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 the tag. The leather ties are still attached. Most importantly, the tag still bears my mother’s name.
Miss Mary Hannigan.
Before she was my father’s wife, before she was my mother, she was the young woman waiting in New Hampshire for something in the mail from Martinsburg.
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“Wish You Were Here”
Another photograph shows the Seattle waterfront and a streamlined passenger vessel. Turn it over and there is another message: “Wish you were here.” It is such a familiar postcard phrase, but in the context of their lives, it means something more. My father wasn’t on vacation. He was in the service. Mary was thousands of […]
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 […]
Induction Paper
What this document records is a clearly defined sequence in my father’s entry into military service during World War II, set within the structured and highly organized process of Army induction in 1942. On August 4, 1942, my father, Roger E. Watson, was among a group of men processed through the induction center in Clarksburg, West Virginia. […]
