In the photograph to the right, Axel Wilhelm Lubbers poses with his mother (Johanna and two sisters (Dagmar, the elder, and Ida, the younger), taken while the family still lived in Copenhagen, Denmark; his father died in 1897, when Axel was 12, so I think this photo must have been made not too long after that, based on Axel’s youth. Certainly it was taken before 1903, when the family emigrated to the U.S. along with a dozen or so other Latter-day Saints also headed to Utah.

The photo below shows Axel as an adult with his two children, Betty Ida and Joseph Axel; I estimate it was taken about 1929 or 1930.

In between those dates, Axel served in the United States Navy during World War I, part of the time aboard the Knickerbocker. It wasn’t a glamorous billet – the Knickerbocker was an old tugboat first leased, then purchased, by the Navy, to serve as a minesweeper late in 1917. She was so old and unfit, really, for duty that the Navy struck her from the list of its ships early in 1918, but then recalled her to duty because tugs were in such short supply. She sailed up and down the Hudson and around New York Harbor, straining the waters with her heavy nets, searching for mines planted by German U-boats.

The Knickbocker wasn’t alone in her patrol to keep the shipping lanes open; in the air above, watchers in great observation balloons kept a lookout for enemy presence.

One day that winter of 1917-18, the men of the Knickerbocker found one of the observation balloons, abandoned, floating on the water. They brought it aboard, and immediately cut it into pieces, each man claiming a piece as a souvenir.

Axel Lubbers fingered the piece he was given – soft rubber, a gray layer on the inside, an outer white covering. His piece included some red and blue markings as well. What to do with it, though, what to do with it?

Surely Axel’s use of that souvenir rubber was unique about the Knickerbocker’s men. Axel made an apron.

An apron? Yeah. He made the upper part chiefly of the inner gray lining; the skirt was made of the white rubber – and he cut the skirt in the petaled shape of a Utah sego lily. The edges of the entire apron were trimmed with bands of the red, white, and blue markings of the balloon, and in the center of the upper apron he used colored bits to fashion a beehive with a bee on its side, and glued it to its gray background.

This wasn’t just a souvenir for Axel, with overtones of his adopted Utah. Axel presented the apron to the sisters of the Brooklyn Relief Society, for them to sell in their bazaar.

“At the bazaar, the apron was sold for a good price” – sadly, the record doesn’t tell us its selling price – “as a war relic, and that money, with what was realized from the sale of other articles, is being used by the Society in furnishing their room, and for war relief work.”

Axel Lubbers returned to Salt Lake City after the war, marrying and raising those two children. He worked in transportation, first as a streetcar conductor, and later in the train yards on the west side of the city. In 1949, when Axel was 54, he was riding on the outside of a train car during his work in those yards, when he was struck by a swinging gate and died of his injuries.

New Yorkers, keep an eye out in museums and other resources for that Utah/Mormon-themed apron. It’s unlikely to have survived this long, but there’s a story you could supply to curators if it could be found in some collection somewhere!