Dart begins his first letter of the day just after midnight. He’s sitting in another air conditioned rail car, awaiting departure from Cleveland. He claims the car is “conditioned with air straight from the Northern ice cap,” and he’s grateful for his Navy blues. (I think they were made of wool.)
Although he had to leave most of Dot’s letters behind, and her picture as well, he brought along her two most recent ones to answer on the train. While he was home, he counted up the letters she’d written over eight months and they totaled 201! He re-read some of his favorites and experienced the same thrill he had when her first received them.
He again recalls Sunday afternoon in Greenwich when they were sitting in the car. Telling her face-to-face that he loved her was a huge moment for him. He’d been wanting for so long to find the right girl to say those words to, and now he’s found her and knows he’ll be saying the same words to the same girl for the rest of his life. There was a sweet reference to a particular moment when he was “over-eager” and asked for one too many kisses. Dot refused, for which he says he’s grateful. It showed him that she has good sense – better than his, at the time.
He stopped writing to get a little sleep and picked the letter up again in the morning. He expressed delight when the train goes through an Indiana town without stopping. “All night we’ve been stopping at every town, whether it had a name or not. If it didn’t have a name, the engineer’d come through the train with a brush and a can of paint, trying to find a sign painter to name the place.”
Dart mentions that he saw his cousin Marg before leaving Cleveland. As it turns out, Marg indeed knows Dot’s friend Cynthia, a co-ed at Oberlin College. Marg, like nearly everyone else, likes Cynthia very much. He also tells Dot that Burke and Edith are going steady now and that Edith has Wednesday dinners with the Peterson family.
He thanks Dot for calling his mother when he’d left Greenwich. She was very impressed with Dot’s thoughtfulness. I think this early relationship between Dot and Mr. and Mrs. Peterson laid the groundwork for a life-long relationship of mutual respect and affection. I never heard my mother express a negative thought about her in-laws over the years. She regularly talks about how lucky she was with the family she’d married into.
Dart squeezes one more letter out of the day, written from Great Lakes. He has been transferred from the general detail list to the service school list. He’s scheduled to leave for Fire Controlman school on Monday at an undisclosed location. He’s grateful to have been assigned to a group that will be pulling out of this “hot, crowded, unclean place” soon. He describes over 1,000 men sleeping in a huge room. Bunks are triple-decked, and arranged in long double rows with narrow aisles between them.
He’s on a list of 23 men, many from Cleveland, who will be sent to the same location. “If the usual procedure of Army and Navy is carried out, we’ll land in some school far from home.” He’s guessing San Diego, Jacksonville or Washington, DC.
He signs off for bed as he looks forward to a 23-hour liberty tomorrow. He’s hoping to get up to Milwaukee.
