Chloe Melas (Luck of the Draw) and Margot Clark-Junkins (Following the Front) will discuss the extraordinary experiences of their grandfathers, two courageous men who saw it all during WWII, with Q&A to follow.

Melas, NBC’s Entertainment Correspondent, and Clark-Junkins, a writer and native of Westchester, wanted to bring their grandfathers’ stories to light. 

Melas’s grandfather, Frank Murphy, was a member of the 8th Air Force’s elite 100th Bomb Group (the “Bloody 100th”) who was captured by the Germans in 1943. He was imprisoned at Stalag Luft III, a camp immortalized in the film “The Great Escape.” Melas republished Murphy’s memoir in 2023, turning it into a New York Times bestseller.

Going through her grandfather Sidney Olson’s personal papers, Clark-Junkins uncovered a trove of war dispatches written for Time & Life in 1945. In them, he describes in vivid detail hearing Churchill speak in London, seeing Hemingway and Capa in Paris, watching the fall of Cologne and Nuremberg, meeting General Patton, and the liberation of Dachau’s concentration camp. Clark-Junkins published Olson’s dispatches in Sept. 2024.

Copies of Luck of the Draw: My Story of the Air War in Europe and Following the Front: The Dispatches of WWII Correspondent Sidney A. Olson will be available for purchase and signing.