late Deotha Parsons story earlier this month<\/a>. Parson\u2019s rich history of being the first female African American employee to work at Bay Pines VA in the 1940s is all laid out in a book.<\/p>\nThe book is housed in the archives at the Bay Pines VA. That\u2019s where hospital coordinator for the Disabled American Veterans, John Makas, first discovered it six months ago.<\/p>\n
He said he knew then, he had to find and connect Parsons\u2019 family with the book.<\/p>\n
After the story aired and appeared online, the community connected Spectrum Bay News 9 with Monica Hunt and her brother Erik Butler, Parsons\u2019 grandchildren who live in Washington D.C.<\/p>\n
Makas joined the video call to formally meet them and get their reaction to the story.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought it was amazing,\u201d Butler said.<\/p>\n
Hunt says she was surprised.<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah, it was great. I had chills. I was like, \u2018Oh wow\u2019 and all of those pictures. But to see all of the rest of the stuff in the book, it was nice to see,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Deotha Parsons, the history maker, was just a grandmother to them. She had already retired from VA by the time they were old enough to understand her accomplishments.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe wasn\u2019t too much affiliated by the time I got to know her,\u201d Butler said.<\/p>\n
After working for Bay Pines VA, for more than 30 years and retiring in the 1970s the book was created for her retirement. It\u2019s something Makas wants the family to have a piece of.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t want that photo album to get lost. So, my DAV here in the Florida Area, we\u2019re going to get together and we\u2019re going to have that book digitally done for you and I want to give that to your family so that you guys have it,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s something you should have to teach to your grandchildren.\u201d<\/p>\n
Once completed, Makas said he will coordinate with the family to hand them over the new digitized copy of the book. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PINELLAS COUNTY, Fla. \u2014\u00a0A veteran working at the Bay Pines VA recently discovered a book in the archives…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":64041,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[25157,1011,274,276,1190,115,4368,202,204,203,199,201,200,135,278,3393,27351],"class_list":["post-64040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-app-honoring-our-veterans","tag-app-human-interest","tag-app-top-stories","tag-hillsborough-county","tag-human-interest","tag-news","tag-saundra-weathers","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news","tag-tampa","tag-top-stories","tag-veterans","tag-veterans-month"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64040\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}