Well, the censors have taken a holiday. With the ship in US waters, there’s no need to monitor the outgoing letters. Dart takes advantage of the situation to write a news-filled six pages.
Although he’s happy to be sitting in a stateside port, he’s feeling very blue about missing his chance for a phone conversation with Dot. No doubt he’s been imagining that call ever since the Haggard pointed her bow toward home. He was hoping to hop ashore this morning, just long enough to try that call again, but word has been passed that no special liberty requests will be granted before they shove off.
Dart writes that for weeks, all the boys have been talking about their first liberty in the USA. “There was plenty of ‘women and liquor’ in their dreams. And almost every one of the men who went ashore yesterday realized their dreams. Fortified with salty sea stories, two years’ savings, a quart of Schenleys’, and the pent-up desires of many months away from home, they invaded the comparatively peaceful realm of Uncle Sugar Able.”
“After buying their pretty ribbons and polishing off their first pint or quart, they set out on the make for the first shapely miss they could find. By the time all got back aboard, fortunes had been lost, squandered, and stolen. The breath of most could have been ignited. The girls of the city now realize that there is a ship called the Haggard. Some boys had to be poured aboard. Have you ever seen a drunk so limber he could be dumped on his ship like a bucket of water? Yes, that first stateside liberty was a killer. Everything the boys expected and hoped for. (Nothing anybody prayed for, tho’. Nobody prays for things like that!)”
Then he writes a line that makes me smile – so like the Dad I knew. “When I left the ship with $25 in my pocket, I was one of the least wealthy; when I returned with $20, I was one of the fabulously rich. And I’d had every bit of the good time I’d looked forward to, except the sound of your voice.”
He tells Dot about news from classemates at Shaw that arrived with his stack of mail. He mentions another shore liberty he experienced a short time ago “in a large city, quite civilized and beautiful.” I wonder if that was in Honolulu? Then he turns his attention to answering the letters he received from Dot.
“Your six-page, built-to-order, limosine style letter of July 8, 9 is really a nifty one. Lots of swell material, but probably much like my own letters – not much which brings up any comment.”
He says he’ll get to work convincing his parents that they should visit her. If he’s on leave around Labor Day, he might be able to go up to Lake Sunapee with Dot and her father.
At this point, dinner is called for all hands, so he joins the mad scramble to the mess hall. When he returns, he raves for a couple of juicy paragraphs about the good, fresh food they got on board this morning – lots of fresh fruits and vegatables, which were a real treat after months at sea. “It surely takes prodigious quantities of food to keep a crew as large as ours fed well. And to keep them happily fed takes even more.”
He’s not sure how he’ll be able to tell her about all the places he’s been the way he writes about them. It often takes him a long time to find just the right word to put down on paper, so he fears he’ll stammer quite badly if he’s speaking the descriptions. Then he tells her that he wouldn’t bother writing to her letters like the ones she likes so well if he didn’t think she was saving them. “I don’t write that kind of letter to people who don’t appreciate them. If I get a useless, dry, uninteresting, newsless letter, I don’t take much pains in my reply. As a result, you, Mom and Pop and Fred get my best efforts. Fred said he’d scuttle some of his equipment in order to bring his letters home, if his baggage were limited.” I hope with all that’s in me that somehow Dad is aware that his letters survive, even today, for the enjoyment of a wider audience.
He truly hopes he can talk like Hite after years of marriage. “One thing he doesn’t do, but which irks me when I hear it, is to speak of his wife as ‘my old lady’. I like Hite’s expression, though. He says he’s writing to ‘my baby’s mother.'”
In answer to Dot’s inquiry, he writes that he doesn’t snore – at least no one has ever told him that he did. (That would change in later years when he achieved World Champion status for his nocturnal noises.) “But I’ve been having some mighty noisy nights this Summer. So have some others in my corner. We wake each other up screaming about once a week. Even that’s becoming less frequent.”
I guess no one escapes war unscathed.
Therer were no letters written by either Dart or Dot on the 21st, but Dart will return on July 22.
