Category Archives: 17. February 1945

February 16, 1945

Here’s a 10-page novel from Dot. I guess she had a lot to say after her trip to Ohio and visit with Dart’s parents. She’s homesick for her adopted state already. “Gee, I hope it won’t be too long before I can find another excuse to go out there,” she exclaims.

She’s enclosing some airmail stamps, but demands that he send them back to her as soon as possible. I think he can send V-mail letters for free, but maybe airmail arrives faster.

The first sight she saw this morning after opening her weary eyes was a letter from Dart. It was dated Feb. 4, about the same date as some of the other letters she’s already received, but she is ecstatic to get it, whenever it arrives.

Honoring his frequent request, she enclosed Gordon’s address so Dart can keep an eye out for his ship. As Dot says, there are lots of ships in this Navy, so the odds of finding a particular one in the giant Pacific are slim. Still, it would be fun if these two important men in Dot’s life could meet each other out there.

She remarks about the number of movies Dart has seen onboard ship. Now that he’s assigned to his destroyer, she assumes he may have other things to do. She saw one of the films he mentioned with Deanna Durbin, Can’t Help Singing. Dot quipped,  “She certainly can’t! Even when the hero was trying to make love to her, all she did was sing! Of course, it relieved the deadly silence there may have been otherwise, but I think silence has lots to offer in times like that, don’t you?”

Dart has asked her to describe a snow storm to help cool him off. After denying she had the descriptive ability to do that, she did a fair job of telling him about the snowfall that came to Greenwich just before her Ohio trip. Then she told him to feast his eyes on the huge icicle her dad is holding in the enclosed snapshot. “Imagine it dripping down your back. Maybe that will cool you off.”

Referring to one of Dart’s letters in which he called himself a “parasite” for not having done more to earn his Navy benefits, she jokes, “How dare you call Peterson a parasite! He’s a darn ‘site’ better than that. I’d say he’s a monosite.” She apologizes for the bad pun, blaming a lack of sleep. Dart the punster will appreciate that groaner.

She told him that his letters have had a few bits cut out by the censors, but not as much as the ones he wrote to his parents. Even though some of them were full of holes, they all guessed that he was passing some time earlier in the Marianas. Is he able to confirm if they were right?

Dot confesses that no matter how many times she reads his letters, she still marvels at the beautiful way he expresses himself. She thrills to his descriptions of nature, people around him and his own thoughts. “But the thing that thrills me most about your letters is that you’re saying them to me! That of all the millions of girls who would give anything to be your girl, you picked me. Sure you’re crazy, but I’m not going to let you know that until I’ve convinced you that you’re right to have done so.”

Finally! The answer to Dart’s question about the mysterious puff Dot got for Christmas. It turns out a puff is like a comforter, a warm, puffy blanket. It’s nice for her to realize there’s something he doesn’t know.

At this point in the letter, Dot comes down pretty hard on Dart’s doubt about her. She doesn’t mince words when she tells him that he will never receive one of those letters “dipped in sugar,” asking him to release her from her promises because she’s met someone else. She assures him she never makes a promise she cannot keep, and even though she’s a little shy when they’re together, and has a hard time saying the words that convey her feelings, her feelings for him are strong and sincere. She implores him to be patient until the day when she can show him just how much she loves him, and how many ways.  “Just pretend the way you feel about me is multiplied by one thousand, and then you’ll have barely scratched the surface of how much I love you.” For a girl who claims to be poor at description and short on words, I’d say she expressed herself pretty well just then.

She agrees with Dart that a second floor on their house will not be necessary. Maybe they could have a partial upstairs that could be finished out in the future, as needed.

Wanting to end the letter before it requires additional postage, she warns him not to get too stoop-shouldered in the destroyer. She likes him nice and tall, just like he is.

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February 17, 1945

Faithful Dot writes again. She’s listening to “The Hit Parade” and just heard I’m a Little on the Lonely Side, which describes her feelings exactly. She misses all her friends from Andrews and she misses her time with Dart’s family.

She seems to be feeling nostalgic, too, because she recalls the night she and Dart went to see Phantom of the Opera and sat talking in the car for over an hour in front of Betty’s house. She was hoping all night that Dart would want to kiss her, but she feared that if he did, she’d blush terribly. He did, and she did. She’s mentioned it recently, but while she was at his folks’ house, all she had to do was think about Dart and she would begin to blush. “My face tells more stories on me than my lips ever could!”

She is becoming a terrible Connecticut Yankee, pining only for Ohio. She assumes it’s the people who give her such a fond image of the state because everyone she knows there is so nice. Her parents took offense when she mentioned how much she missed the Petersons and the Buckeye State. She’s hoping she’ll be able to go out toward Cleveland for college next fall.

She’s babysitting Toni Gale this evening. When Dot first arrived at Gale’s house, the tot blurted out in one breathe,”You didn’t get married in Ohio, did you? I hope not, because Mommy says brides are pretty and I was afraid I wouldn’t recognize you!” How’s that for humbling?

Finally, she starts a long, faltering paragraph about needing to tell him something that she’s been trying to tell him for quite some time, but something always gets in the way and she can’t bring herself to reveal her secret. She strings him along in this manner for several sentences – there’s been an accident, of sorts; she fell; it’s pretty serious… Finally she admits that she’s fallen head-over-heels in love with him. At first it was scary, but she’s gotten used to it and now it feels wonderful. She apologizes for wasting his time and her stationery on such silliness, but there was nothing else to write about today.

She fills a line with x’s, reminding him that they represent kisses, but she prefers the “other kind.”

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February 18, 1945

A quick note brings the debut of some new stationery – a graduation gift from Chucky who wished her a happy birthday and merry Christmas when he gave it to her.

While she’s babysitting at Carter’s house tonight, she wrote to Dart’s parents to thank them for the wonderful stay she had at their house. “I can’t begin to tell them how much I enjoyed staying there. Maybe if you tell them too, they’ll have some idea how much it meant to me. Hurry and come home, please, so I have an excuse to go to Ohio again. Of course, I don’t care anything about seeing you (it says here in fine print, at the bottom of the page.)”

She asks what he’d like to talk about now. It seems they always talk about “us,” which is fine with her. She could tell him how much she loves him, but he already knows that so she won’t bother mentioning it.

Tomorrow brings her dreaded return to Franklin Simon after a long break. She’s really not excited to go back. She tells Dart she’s considering finding work in a defense plant so she’ll make plenty of money for college in September.

That’s all there is for today, but she’ll be right back with pen and paper tomorrow.

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February 19, 1945

Dot’s letter is a nice balance of chatty news and a response to the two letters she got from Dart today. She calls them “real picker-uppers.” One reason she has for wanting to stay at Franklin Simon is that everyone there seems to care a great deal about Dot’s romance. They always check in with her after she goes home for lunch to see if there were any letters from Dart. They can usually gauge the response by the width of her grin, and they always want to know what’s new with him. My theory is that they really like Dot, and they enjoy how animated she gets when talking about her beau. As the saying goes, “Everybody loves a lover.”

She’s glad to hear he’s beginning to like life on board the ship. When she told her father that, he remarked, “Oh sure! He’s probably having a wonderful time. He’ll probably come back married!” Then he told Dot to tell Dart he said that. “There, I told you, but only because he asked me to. Under no circumstances should you feel obligated to act upon his suggestion!”

Her boss, Bob Goldstein has written another note to Dart to include in Dot’s next letter. She comments that it’s a nice note, except for the punctuation and grammar, but Mr. Goldstein has only a third grade education.

Typical of this time of year, Dot reports that the store is about as busy as a nylon stocking shop with only 35 gauge nylons to sell. (I take it such items are not that appealing.) It’s 3:00 in the afternoon and Dot has yet to open her sales book.

She appreciates Dart’s efforts to prepare her for the time when the letters stop coming for long periods. Still, she hopes he realizes that knowing it’s that time is coming will not make it any easier to live through. She will heed his advice and keep re-reading his old letters during the “drought times,” probably having them all memorized by the time he comes home.

If she sends him any more photos, the Navy will need to build a separate compartment just to house his “rogues gallery.” Still, if her snapshots from her Andrews weekend turn out she will send him some.

Yes, she says, the Miller boys were well-behaved on New Year’s Eve when she babysat. “I’m sure even you are well behaved when you’re sleeping,” she retorts.

She’s fascinated by the ‘perfect 12″ from Dart’s past and she wants to hear all about her. Then she asks him if a “perfect 14” would be okay with him.

If she’s to have anything left to write in her next letter, she needs to end this one right now, and so she does.

No letter from Dot tomorrow, but we’ll have a chance to re-connect with Dart.

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February 20, 1945

I would not take kindly to anyone who maligned the Valentine’s Day letter Dart wrote recently, unless it was the author himself. Even then, I’d be hard pressed to agree with any negative critique, Still, that’s how this letter begins.

“This kid is ashamed of himself. Here he expects to make some money by writing after the war, and he turns out a bunch of run-down, corny, over-worked crap like that last letter to you. Such tripe as I wrote in that letter should best be forgotten. Anything nice I said about you, I’m not ashamed of, nor do I regret. But the rest of it – BAH! It must have been disgusting, or at least discouraging, for you to receive that one. Times before, I’ve threatened to start a little black book of hackneyed phrases, in which I should put all my complaints, do all my ‘hell-raising,’ do all my writing when I feel low, so that  never again will the moody side of Peterson show in his letters. Enough for the borscht which had to come out in the last letter.”

I want to take a moment here to defend the letter he so viciously derides here. It was not an excerpt from a novel, nor was it intended for public view. It was the deeply personal, brutally honest confessions of a scared young man, far from home in very dangerous circumstances. In writing his truest feelings to the woman he loved, he was building on their intimacy in a way that could never be complete if constructed only with happy thoughts. He was bearing his soul and trusting her to accept it, dark crevices and all. For that purpose, it was a masterpiece.

He goes to tell a little about life on the USS Haggard. When he first arrived, the Executive Officer told the crew that they would go through frequent cycles of loving, then loathing this little ship. Dart confesses he’s completed that cycle at least a dozen times so far. The ship rides rough. She’s always wet, as are the men who occupy her. The food coming from her galley is mediocre at best, and there is terrible over-crowding that makes sleeping very uncomfortable and unpredictable. Still, the crew, while not particularly chummy, give the impression that they’re always there to help if a buddy really needs it.

He mentions there are three full-blooded American Indians aboard, named Whiteface, Two Bears and Smith. Smith is Dart’s watch captain.

Dart is assigned three four-hour watches out of every 24-day, with four hours of sleep and free time in between. He spends his time searching for a place to stretch out his long frame for a nap and trying to find the least-wet clothing to wear on is next watch. He has a hard time keeping clean, but he’s grateful for the ship’s laundry. His whites come back yellow and his denims have been bleached white, but at least he doesn’t have to scrub them himself. He seems slightly obsessed by the fact that, lacking a freezer on board, they cannot keep ice cream. The only time they get the stuff is if they can bum a few gallons from a larger ship and eat it all before it melts in the South Pacific heat.

He’s frustrated because there’s so much to write about, yet so little that can actually be said. Then he adds. “I hope this experience doesn’t change me too much, so that you won’t love me anymore. If I should lose you it would be the end of my world. There’d still be reasons to come back, but not the same reasons I’ve had for about a year and a half.”

There are so many reasons why it’s difficult to write while at sea, but he’ll keep on writing anyway. He’ll also keep on loving Dot and dreaming of the time when they can “grow up together.”

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February 20, 1945

Dot begins this letter with a direct quote from a letter Dart wrote to her one year ago this very day. “I’m sorry I didn’t write yesterday, and I don’t think this will be much of a letter tonight.” She says the same opening line is as true for her today as it was for him then. The only difference is he didn’t write because he’d had a temperature of 103 and “felt lousy.” She simply cleaned her closet last night.

Closet cleaning is her most dreaded task. It pains her to throw away sentimental junk, but it works wonders for the closet.

She took care of Carter tonight and had an easy time of it. It’s very late as she writes this, but Franklin Simons is closed tomorrow for Washington’s birthday, so she needn’t get up early. “Isn’t it nice George was born on a weekend this year,” she quipped.

Tomorrow she babysits for a little boy she’s never met. She thought it was worth a try since her last “blind date” worked out so well.

She just counted all the letters she’s ever received from Dart and they number 357! She wonders how many she’s written him and declares she’d rather have one from him than a million from her.

It’s no use fighting sleep any longer. She hopes to carry her daytime dreams of him into her slumber.

She also enclosed a page from The Saturday Evening Post full of cartoons, silly stories and amusing anecdotes. She hopes it will entertain him for a few minutes. I’m sure it will. What a clever way to pad her letters a bit for his enjoyment.

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February 22, 1945

It’s been a mere 24 hours since Dot last wrote, and all she’s done in that time is sleep and clean her room, so there’s not much new to write about. Still, she likes the idea of having a chat with Dart.

She created a little cupboard to place on her bedside table for the purpose of neatly storing odds and ends of stationery. She left room on the table for Dart’s picture, of course.

She asks if the Navy gives Dart the day off for Washington’s birthday, but assumes they don’t. She suggests he keep close track of all the holidays he’s forced to work so he can take that many days off when he gets home. Clever girl!

She’s babysitting for Carter Ford and Mrs. Ford just called from NYC to say she won’t be home until very late. Poor Dot must drag herself to work tomorrow with very little sleep. “The idea doesn’t appeal to me at all, but who cares? No one. No one at all! I’m just a poor mistreated babysitter. Nobody loves me, everybody hates me. I’m going out and eat worms. Gruesome thought, but a wonderful night for the sport. It’s been rainy and foggy all day – a regular field day for worms. True, it has been rather chilly, but even worms must make sacrifices. They can’t be too fussy. After all, there’s a war on!”

She admits that previous paragraph is conclusive proof that she’s crazy, but she blames that on a dripping faucet and goes to turn it off.

She comes back, but still has nothing to say and it’s the end of a page, so she decides to try to get some sleep before Mrs. Ford comes back. By the way, she loves Dart very much.

There are no letters written by either Dot or Dart until February 26, but I’ll try to insert something of interest at least once in those three days.

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February 26, 1945

This letter from Dart is part “day-in-the-life” stuff, part nostalgia for simpler, safer times, a couple of bits about food, and some lovely thoughts about Dot.

He’s in a cheerful, not-too-romantic mood, but that’s a big improvement from the “drastically blue and disheartening” moods of some recent letters. He hopes he’s not disappointed her too much with his gloomy letters of late. It’s my belief that a young man risking his life to preserve freedom across the globe is entitled to express whatever mood he’s feeling. I suspect Dot may feel the same way. I doubt she was too disappointed by his recent letters.

He tells about the big, fast, dizzying adventures he’s been having. Lots of thrills, but not the kind people would willingly pay money to experience. The thrill of being slammed against the steel walls of the ship as it makes its rough way through raging seas; the thrill of being perpetually soaked to the skin with salt water and having to work in drenched, water-laden clothes. It’s the thrill of having your life in “real, wet, turbulent danger.” He only hopes his memory of such thrills will be short when this whole thing is over.

“Ah, but when the going is pleasant and the ship cuts the still water without trying to shake the human parasites off her back; when the wake and the bow waves glow green with the weird phosphorescence of the sea at night; when we can jump rope during the daytime watches on deck; that’s when all the discomfort of the rougher days is partly forgotten. It’s almost likeable then.”

He reports about the famous “battle breakfasts” the Navy serves on days when they expect to engage the enemy. A huge spread of pancakes, sausage, eggs, fruit, toast, etc. Dart’s first came quickly on the heels of his bout with seasickness, and had he been able to keep it where it belonged, he declares it would have had “amazing possibilities.” See how stealthily he mentions that he’s experienced combat?

The ship has a few radio speakers scattered throughout, in addition to the PA speakers. Often, there’s familiar music from home piped over the speakers. They even get recorded versions of the live radio programs from the States, played one week after their original broadcast. Dart sounds like an old man when he contrasts the high school kids who need a constant stream of new music to keep them interested with the men on the ship who prefer the “old standards,” the tunes that were popular before they left home to fight a war. Dart can’t get enough of Raymond Scott, Glenn Miller, Woody Herman and Fred Waring.

Some of the guys on the ship have the region of their bunks plastered with exquisite examples of pin-up art. “Unbelievably exquisite-looking females, in languorous and entirely unnatural poses designed to stimulate the imagination without leaving very much for the imagination to conjure up.”  He appreciates that their colorful presence breaks up the stark whiteness of the ship’s walls and that they are nice to look at, but he prefers a real, live girl that he can dream of holding in his arms. He prefers to gaze at the pictures of his girl – the one who defines beauty for him – and dream of their real future together.

He claims that even though the food on the Haggard is not great, it’s generally edible. Most of the guys report having gained a few pounds. But not Dart. “I’ll never gain weight. I couldn’t do it on a diet of cream puffs, malteds and thyroid extract. Oh, why did I mention cream puffs and malteds? They belong in the category of ‘lesser dreams of past and future,’ along with juicy hamburgers, french fries and Cokes , ‘Dagwood’ sandwiches, football games and dances in the fall.” He also recalls once again the time Dot sat in his dirty workshop and helped him get his little engine running. Another man might have meant that last part as sly reference to some hanky-panky, but for Dart, the real delight was that she literally helped him get his little model engine running.

In case she needs reminding, he tells her that he loves her very much, then signs off for dinner.

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Dot writes two letters today – the first newsy and a little goofy; the second one uncharacteristically romantic.

Dot’s  had to neglect Dart for a few days because Toni Gale spent the weekend at the Chamberlain house and it was Dot’s job to make sure she didn’t burn the house down. By the tithe tot had “wound down,” Dot was ready to collapse into bed.

All the newscasts this weekend have been about the bombing of Tokyo. It seems to Dot that it involved primarily aircraft carriers of the 5th fleet, so she assumes Dart had no part in it. In truth, the carriers were always the “media darlings,” garnering lots of film footage and attention. Still, those big ships didn’t go anywhere alone. It took lots of lesser vessels to support these floating cities. I recall Dad telling stories of the Haggard’s role in hovering close by as pilots returned to the deck of the carriers. If they had to ditch to avoid crashing, the crew of the Haggard was on hand to fish them out of the sea. Dart may very well have had an intimate view of the bombing of Tokyo. If so, it’s probably best that Dot remained in the dark.

She goes on for a few silly paragraphs about the new law going into effect that requires all bars, restaurants and places of entertainment to close at midnight. She makes a big deal of how much this will cramp her style and cut into her drinking time. “Whatever shall I do? I’m quite beside myself. Now, if you were beside yourself, you’d be just about the right size. But with me beside myself, well, I’ll tell you I’m a bit dubious about walking down a narrow sidewalk for fear I’ll overlap into the gutter. Oh well, such is life without a wife, and here I am without a man, unless you would make the great mistake of call Mr. Goldstein a man.”

See what I mean about goofy? I’m sure Dart got a little chuckle out of her comedy routine when he read that letter.

But she’s not done yet. “It’s raining cats and dogs. Of course, that gives Greenwich an over abundance of pets, but who cares? They’ve always said Greenwich was the cat’s meow, so a few more could hardly spoil its reputation.”

Time for Dot to go home for lunch and finish this later.

She picks up again in the evening after she and El return from having seen “I Love a Soldier.” The movie made Dot miss her sailor all the more. It touched close to her heart because the film was shot in San Francisco and made her homesick for the times she used to receive letters from there. At the beginning of a scene with the cable car, Dot told El the street on the screen was Market St. When it turned out to be so, El asked her how she knew that. “I recognized it from a sketch Dart drew once,” she replied.

It’s time for places of entertainment to close, so she thinks she better stop writing because her favorite form of entertainment is her little “chats” with Dart. “A letter from you does an even better job of boosting my spirits. Old letters help some, too, so I’ll read a few of your past masterpieces and wait patiently for the coming ones.”

She says that she loves him so much it hardly seems possible she’s seen him only eight times in her life. “I’ve loved you since the first time I saw you. In fact, I can’t remember when I didn’t love you.”

She signs off with “Goodnight, Dearest. Sleep tight. All my love, always.”

She enclosed a couple of cartoons clipped from magazines.

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February 27, 1945

A brief note from Dot provides a few details of how she spends her time when she’s not working. Tonight she did some lettering for some Red Cross posters. Since she didn’t finish, she’ll probably spend tomorrow evening on the same activity.

She had a short visit with Cynthia today. She’s visiting from Oberlin College with her “best beau,” whom Dot met a few weeks ago while in Cleveland. He got his orders to leave school and report to Great Lakes Naval base in a few days. Dot says he seems like a nice kid, but so very young for Cynthia to be so crazy about him. He’s 18 and off to fight a war.

Dot was surprised to learn recently that her mother was engaged when she was only 18. Even though she waited until she’d graduated from Wellesley before marrying, that seems very young to Dot (who, you may recall, is 18 herself.)

She says once again how difficult it is to write when she has no new letters to respond to, but I think she’s doing a great job. Mom reminded me this week that during the war years, Americans were strongly encouraged to write often to service men. They were urged to keep the letters light, newsy and cheerful so that their menfolk could concentrate on winning the war instead of worrying about things back home. I think Dot does a consistently great job of following those suggestions.

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