Love Through the Wartime Mail
There was nothing unusual about a serviceman sending photographs and messages home during World War II. That is precisely what makes this little collection part of a much larger history.
War separated millions of husbands and wives, sweethearts, parents, children and friends.
Mail became a lifeline.
Letters carried news. Photographs carried faces and places. Postcards marked someone’s travels. Small souvenirs gave the person at home something tangible to hold.
And people waited for the mail.
We tend to remember World War II through its enormous events — Pearl Harbor, troop movements, battles, casualties and victory.
But those events were made up of millions of individual lives.
People fell in love.
They waited.
They worried.
They planned marriages.
They imagined the lives they would have when the war was over.
And sometimes a young serviceman in Seattle bought a tiny cloth mailbag, filled it with photographs, and sent it across the country to the woman he loved.
Read More From Nancy
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 […]
A Window into My Father’s Senior Year
Among my parents’ papers, I found my father’s senior autograph book from his graduation at St. Joseph’s High School in June 1939. The small brown book contains signatures, handwritten messages, and well wishes from classmates and teachers as they prepare to leave school and begin the next stage of their lives. What interested me most, […]
“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. […]
