articulate the need and the mission. When asked in a letter, Tom Hanks responded that he would do whatever he could to help. He became that voice.

In making the Private Ryan movie, Hanks had spent time at the Normandy American Cemetery on Omaha Beach. He had been over-powered by the sacrifice made there and throughout western France as American soldiers died for the liberation of Europe. Hanks wanted to give back. He wanted to honor those who had died. He didn’t need to be convinced of the significance of a World War II Memorial, he wanted to be a part of it.

When, in late 2000, we had a ground-breaking ceremony at the location where the Memorial would be built, Hanks was there.

We chatted, met his wife and had a very cordial conversation at a reception preceding the event. What I wasn’t ready for were the remarks he would make during the ceremony.

I was expecting that a famous person, like Hanks, would probably have hired a speech writer to frame some powerful words. Instead, he got up before the microphone and read about three paragraphs from Ernie Pyle’s book, Brave Men. It was a story of GI’s struggling and dying in the winter mud and snows of Italy during brutal fighting in the mountains south of Rome, and how, one night, as they came off the mountain, they stopped to salute, pray with, and talk to their young commanding officer, now dead and propped up against a wall there on the battle field.

I don’t think there was a dry eye in the crowd that day as Hanks read these words. The ground-breaking event wasn’t about him. It was about young men experiencing the hell of war in a foreign land, fighting and dying for their country and a cause that they believed in. It was clear that this ceremony was about them, not about who the speakers were. I became a “Tom Hanks guy” that day and, ever since, have followed him in the movies.

You might want to see his latest movie. The truth underlying it is another story which springs deep from the human experience. Sometimes Hollywood gets it right.

Rolland Kidder is a Stow resident.