Here’s a note from Dart – short on words but long on enthusiasm. He was allowed to walk around a bit today! With the help of a corpsman or fellow patient, he could take brief strolls around the ward, with orders not to get too tired.

He’s a little tired tonight, but mostly happy. It may be spring, but Dart’s thoughts have turned to “sick leave.” Here’s hopin’.

Dot dashes off a quick note before class, and another one during evening study hall. The second one is sassy and playful .

She and roommate Cathie have been sitting around their room talking about their “love lives.” Dot asked Cathie to put the stamp on Dart’s envelope while Dot finished the letter. It seems Cathie took some liberties with her task and has written practically an entire letter on the outside of the envelope. Now she says she’ll mail the letter and Dot can’t know what she wrote on it. I hope Dart will clue us in with his next letter.

Cathie’s not the only one writing secret letters. Dot tells Dart she wrote him a letter that afternoon, but he cannot see it for four years – if they still know each other then.

Dart was happy to receive two swell letters, complete with two swell pictures of a swell girl! The photo booth pics from the dime store were a big hit with him.

Like Dot, he was awake very late on both Saturday and Sunday nights, mostly thinking about her.

He saved the bad news for last. The only way to tell if phlebitis is cured is to allow the patient to walk around after the swelling goes down. If the swelling returns, he’s not cured. It did, so he isn’t. Perhaps if he used “swell” in his vocabulary with a little less frequency, he’d have less swelling! At any rate, he’s feeling pretty bitter right now.

Feeling it is about time for her to write Dart a decent letter, Dot will try to do it with this one. She surmises that the most logical reason that he has not received any Special Delivery letters from her is that she hasn’t sent any! That would certainly explain it.

As a senior, she must write a paper on her philosophy. She’s dreading the assignment, but part of it is to interview various people about how they feel about religion, race, right and wrong, etc. After hearing what other folks think about such things, she is supposed to be better prepared to share her own thoughts. Therefore, she has asked Dart to send his ideas about life’s big issues. This sounds like it’s right up his alley, and it should help them learn even more about each other.

She’s listening to the Bob Hope radio program. A few months ago he was put off the air for reading an “undesirable joke.” Tonight he made a crack that he had a great joke up his sleeve, but NBC wouldn’t let him use it.

Dot adds that since her mother’s birthday is in three days, she needs to end her letter to Dart and write to her mom. Before sealing the envelope, she inserts a poem written by her mother, as well as a sassy little ditty going around Andrews School.

Dart’s letter is an unusual one, spurred in part by the note Cathie wrote inside the envelope of Dot’s recent letter. The contents apparently pleased Dart greatly, leading him to think (or hope) that Dot had something to do with their authorship. If she didn’t, he’s keeping her – and us – guessing.

Then, in response to Dot’s query about how he writes such interesting letters, he launches into a long, mostly tongue-in-cheek discourse about the mechanics of letter-writing.  My favorite part was “Often the train of thought is sidetracked to let a carload of dreams, reminiscences, or amorous thoughts and phrases go by…After all irrelevant thoughts are given mute appearance on the paper, the day’s news is set forth.”

He confesses he is intrigued by the letters Dot has written that he cannot read until she’s 21, and he signs the letter “All the love in the world.”

Here’s a quick note fired off before Dot begins her homework. The gist of it is a celebration of spring. “In the spring, a young man’s fancy turns to what the girls have been thinking about all winter!”

She warns that with school work piling up, her letters may thin out for a few weeks, but her thoughts of him are constant.

What a long and interesting letter from Dart today! In response to Dot’s “interview questions” on his philosophy and belief system, Dart waxed eloquent for nearly 10 pages.

Before discussing the main topic of the letter, however, he assures Dot that she needn’t worry too much about his temper tantrums. He hasn’t had one in quite a while, he has learned other methods for venting his spleen, and “The less said about the subject, the better. After all, I’m trying to sell you something, (namely, me) and what salesman is going to build up the bad points of his product?”

I especially like Dart’s argument about right and wrong – maybe because it so closely aligns with my own views. Anyway, everything he had to say on a variety of topics is well worth the read.

Dot’s letter is another brief typed one as she tries to practice her burgeoning skill. The letter was inspired by the long typed letter she received from her sister Eleanor that day. They are challenging each other to practice more often.

The main news is really Eleanor’s news that she is in love with a “big chunk of GI,” a corpsman in the Medical Corps and a medical student. We’ll hear more about that romance as time goes by.

Dart’s offering today is brief because he was swamped with eight letters and a package at mail call today. He is most appreciative of her “terse” messages inside the envelopes of the letters. I’d love to know what those messages were like, but I mustn’t be greedy. It’s enough that time has spared the letters themselves, even if the envelopes are lost.

The doctor has prescribed several more days of bed rest before Dart can begin the process of walking again. He sounds discouraged and is bracing himself for the fact that he is unlikely to see Dot before she leaves campus for the summer.

He added his retort to the little ditties Dot included about spring and kissing: Kissing spreads disease, it’s said, but this is seldom seen. The heat that is developed thus kills germs that pass between. After that, and having read Dot’s mother’s poem about spring, he decided to “yield the poet’s honors to Mrs. Chamberlain from Greenwich.”

Wow – this is an odd letter from Dot. She seems a little miffed that Dart suspects she was somehow in on the letter Cathie wrote inside the recent envelope. She swears again that she has no idea what her roommate wrote.

She started to tell Dart about the high praise the senior class received today from Mr. Hibschman, when the letter was co-opted once again by Cathie. (Dot had gone out to play a little baseball.) Since this particular letter is typed, there’s no way to judge by the handwriting. Anyway, when Dot returned to the letter, she was angry that Cathie had messed it up and she believes that Dart will once again think Dot was pretending to be Cathie. The letter ended rather abruptly.

Dart’s letter today is a little odd and confusing – a natural outcome of all the secret and co-opted letters from Dot and her roommates recently. He admits that Cathie wrote something inside the envelope about Dot loving him. Since Dot had already told him that, it didn’t come as news, but he was happy to see it confirmed, in writing, by another source. Reading Dot’s declarations of love and knowing he returns the feeling is one of his greatest thrills these days.

He asked the doctor today if there was any chance he could be home by late April, and the doc confirmed there was a chance. Everything now is trial and error to see if his leg has healed from the phlebitis.

Dot spent a lazy Sunday afternoon on her bed, reading magazines and listening to the radio. That’ll be the last lazy day for a while if she plans to have her school work completed and approved in time for a May 17th departure.

She received a letter from the Marine. He wrote about his luck in having been chosen to have dinner with none other than Ronald Coleman! Dot must have been so impressed. She writes that Jim (the Marine) writes an amusing letter, but that he is the most pessimistic person she’s ever known. That wouldn’t have much appeal to a girl like Dot. See, this is one example of how much we can learn about another person through letters. I often hear folks say that they find it remarkable that nearly all of my parents’ courtship was via letters. They question how well folks can really know each other that way. I think these letters demonstrate just how clearly someone’s personality is expressed through writing.

Speaking of which, Dot was very interested in Dart’s recent “philosophy” masterpiece. She loved learning more about what made him tick, even though she claims he is a much deeper thinker than she is.

She warned Dart again that she will be cutting back on writing soon to focus on school work. She pleaded with him to keep so busy getting better that he wouldn’t notice the absence of her letters. She closed by telling how embarrassed she was that she choked on the communion grape juice in church that morning.

One-hundred five words is all Dart could manage today. He has bad news, but he is not telling Dot what it is – he’s hoping it will pass.

Also, if he is not well in 27 days he can be given a medical discharge from the Navy, which he does not want.

He sends his love.

Dot liked Dart’s “poem” about kissin’, but since she hasn’t “mastered the art,” she’s unsure if the poem is true. She does recall one kiss in particular ‘though…

She asked Dart whether the Yanks or the Rebs won the battle over the ward’s radio. She explains that there is war raging in her room and she cannot understand why four seniors cannot get along without throwing tantrums. Andy seems to fly off the handle much faster than the others, and is slow to “fly back onto the handle.” Dot thinks everyone’s nerves are raw because they all want school to be over.

Continuing an on-going point of conversation, she agrees that the Chamberlain clan is a tall one. She is disappointed to be the shortest member of her family.  She writes that it was always her ambition to be 5’8″, but she meant tall – not wide. Then she goes on a rant about how Dart should face facts that she is not really “right-sized.” She bears the scars of her brother’s merciless teasing about how fat she is, and says she can take the truth from Dart. (Note to readers: Dot was NOT fat! She was certainly curvy, and always had a soft, hour-glass figure. But, as in so many other aspects of herself, she was self-conscious about her looks.)

She commiserates with Dart about being lonely, homesick and sometimes “lovesick.” She mentions a period about a year before when she had a crush on a college friend of her sister’s. They corresponded for a short time, although he never indicated any special feelings for Dot. He entered the Army and no one has heard from him since. She writes “This year, I do get very lonely, and I don’t mean for Mom to come tuck me in.”

She signs off with “Yours til I’m as thin as you are, and at the rate we’re both going, that’ll be forever.”

Dart disavows any claim of having “mastered the art” of kissing, but he recalls the same kiss Dot does and believes that’s a good basis for his poem.

The Rebs have won the war between the states that is being waged within the ward, but Nurse Meany has confiscated the radio for a few days cooling off period.

He agrees that nerves can sometimes get a little rough. He’s in a bad state right now. “Seems as if I’m losing my grip on things. The blue days are coming closer together, the humor’s getting stale and little green things seem to be running up and down my spine half the time! Oh, to the depths of perdition with everything except you and me.”

He riffs on himself coming from hearty stock, but he is the exception. Shorter than much of his family, and far too skinny to boot. “You’d think that with so little flesh covering my innards, that every bite I eat would make a lump.”

He emphatically denies that he was razzing Dot about her weight. He likes her just the way she is, and even if she’s not as tiny as the girl he dreamed he’d fall in love with, she’s the prettiest girl he’s ever dated. Besides that, they seem quite congenial in their letters. He hopes they’ll be just as congenial in person for many years to come. He recalls once reading a poem with the general thought that women often insult the taste of their male companions by contradicting the complimentary remarks the fellows make.

He comments on her revelation that she’d had a “torrid” unrequited crush a while back. He, too, had such a heart-breaking affair until the lady in question told him six times in a letter to go to hell six different ways.

Well, now that he’s come to page six of this letter, it’s time to reveal the news she’s been waiting for: First, he’s still up and about and his leg shows no ill-effect. That’s good. However, his surgical wound healed too fast, became infected and burst open recently. That’s bad. Tomorrow he’ll be transferred to the infected surgical ward. “No telling what they will do to or for me there, but I’m not any too anxious to experience any more experiences in the surgery ward.”

He then says that either something very wonderful must happen to him soon, or he is now paying for all the good things he’s already had in his life (or all the cuss words he’s used). On top of his health issues, his sea bag containing his personal belongings and Dot’s picture, has been lost without a trace. It was left behind in the barracks when he was transported via ambulance to the hospital weeks ago. Apparently, when his class completed boot camp, his sea bag was misplaced in the vast bowels of a major military installation.

Dot is astounded that Dart has had another reversal in his health status . She fervently hopes he doesn’t receive a medical discharge. She also hopes she’ll be able to see him soon.

She had a letter from her friend Cynthia who is in Ohio to study piano at Oberlin. She’ll be in Cleveland over Easter and Dot is truly looking forward to seeing her. She always feels better after a visit with Cynthia because she’s so jolly and has a friendly word for everyone. I have fond memories of Cynthia when I was younger. She and Mom remained friends and I counted myself among Cynthia’s legions of fans. She had a laugh that could be heard for miles and got a huge kick out of life. She died far too young.

There’s not much more news from Willoughby, except that the weather has been extremely windy. It reminded Dot of the terrible hurricane she witnessed in New England in 1938.

She’s running behind on her store manager duties, so she must close and catch up.