“Living for Just You!”
Another photograph shows Seattle’s Aurora Bridge stretching across the landscape, with Mount Rainier visible in the distance.
On the back, my father wrote:
“Living for just you!”
It is another remarkably personal message preserved on the back of an otherwise ordinary souvenir photograph. My father could have written something about the bridge, the view, or the places he was seeing. Instead, once again, he wrote about Mary.
Those few words take on even greater meaning when I think about the circumstances in which he wrote them. He was a young man in the service, thousands of miles from the woman he planned to marry, living through a period when neither of them could know exactly when they would be together again.
Each photograph was showing Mary another piece of the world he was experiencing, but the messages on their backs reveal something much more important.
“Darling, I love you.”
“Wish you were here.”
“Your everything to me.”
And now:
“Living for just you!”
Taken together, these weren’t simply messages written on souvenirs. They were a conversation across the miles, preserved because my mother chose to keep everyone.
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“Darling, I Love You”
One of the little photographs shows Mount Rainier rising above the landscape, its snow-covered peak dominating the view. Turn it over. In my father’s handwriting are the words: “Darling, I love you.” There is something particularly moving about finding those words more than eighty years later. My father wasn’t writing for anyone else to read. […]
A Little Mail Bag from Seattle
The pouch itself deserves a closer look. This was the kind of inexpensive novelty souvenir that could be purchased, filled with small photographs, addressed, stamped, and sent through the mail. The miniature mailbag turned an ordinary packet of souvenir pictures into something more memorable. More than eighty years later, the original postage stamps remain on […]
Christmas 1941 — St. Vincent’s Home, Saginaw, Michigan
Among my father’s papers are several Christmas cards that help document a period of his life that I know only in pieces. In the weeks before Christmas 1941, he was living at St. Vincent’s Home at 800 Howard Street in Saginaw, Michigan. The envelopes themselves establish this address, while the postmarks and Christmas greetings place […]
