Here are just a few quick lines at the end of Dart’s first liberty in eight months. He spent some time at the U.S.O. before exploring the city on his own and learned two things: Milwaukee is quite a bit bigger than he had expected it to be, and a train yard and engine are not proper places for a white uniform. (No longer so white.)

He’ll have a medical exam in a few minutes and then he’s off to an unknown destination tomorrow. He hopes he’ll be somewhere on the East coast so he and Dot can see each other more often. “Until I can write again remember that wherever I go, my heart and my memories are with you.”

Dot writes a page of introduction to a poem she wrote to try to explain how she feels about Dart. She writes, “It’s corny and juvenile and everything else poetry shouldn’t be, but I’m sending it along anyway just to show you how I spend my time.” She recalls that a week ago at this time, they were sitting in the car by “their” island. How she wishes she could have said the words then.

The second page is the poem itself. Later in her life, Dot would become well known for the witty, clever ditties should could write for any and all occasions. This work is neither clever or witty, but it speaks volumes about the depth of her feelings for her sailor.

An excerpt:

You’ve given your love, which is more to me

Than all that has been or is to be.

You’ve awakened my heart to that which is good

And have done more for me than I thought anyone could.

Dart’s short letter brings a bitter pill. He has his orders; he’s going to San Francisco for his advanced training. There is a fire control school in Connecticut, but he will be thousands of miles away. He says he’s always wanted to travel and see the world, but now all he wants to do is spend time with Dot.

He writes that his destination makes him even happier that he was able to see Dot on his leave. “I have you to work for and fight for. Work and fight harder than ever before.”

He expresses his concern about how he’ll get through the next couple of weeks with no letters from Dot or from his family. He’s already terribly homesick and misses mail after only a few days.

There is a poignancy in his final paragraph that expresses hope, but also an underlying fear and uncertainty. “Bu the time you get this I will be far away, but be a brave girl and don’t cry. It’s not so long before we can be together again. I don’t know when, but it can’t be another six or eight months. When the war is over, if we still feel the same way, we can be together forever.”

Dot has made it through the first half of a hot, tiring, busy two-day sale with the aid of two letters from her “one and only” that she read over her lunch break.

She’s pleased he had a comfortable return trip to Great Lakes. She’ll be happy to tell Cynthia that Dart’s cousin Marg remembers her after all. She’s interested to learn that Burke and Edith are going steady and says she hopes Burke has better taste in girls than his brother does. Then she adds that she’s grateful Dart’s taste is so bad or she would be out of luck. (Is there a hyphen in “self-esteem issues”?)

She claims that it’s so humid in Greenwich that when her kid brother Doug walked into the kitchen after falling into a river, their mother didn’t notice any difference between his appearance and that of everyone else’s!

She’s happy to hear he’s on his way to advanced training and says she go nuts until she learns where he’ll be stationed. She wants him as close as possible, but her first hope is that he goes where he most wants to be.

She asks if he enjoyed his Milwaukee liberty and if he met any cute “number” she should be jealous about. “I get jealous very easily, you know. Now, if I were smart, I wouldn’t have told you that, but I’m not smart, so I did.”

I find that previous statement very interesting. It belies the strength of the woman who would become my mother. When I was a teenager, I remember Mom telling me that there was no place for jealousy in real love. If you were sure of your love and that of your partner, why would you waste energy on jealousy? Conversely, if you were jealous, it spoke volumes about the feebleness of the love between you. I always liked the self-assuredness of that statement, and recognized its truth even as a young girl.

Dart’s first letter of the day is written from Omaha Station, aboard a handsome Pullman car. All 25 men from his unit are in the car, as well as two petty officers. “The Navy’s doing pretty well by us, too. Only one man to a berth and no space left over.”

He writes that there are guards posted at either end of the car and the men are not supposed to talk to anyone on the outside. I guess it’s some kind of secret that the Navy is sending 25 guys to fire control school on Treasure Island. Dart’s biggest concern is finding someone who can mail this letter.

Later that Day, Dart writes that they are passing the 500th milepost since he last wrote. They are approaching Cheyenne, Wyoming and the sun is approaching the western horizon.

He takes a couple of paragraphs to describe the sights from his window: rugged, grayish shadows against the yellow and blue sky are the first glimpse they’ve had of the Rockies, which they’ll cross as they sleep. They are traveling through a wide, flat valley, populated by horses and cows. Occasionally he sees the glint of sunlight bouncing off a farm house window in the distance.

That’s all for today.

Dot’s letter begins with the report that her “second best beau’s wife” just called her to babysit on Tuesday. Of course she means the Pecsoks. They are sorry they didn’t meet Dart on his quick trip to Greenwich. They would have liked to meet a fellow Clevelander.

Dot is thrilled with the quality of the enlargement she had made of Dart’s snapshot. She proclaims him the best looking “gob” she’s ever seen, and then decides to remove the limitation of “gob.” Best looking man ever!

The sale at work is over, and Dot’s only regret is that with all the running around she did, she didn’t lose a single ounce. She pronounces herself “something short of a ten ton truck.” She says there’s nothing wrong with being healthy, but she thinks she’s overdoing it!

She reports that her mother is feeling well enough to take a trip to Lake Sunapee with Doug nest week. It looks like she won’t have her tonsils out just yet, after all.

Dot plans to spend her half day off at the beach, working on a little tan. She knows she won’t have as much fun as she did on her last beach trip, when Dart was there.

Dart’s offering today is another of his extraordinarily descriptive letters. He paints a vivid word picture of the rugged scenery he can see from the train window. They have crossed through Utah and Nevada since sunrise. Dart is enchanted by some of what he sees, but he loathes other bits. “I’m writing this from somewhere in Nevada. Where in Nevada doesn’t matter worth a row of pins. I wouldn’t give you thirty cents for the whole huge state, with its endlessly rolling wastelands, millions of scrubby evergreens, and untold myriads of sagebrush bushes.”

But then he proceeds to write with reverence about the splendor of the distant purple mountains and the dazzling colors reflected in them.

He describes a typical desert town with its gray, weathered buildings, sparse population, and a smattering of horses and decrepit cars. He says the majority of businesses are either saloons, two-bit hotels or houses of ill-repute, in mute testimony to Nevada’s “wild and wicked character.”

He was thrilled to be able to experience first-hand an engineering marvel he’s read about for years – the Lucin Cutoff. This is a series of bridges and fills that cross the Great Salt Lake. He was impressed by the vast salt flats surrounding the lake, looking for all the world as though a heavy snow storm had just passed through the area. He describes the sparkling beauty of the lake itself and the ring of mountain peaks reflected in its calm waters.

To rely solely on my paraphrasing of this letter is to cheat yourself of Dart’s gift for relating the natural wonders he witnessed on this trip. This is one letter that’s worth the effort of reading the images of the original pages.

He ends the letter with a paragraph of such longing that I’m sure Dot could feel it as she held the pages in her hand. “When I’m with you, I’m enchanted into a sort of silence, and when I’m far away, I long for you to be here (or me there).  It doesn’t seem possible that we’re so far apart. My love deepens with the distance, Dearest.”

It’s a good thing, because there will come a time when the distance between them is even greater than it is now.

Dot’s letter is short, but very sweet. She’s sad to learn he’s being sent so far away, but she feels they have both been so lucky that she chooses to focus on her gratitude instead of her disappointment. “If I weren’t sure of the way I felt about you, I s’pose I’d feel differently about it. But I am sure, and 3000 miles or 3000 years won’t make me change my mind.” It’s lovely to see her  as adamant as Dart about the permanence of their relationship.

She adds, “When I look at the map, California seems very far away, and I get a big lump in my throat, but you’re still in the country and I thank God for that.”

She cautions him not to write to her when he should be studying because she doesn’t wan to interfere with anything that might delay his coming home.

Well, Dot and Dart are now as far apart as it’s possible to be with both of them still in the USA. He arrived today at Treasure Island, off shore from San Francisco.

He describes his new home, once the site of the World’s Fair, as the busiest and most war-like place he’s seen so far. Although some of the old World’s Fair buildings are being used by the Navy, everything is painted an Army olive drab. There are airplanes of every size and type passing overhead and the bay is filled with ships of every description. He’s not allowed to say much more about what goes on there, but he can talk about the weather.

“I don’t think such a heck of a lot of California’s sunny weather. Today’s been sunny enough, but the island is cold and windy all the time. One consolation to the cold is that no whites are worn, saving much time and energy in washing.” I’m sure it would get mighty tiresome washing all those white uniforms by hand to the satisfaction of the officers.

He has no complaints about the setup. There is a very liberal liberty policy (6PM to 7AM, two days out of three, and every third weekend.) K.P. and guard duty are kept to a minimum. It almost seems too easy to Dart, who says he’s going to be very careful because he wants to go as far as possible in the Navy. That’s a surprisingly ambitious statement for Dart to make about his military service.

“It’ll be a tough grind, so I’ll have to keep my nose clean and placed tightly against that mythical grindstone. That lovely liberty will probably be passed up. The time’s valuable now and the money will be valuable in case I manage to survive and ever want to buy a house, a car, or something of the like. As I’ve hinted before, you figure very prominently in those hopes and dream.”

Wow! That paragraph packs a lot of sentiment into a few words. He wants to be successful in his studies. He needs to save money for the future. He envisions Dot as part of that future. But mostly, it is a not-so-oblique affirmation that he is going into battle and may not survive. Of course that’s a constant reality during this time, but Dart’s statement demonstrates that, while it is seldom voiced, the thought is always there. It must have sent a jolt through Dot’s heart to read those words.

He writes a bit about what a perfect trip he had across the country and about witnessing the sunrise over the Sierra Nevada mountains while on early morning guard duty aboard the train.  He sends Dot his new address and heads off to bed to dream about his lovely lady.

Here’s another one-page letter from Dot. She misses him and has a hard time wrapping her head around the fact that he was with her at the beach less than two weeks ago, and now he is a continent away. She consoles herself with thoughts about when he’ll be with her on the beach again.

The only news she has to report from her side of the world is that she loves him, which is not news at all.

She was so thrilled to get a letter from him today that her fingers could hardly get it open. Because she assumes he’s at his destination by now, she wishes him the best of luck in all that he’s doing, rather than a continued pleasant journey.