As I mentioned in this post, I have inherited hundreds of letters that were written from my wife’s grandfather to her grandmother while they were courting. Most of the letters were written during the time while my wife’s grandfather was drafted into service during WW2. Many are from basic training and many are from his time served in India. I have not yet begun the formal process of scanning, dating and sorting the letters. This letter was floating around on top with no envelope – there is no date listed on it besides “1945”. All spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors have been left intact.
Arts & Letters
Treasure Trove
My wife took a recent visit to her grandmother and grandfather. They aren’t doing so well. We have had to have “the talk” with them about getting them out of their house and into some sort of assisted living facility. It isn’t pleasant, of course – it never is when dealing with situations such as this.
While there, my wife was asked to go through some things and distribute them among the living family members. Most of these things hold only sentimental value. I ended up with a couple of guns, a sweet antique Marlin .22 and a beautiful bolt action Mossberg 12 gauge shotgun. I haven’t had time to research them as of yet.
As we were cleaning up the van and getting some of the items ready for a garage sale to raise cash for them, my wife informed me she also got a box of letters. What’s that, I said? Well, here it is.
I was told that these were letters from my wife’s grandfather to her grandmother. And they are. Hundreds and hundreds of them, neatly bundled and put away for nearly 70 years before my eyes gazed upon them. From an early look, the vast majority of them seem to be from when my wife’s grandfather was drafted to be in the big war – ww2, that is. They have that musty/old book smell.
He was stationed in India and from what I can glean upon reading a letter or two is that he was a supply clerk of some sort. There are also a lot of letters that he wrote to her from basic training. Most of the addresses use grandma’s maiden name. They were still courting.
Oh yea – I haven’t told my wife this yet – there are letters from other guys to grandma too. Well then.
I plan on sharing some of these letters with our readers here. They are an invaluable source of information to a historian such as myself to get a feel what it was like back then – not only from a military history standpoint, but they will be a look into the social lives of folks back then as well.
I shall change the names as these folks are still alive, but I will leave all of the language intact. I hope you enjoy these letters that I will publish as I find time to transcribe them. The first thing I need to do is figure out everything chronologically.
I am absolutely giddy with anticipation.
Story-Telling and History
I am almost sure that telling a historical story through a movie is fraught with as many perils for the story-teller as doing so through the medium of historical fiction it’s just that the movie-maker’s pratfalls are so much more … public, I guess is the word that I’m fishing for. There are big-name, serious historical fiction writers who abuse history almost beyond recognition in their attempt to weave a tale of the past Philippa Gregory, anyone? but to my mind, the really, really egregious mainstream offenses are committed in the service of movie-making.
American Heritage
I can blame my intense, not to say passionate interest in 19th century American history specifically, to the Western frontier to being exposed at a very impressionable age to two things, and both of them the fault of my parents. One of them was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series of books, which Mom and Dad began giving me as gifts at around the age of eight … by which time I could read confidently and omnivorously. I would get a single volume for Christmas or a birthday present, dated and inscribed and I very clearly remember sitting down and reading them from cover to cover almost immediately. They gave me a pretty good sense of domestic life in the small-town mid-West, and what work was involved in keeping house, home and family together on the late 19th century frontier.
“My Verse Distills Your Truth”
I’m an amateur at technology – one of those stand at the front and yell at them, one of those “put-two-marks on the board to describe all of – well everything” teachers. “Potted lectures,” tests over the readings – that’s me. (My favorite pattern – that of the autobiographical or first person narrator taking us to the past, showing us the trail and trials to become the person speaking had a certain simplicity. But laughter began as I started, one semester, to put it up for the fifth or sixth time. Ah, I said, but doesn’t this make sense? Well, maybe, they said. It also looks like a rather flaccid penis. Perhaps simplicity leaves too much to the imagination.)