Today, Dart is the solo letter writer, and he writes on a raggedy sheet of cheap stationery. He confesses that his tightwad tendencies have lead him to try and use up all his mismatched paper now so he’ll have less stuff to take with him when he returns to boot camp.

Speaking of which, on the advice of doctors, he will not try to return as early as Tuesday. His care team seems to think that he should have more experience working to see how he bears up. The galley crew is pretty tiring, but even worse, it leaves little time for writing to friends and sweetheart.

Alluding again to some test results he’d received a few days ago, he tells Dot to forget about it.  “I’ll probably get around to telling you about it sometime when we know each other much better and it might not embarrass either of us,” he writes. I suspect he may have been referring to the results of the fertility test he was given after having the mumps – known to sometimes cause sterility in men. Years later, he admitted to Dot that the test had indeed shown him to be sterile. As it turns out, that was yet another procedure that the Navy hospital managed to botch. The story is that the corpsman had collected the specimen in a jar piping hot out of the sterilizer. So hot, in fact, that it killed every little “swimmer” in there. Dart, of course, went on to sire three healthy offspring.

He has placed Dot’s photo in a nice leather frame for better protection than the original cardboard frame provided. I think it’s sweet that he kept the old frame because of some sentimental words she had written in the corner. I believe the photo still resides in that same leather frame, where it has been for the past 70 years.

He closes by saying, “I’ve got to see you soon, Dot. Others may suffer longer separations, but they’re made of stronger stuff.”