The Letters Project

 

Readers of Rick On Theater may have noticed that I’ve been publishing a lot of posts that I haven’t written.  There have been several by my friend Kirk Woodward, a frequent guest blogger on ROT since I launched the blog, and many republications of articles and reports from other outlets—but relatively few original pieces that I’ve composed. 

That’s a situation that I assiduously avoided from the start.  In fact, my performance reports were not only the mainstay of ROT, but the rationale for starting the blog in the first place.  The pandemic shutdown interrupted that protocol for almost two years, but that’s not the actual reason for the apparent change in blog policy.

The fact is that I’ve been working on a huge project on and off since 2016, and now, eight years later, I’m close to finishing it.  I still have work to do, but when I am finished, I will be posting the result on Rick On Theater in installments.  I’ll have more to say about that at a later date.  For now, I want to explain the reasons for the long hiatus from original writing from me on the blog.

My mother died in 2015 at the age of 92.  She’d been a widow since 1996, almost 20 years, my father having died at 77.  They’d been married for 50 years as of January 1996.

Mom was born in New York City, but her family moved to Trenton, New Jersey, when she was little (see “Horsman Dolls,” posted on ROT on 14 February 2017).  After graduating from college in September 1944, she did social work with servicemen and -women who were far away from their homes out of the Trenton Chapter of the American Red Cross.

Dad was also a native New Yorker, but in January 1945, he was an artillery officer at Camp Hood in Killeen, Texas.  Like many stateside GI’s, Dad had come home on leave for the holidays.  He and my mother-to-be met on New Year’s Day 1945 and immediately fell in love.  Mom was 21 and Dad had only just turned 26.

Dad left New York on 7 January to return to duty in Texas.  Stopping in St. Louis, Missouri, the next morning to change trains, Dad began writing to the girl he’d just met—and Mom replied.  This began a year‑long correspondence that continued when Dad was sent overseas and even while he was fighting across western Europe, and upon his return to the States. 

I imagine there are lots of World War II couples with similar tales, but what I find remarkable, now 79 years later, is that not only Mom, back in the safety and comfort of Trenton, but Dad, in the hectic activity and chaos of combat and the peripatetic life of an army officer, managed to keep the letters they’d received from each other. 

In the early years of my parents’ marriage, Dad took the two caches of letters and had them mounted and bound in two scrapbooks.  They kept the two volumes in our home, taking the books with them whenever they moved, including their sojourn in Germany with the U.S. Foreign Service (see “An American Teen In Germany” on ROT, 9 and 12 March 2013, and “Home Alone,” 12, 15, and 18 June 2015).

Eventually, Mom brought the letters with her to the assisted-living residence in Bethesda, Maryland, which was her penultimate home, and when she died, among the first things I made certain to safeguard in my own apartment in New York was the two-volume set of bound letters. 

I had long wanted to do something with the letters, and now that I had them in my hands, it became a matter of exactly what and how.  The letters run from 8 January, a week after Mother and Dad met, to 2 December 1945, two days before Dad was released from military service. 

In all, Mom and Dad exchanged 182 pieces of correspondence (that were preserved).  Dad sent Mom 81 pieces, including 4 telegrams, 1 postcard (a change of address notice), and 1 V-Mail; Mom responded with 101 pieces between 11 January and 1 December, including 1 telegram, 5  birthday cards (Dad’s 27th birthday was 5 November 1945), and 7 V-Mails. 

(V-Mail was a development used between 1942 and 1945 both to save space and weight that could be then devoted to shipments of war supplies, and to enhance security.  The pre-printed form on which the message was written was photographed and transported by ship or plane as microfilm images.  The V-Mail negatives were then printed at a quarter of full size to be delivered to the addressees.)

On 18 February, I wrote up the last two letters in the collection.  I’m now rereading the resulting document from the top for the purpose of editing and revising it.  Its working title is “Letters from the Fronts” because Dad was writing from the “military front,” including the battle front, and Mom was writing from the home front.  Their perspectives were different.

In the three-part post I called “Home Alone,” I posted transcriptions of 17 letters my father wrote to my mother in September and October 1962.  The letters were from the month my dad was in Germany starting on his job as a Foreign Service Officer before my mom joined him. 

Unlike the “Home Alone” letters, I haven’t merely transcribed the messages in “Letters from the Fronts.”  I’ve quoted selectively (though sometimes extensively) and summarized the rest of each letter, adding commentary and explanations as I felt it was necessary. 

Some of the comments are personal recollections from family lore and my life with my folks over 49 years with my dad and 68 with my mother.  (There are tributes to my father—“Dad,” 20 June 2010—and to my mother—“Mom,” 1 November 2016—on the blog.) 

I start out, for instance, with an explanation of how, why, and where my future parents met—the circumstances that led to the correspondence.  There’s also the interesting fact that before my father enlisted in the army in March 1941, he did some previous service in another institution—something that’s not mentioned in the letters.

Other notes are identifications of people mentioned in the letters, mostly family members and friends of either my mother-to-be or my father-to-be.  (There are some names I can’t identify, and I’ve acknowledged that.)

Aside from both my mother’s and my father’s parents, who played a significant part in the story that underlies the letters, one other close relative of my father was most instrumental in the meeting of my future mother and father.  She figured prominently in the letters, but why she was there wasn’t explained.

Perhaps most helpful, I have tried to identify or explain references to places or events that the correspondents mention in the letters, some of them historical, some regional, some just obscure, especially almost eight decades later.

I won’t reveal here any interesting surprises, but do any readers know what the President’s Ball was?  I didn’t . . . until I researched it.  Did any of you know that “Tax Day” was originally on an earlier date than 15 April?  It was news to me!  And my mother made mention of that little factoid.

One of the principal characters in the letters story took a vacation at a place called Scaroon Manor.  I’d never heard of it, so I looked it up.  It was a late-19th-century resort in the Adirondacks of New York State, across the Hudson River from Vermont, that closed in 1962 and became a state park in ’67.  (A popular movie with a cast of major stars was filmed there in 1957—one you may have caught on TV.)

Among these latter notes are also army references my father (and occasionally my mother) makes that are either familiar only to people with military experience or are limited to the World War II era.

Had you ever heard of the “forty-and-eights”?  I certainly hadn’t, but my dad had to ride in one in France.  They were apparently well known as rail “accommodations” during the war.  What about V-Discs?  I introduced readers to V-Mail above, but except for the name, there’s no connection.  I wasn’t familiar with either of those terms, so I searched them out.  V-Discs were a special kind of phonograph record.  (Those who are too young to know what phonograph records were will just have to look them up themselves.)

What about tattoo (not the skin art)?  If you served in the army, you should know what it is, but it’s probably not familiar to other readers.  Dad mentions it in one of his letters.  I think most Americans know what taps is, at least relative to military funerals.  It’s also the last bugle call of the day on an army base and announces the official close of the day.  Tattoo is blown about an hour earlier to signal the end of the day’s work.

Rereading my folks’ letters from 79 years ago, I must confess that I found them really interesting, but I don't know if anyone else will find them so.  There’s considerable information about my family that I didn’t already know, and that might not be of any interest to anyone else. 

In one respect, I had two contrasting reactions simultaneously.  It was fascinating and strange at the same time.  This was particularly true in the letters of the last month of the collection, while Dad was waiting for his separation orders.

Dad had arrived back in the States in early September.  He landed in the New York area and immediately took two months’ leave.  He proposed to my mother and they started making wedding plans. 

Dad reported to North Carolina at the beginning of November and was essentially waiting for his release from the army, which came in the first week of December.  The letters he and Mother exchanged during November were full of discussions about decisions and choices concerning the wedding—Where would they have it?  What would Mom wear?  Whom would they invite?—and the honeymoon—Where should they go?  How should they get there?  How long should they stay? 

There was also considerable discussion regarding where the couple would live and whether they’d be able to find an apartment, considering the post-war housing shortage, and what job Dad would find once he was released from the service.

The debates, which also included the input of their parents, especially Mom’s folks, were interesting to read.  There were decisions they considered that I never knew about.  But at the same time, I knew beforehand how it all came out!  It was a very peculiar feeling.

There are also surprises and revelations, often little items that illuminate a time and place that few of us here now were around to witness.  I was born a little over a year after the letters stopped.  Some of what Mom and Dad wrote about was history—the deaths of President Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler, for example—but most of it was a level or two beneath that.  It was just life in 1945.

I don’t want to preview the letters’ content here.  If there is anything of interest to readers, that’ll spoil it.  I just want to explain at this point, when I’m close to competing this long task, why I’ve been so distracted—maybe ‘preoccupied’ is a more accurate word—with regard to Rick On Theater. 

I can’t give any kind of an accurate date when I expect to have “Letters from the Fronts” ready for posting.  I hope it’ll be sooner rather than later.  I’m anxious to see if there’s any interest in the result of my eight years’ effort.  I can’t guess, of course; I can’t be a disinterested judge.  These are the voices of my parents, after all, and I’m eavesdropping on them from almost 80 years in their future.

My friend Kirk suggested that I write a post on the work of creating “Letters from the Fronts.”  Toward that end, I’ve been keeping notes on some of the things I’ve done to put the commentary together, some of the methodology of my efforts.  Every once in a while, I tell Kirk about some process or technique I used to solve some little mystery or resolve some small conundrum.  I suspect that’s where he got the idea that a method post would be a good idea.

I won’t be writing that report until after “Letters” is “in press.”  Of course, if “Letters” doesn’t generate much interest, then a report on how I created it will be even less engaging.