Born: October 8, 1933   Boise, ID 

Died:  July 10, 1953

Buried in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, Honolulu, Hawaii.

Although his body is buried in Hawaii there is a cenotaph at the Morris Hill Cemetery in Boise, Idaho.

War: Korean War

Rank: Corporal, U.S. Army

Location of Action: Near Sokkogae, Korea

Date of Action: July 8-10, 1953

Official Medal of Honor Citation:

Cpl. Schoonover, distinguished himself by conspicuous gallantry and outstanding courage above and beyond the call of duty in action against the enemy.  He was in charge of an engineer demolition squad attached to an infantry company which was committed to dislodge the enemy from a vital hill.

Realizing that the heavy fighting and intense enemy fire made it impossible to carry out his mission, he voluntarily employed his unit as a rifle squad and, forging up the steep barren slope, participated in the assault on hostile positions. hen an artillery round exploded on the roof of an enemy bunker, he courageously ran forward and leaped into the position, killing one hostile infantryman and taking another prisoner.

Later in the action, when friendly forces were pinned down by vicious fire from another enemy bunker, he dashed through the hail of fire, hurled grenades in the nearest aperture, then ran to the doorway and emptied his pistol, killing the remainder of the enemy.  His brave action neutralized the position and enabled friendly troops to continue their advance to the crest of the hill. 

When the enemy counterattacked he constantly exposed himself to the heavy bombardment to direct the fire of his men and to call in an effective artillery barrage on hostile forces.  Although the company was relieved early the following morning, he voluntarily remained in the area, manned a machine gun for several hours, and subsequently joined another assault on enemy emplacements.

When last seen he was operating an automatic rifle with devastating effect until mortally wounded by artillery fire. Cpl. Schoonover's heroic leadership during 2 days of heavy fighting, superb personal bravery, and willing self-sacrifice inspired his comrades and saved many lives, reflecting lasting glory upon himself and upholding the honored traditions of the military service.

The Schoonover Bowl at Camp Casey, South Korea, was named after Cpl Dan Schoonover, who was awarded the Medal Of Honor. It was called the Bayonet Bowl, then renamed after Dan. There was also a small camp near the DMZ in the central area named after him, Camp Schoonover. Not much reference to it can be found now. It was in the small village of Unchon-ni, located near Camp Kaiser.

Shirley Schoonover, 1936-2004

Personal Information: Family: Born February 25, 1936, in Biwabik, Minnesota; daughter of John Arvo (a farmer) and Clara (Knuutinen) Waisanen; married LeRoie C. Schoonover (divorced); children: Noel, Scott, Robin; died June 4, 2004.  Education: Attended University of Minnesota and University of Nebraska. Politics: Independent. Memberships: Lincoln Community Playhouse. Addresses: Home and Office: 456 Julian Pl., Kirkwood, MO 63122. Agent: Sterling Lord Agency, Inc., 660 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10021.

Career: Hovland-Swanson, Lincoln, NE, fashion coordinator during 1960's; University of Nebraska, Lincoln, instructor in education during 1960's; University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, assistant professor of English, 1970-74; writer.

Awards: O. Henry Award, 1962, for "The Star Blanket," and 1964, for "Old and Country Tale." Martha Foley Award for short stories.

WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:

            Schoonover, Shirley. Mountain of Winter. New York: Coward-McCann, 1965.

            Mountain of Winter was translated into German and sold by Rowohlt under the title

            Ava, (c) 1967. It is a story about a young woman coming of age in Minnesota.

            ---. Sam’s Song. New York: Coward-McCann, 1969.

            ---. A Season of Hard Desire. New York: Avon, 1981.

            ---. Winter Dream. New York: Avon, 1980.

                    This novel is a whimsical story set in the forests of Savo and peopled with

                    characters named Vaino, Ilmi, Lem, Louhi, an elf by name of Tet and an evil

                    shaman named Lute.

            ---. Letters from the Sandcastle.

            An excerpt from Mountain of Winter appeared in Michael Karni and Aili Jarvenpa,

            editors, Sampo the Magic Mill: A Collection of Finnish-American Writing.

            Minneapolis, MN: New Rivers Press, 1989.  

Work has been represented in anthologies, including Best Short Stories of 1970, edited by Martha Foley. Contributor of criticism, articles, and short stories to New York Times Book Review, Atlantic, and Holiday. Assistant editor, Prarie Schooner, during 1960's.

"Sidelights"

Shirley Schoonover told CA: "Motivation for writing my books does not change: to write something approaching the truth about a situation, the people in it. I find that most of my writing goes into the waste basket, that I write a lot and cut more. Recently wrote a few haiku for Warren Benson, the composer; seventeen syllables was exactly how many I had in my head for the material I chose: vegetables, toadstools, ferns. But I had just, a week before, completed four hundred plus pages of Finns I, the first part of a large thing I'm tackling about the Finns in The Kalevala. That is a work of love. The language and the poetry, the imagery of that long folk poem is somehow soul satisfying, nurturing, invigorating. I hope the books I'm writing will be a dot as enchanting.

"The book I'm working on now, Flowers for Leah, is about a woman who discovers that her marriage, her life, have been based on myth and fantasy, and that it is peopled by strangers who are isolated from each other and from themselves. While all good marriages are different, bad marriages have a similarity: an intangible monster that takes on carnality, blood and bone, and that monster (in Leah's marriage) is the child, the lover, the inevitable destroyer of the marriage. Well, that's not all the book is about, it's also about the undersea life that women have. Leah, I hope, illuminates that aspect of womanhood."

In the midst of a flurry of reviews characterizing Schoonover's book Sam's Song as just another erotic novel born of the feminist wave of writing, Martin Levin asked: "When is a dirty book not a dirty book?" He answered: "When it is a cride coeur, in which whatever detritus there is exists as part of the structure of personality." He went on to say that "Schoonover is a literary artist who is not interested in practicing elementary Freud any more than she is using her protagonist as a medium for tittering scatology. Her narrator is a thoroughly homogenized mixture of ambiguous urges, detoured maternal feelings, sharply bitter humor, ethnic (Finnish) traces. In short, she has soul--one that is lost in a `black forrest' of obsession, whose outcry shrills with compelling urgency."

Source:  Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2001.

Source Database:  Contemporary Authors

Thomas David Schoonover, 1936-

Personal Information: Family:  Born May 27, 1936, in Winona, MN; son of Robert (a salesperson) and Harriet (Rislove) Schoonover; married Ebba Wesener (a university instructor), March 25, 1966; children: Paco. Ethnicity: "European." Education: University of Minnesota, B.A., 1959, Ph.D., 1970; Louisiana State University, M.A., 1961; attended University of Heidelberg, 1965-67, and University of Madrid, 1967. Memberships: American Historical Association (life member), Organization of American Historians (life member), Society for the History of American Foreign Relations (life member), Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (member of council, 1998-2001), Conference on Latin American History, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (chapter vice president, 1971-74), American Civil Liberties Union (chapter president, 1974), Southeast Conference of Latin American Studies, Phi Alpha Theta. Addresses: Home: 172 Antigua Dr., Lafayette, LA 70503. Office: Department of History, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, East University Ave., Lafayette, LA 70504; fax 337-482-6809.

Career: University of Wisconsin--La Crosse, instructor in history, 1962-63; University of Maryland, European Branch, Heidelberg, West Germany, instructor in history, 1963-67; University of Louisiana at Lafayette, instructor, 1969-70, assistant professor, 1970-75, associate professor, 1975-88, professor of history, 1988-99, currently SLEMCO/Board of Regents Support Fund Professor of Liberal Arts. University of Bielefeld, senior Fulbright lecturer, 1981-82; Cornell University, visiting professor, summers, 1991 and 1997. Lafayette High School, assistant soccer coach, 1987-96.

Awards: Grants from University of Southwestern Louisiana (now University of Louisiana at Lafayette), 1971, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1983; fellow of National Endowment for the Humanities, 1972-73; grants from American Philosophical Society, 1979 and 1980; grants from Fritz Thyssen Foundation, 1981-82; Alfred B. Thomas Book Award, 1999, for Germany in Central America.

WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:

Dollars over Dominion: The Triumph of Liberalism in Mexican-U.S. Relations, 1861-1867, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge), 1978.

(Contributor) Richard Dean Burns, editor, Guide to American Foreign Relations since 1700, American Bibliographical Center-Clio Press (Santa Barbara, CA), 1982.

(Contributor) Rhodri Jefferys-Jones, editor, Eagle against Empire: American Opposition to European Imperialism, 1914-1982, University of Provence, 1983.

(Editor and translator) Mexican Lobby: Matias Romero in Washington, 1861-1867 (selected correspondence), University Press of Kentucky (Lexington), 1986.

(Contributor) R. Lee Woodward, editor, Central America: Historical Perspective on the Contemporary Crisis, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1988.

A Mexican View of America in the 1860s: A Foreign Diplomat Describes the Civil War and Reconstruction, Fairleigh Dickinson University (Rutherford, NJ), 1991.

The United States in Central America, 1860-1911: Episodes in Social Imperialism and Imperial Rivalry in the World System, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1991.

(Contributor) La economia mexicana, El Colegia de Mexico, 1992.

The Banana Men: American Mercenaries and Entrepreneurs in Central America, 1880-1930, University Press of Kentucky, 1994.

(Contributor) James W. Cortada, editor, Spain in the Nineteenth-Century World: Essays on Spanish Diplomacy, Greenwood Press, 1994.

(Contributor) Robert E. May, editor, The Union, the Confederacy, and the Atlantic Rim, Purdue University Press (West Lafayette, IN), 1995.

Germany in Central America: Competitive Imperialism, 1821-1929, University of Alabama Press (University), 1998.

(Contributor) Walther Bernecker, editor, 1898: Su significado para Centroamerica y el Caribe; Censura, Cambio, Continuidad?, Vervuert, 1998.

The French in Central America: Culture and Commerce, 1820-1930, Scholarly Resources (Wilmington, DE), 2000.

Contributor to Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Contributor to history journals. Area editor, Americas: A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History, 1973-85, 1988-91; member of editorial board, Diplomatic History, 1978-81.

Works in Progress: Competitive Imperialism: The United States Challenges the World in Middle America, 1821-1929.

Source:  Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2001.

Source Database:  Contemporary Authors

Gloria Jean Schoonover, 1927 - 2018