Category Archives: 04. January 1944

January 13, 1944

Again, a solo letter from Dot – as usual, it’s charming and full of life.

First, check out the weird little illustration on her stationery! The caption says “I’m all prepared if you don’t write!” and that is under a drawing of a woman surrounded by all methods of destruction; a noose, rifle, poison, gas canister and what seems to be a land mine. How very strange!

Her opening paragraph tells the small-world story of Dot’s mother getting a letter from an acquaintance, Mary Forte. Mary was a Wave/nurse on Dart’s ward at the hospital. She has written that Dart seems to be “mighty fond” of Dot. To quote Dot, “Bet Mom was surprised to hear that cuz from what I told her she thought we were more or less ‘pen pals.’ ” Apparently Dot wasn’t completely forthcoming with her family over the holidays because she was scared of the teasing that would follow. As she explains to Dart, up until quite recently, she was one of the biggest “man-haters” on the planet and her family always told her they would tease her mercilessly when the “real thing” came along.  I guess the cat is out of the bag now!

She tells one of her amusing stories about her retail teacher, Miss Hutton. Dot has quite a talent for describing interesting characters. I could just hear a classroom of teenage girls fighting to keep the giggles from overtaking them as they sit in class with this unusual teacher!

She wraps up with the latest news of her roommate, Andy and the formerly ex-beau. Since receiving an air mail special delivery letter from her Lt. this morning, all the way from England, Andy has been grinning dreamily all through class. I guess the couple has patched things up.

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January 15, 1944 – Dart turns 20

Dot’s birthday package, forwarded to camp from the hospital, was the only mail Dart received on his birthday. He was grateful for all the little treats she’d been able to buy him while on restricted shopping. Still, most of them have to be shipped home to Cleveland because he’s not allowed to have books, gum or non-regulation handkerchiefs while at boot camp.

He’s getting all his required shots again, and his duties include late night sentry and early morning drilling of the new companies. He describes a sunny, balmy, breezy day – nice for parade duty. Then he launches into a mock conversation between two recruits in his new company. These guys, like most of the outfit, are from Brooklyn, and Dart does not hold them in very high regard. Still, the imagined dialogue between them is comical.

He enclosed a poem he wrote while on sentry duty. He calls it his attempt at versification. It’s a sweet, romantic job that will no doubt thrill Dot to the core.

He’s writing the letter while the rest of his company is either passing a swim test or taking boxing lessons. His restricted duty prohibits either of those activities, so he’s taking advantage of the time to catch up on his correspondence.

Finally, he thanks her for the photo she sent in response to his request for more pictures of her. It was taken in the summer of 1935 when Dot was only 9 years old. Not sure that’s the kind of photo he had in mind, but the little prankster thought she’d have some fun with him.

On this day, which would have been his 90th birthday, I still miss Dad every day. Somehow, reading his letters and working on this blog nake me miss him a little less. I am grateful.

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January 16, 1944

Dart’s cheerful and newsy letter reports another long phone call with his folks. His mother has asked that he be sure to invite Dot to their house for dinner when he’s home on leave. His mother, Helen once taught sewing at Andrews, so she is familiar with the proper channels for invitations and permissions for the girls to leave campus.

He is very enthusiastic in his praise of the Great Lakes canteen, and it’s no wonder! This modern military marvel offers for our sailors’ enjoyment: a library, bowling alley, boxing ring and gym, magazine and candy stands, soda fountain, ping-pong and billiards, a phone room (with two operators and 16 phones), post office, comfortable furniture and fluorescent lights. I’m amused by his mention of the lights – that must have been something fairly novel back then. Also, note the lack of televisions! How did they survive? When I think about the operators, I’m reminded of so many jobs that used to be common place and are now virtually extinct. I wonder what occupations we have in the present that our grand kids will never know about?

He mentions that the church service that morning was punctuated with coughs and sneezes throughout the congregation because of the colds going through the ranks. He also conjectured that the brevity of the service added to it’s pleasantness.

He closed the letter out when his whole group was ordered to attend a basketball game.

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Dot writes the briefest of notes, explaining that studying must begin. She also resorts to one of her old themes of thinking that maybe they should cut back on all the “pretty talk” and “mushy” stuff until they know each other better.

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January 20, 1944

Dart’s brief note is in response to a letter he got from Dot on “garish yellow paper,” which she had warned him was coming some time ago. He confessed that the Catholic girl who corresponds with him has used the exact same paper.

He teased Dot gently about  witholding the truth about her feelings for Dart from her parents and wonders if she has yet told them the “gruesome truth.”  He adds that Dot is not the first girl he’s known who was a self-described “man-hater.” He says that all but two of them are now either married or engaged. The two “holdouts” are a Marine and a nun! He says, “I’m glad you changed you mind, and hope that as long as I know you, you’ll never change it back again!”

He includes some funny schtick about how he gets when he has a case of “heart burn” (caused by playing with fire, romantically).

He asks her to forgive his dribble and explains that he has no news. He simple wrote so that he could send her his love.

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January 23, 1944

Dot drops a quick line to let Dart know she’s thinking about him. She just returned from a weekend in Cleveland with friends. She tells Dart she had a date with a guy named Bud Doyle who was two years behind Dart at Shaw High School. “He was nice but the comparison between you and him makes him look rather sick.”

While in the big city, Dot saw the movie “Madame Currie” with Greer Garson. It must have been a great movie because it made her want to study chemistry! Speaking of which, Dot announces with some surprise that she has passed both her lab and her written exam in chemistry, so she’s done with that subject forever.

She called Dart’s mother while in town and closes the letter by sending all her love.

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January 24, 1944

Dart’s letter is a sad liitle thing, written in pencil because he lost his pen when he was transported to sick bay on a stretcher! This poor guy can’t catch a break. He has been diagnosed with catharral fever and will need at least four days in bed. He sounds sick and tired of being sick and tired.

“I’ll be a heck of a sailor when I leave this place. I’m missing half my classes, I’m not learning any of the hand-to-hand fighting, I’m not even getting much marching practice, since I must call the steps, give commands and watch for mistakes.”

It’s taken him all day to write this short letter. He says he’d rater be whispering things in her ear than writing.  He writes that he is almost glad he didn’t have his boot camp leave yet because he’d have nothing to look forward to. He adds wistfully, “If it already happened, no one knows when I’d be seeing you and my family again.” He closes with the statement “It’s less than a  month now ’til I can see you again.” Is it?

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Dot writes a long letter from study hall – permitted because her exams are over and her new semester has not yet begun.

She describes in gruesome detail the long, arduous, challenging exams she just survived. I find it interesting that her academic load was so strenuous because Andrews was more or less a vocational school for young ladies. She seems to have received a pretty good education there.

She and three other students have taken their turn on cook duty. Because they are all such terrible cooks, Dot wrote a little ditty, which her co-cooks typed up to put at everyone’s place for dinner. In typical Dot style, the poem is witty and self-depricating!

She talks about the upcoming prom (she’s not going) and his pending visit home (she’s eagerly counting the days). She vows to never return to her man-hating ways – after all, there’s Ronald Coleman, Walter Pidgeon and… (Does everyone still know that the two gentlemen she mentions were film actors?)

She writes that for the past two weeks she doesn’t know what she would have done without the morale boosting powers of his letters. She feels guilty that her letters to him were few and brief, but his got her though the dreary days of preparations for her exams. As a reward, she’s happy to say that she did okay on the tests.

She adds that Lois Cain (Dart’s official companion on that first group blind date), was a godsend to Dot when studying for chemistry. While she and Lois are not close, Dot credits Lois with great brains and a willingness to help pull Dot through the exam. Dot shamelessly suggests to Dart that he might have been better off to give Lois more of his time and attention. (Fishing for compliments, Dot?)

She mentions a box she has shipped to him and hopes it’s not all crumbs when he gets it.

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January 25, 1944

Dart warns in the first sentence that this will be a disconsolate letter. It bears the bitter news that he has been confined to the US Naval Hospital with the measles! To aggravate things further, he left his barracks without Dot’s picture, his stationery or his fountain pen.

From botched surgery to “cat” fever, to measles. This sailor can’t catch a break. As I see it from the perspective of the intervening years, knowing he eventually made it through and regained his health, I can be grateful that these persistent  medical setbacks kept him out of combat for months. Perhaps they even saved his life. But all this 20-year old can do is despair over his confinement, especially since it delays once again, the long-awaited reunion with Dot.

In what is perhaps his attempt to end the letter on a more positive note, Dart tells Dot about his lively correspondence with his buddy, Fred Dixon. Actually, his youthful smugness comes though a little in this part, but I suppose he can be forgiven because he is so young. I’m a little sad when I read the part about undying friendship between these two young men. While their war-time correspondence was a mutual source of comfort and intellectual stimulation, the friendship did not survive much past the war. The way I understand it, after a few post-war visits in their beloved Cleveland, Dart and Fred found they had grown too different in their outlooks to remain friends.

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January 26, 1944

Dot’s response to the news that Dart is sick again is to tease him, flatter him, and finally distract him by telling him the news from Andrews School for Girls. Throughout, she chides heself for being a) too well “insulated” to get sick, b) a lousy typing student, c) terrible at French, d) not very good at chemistry, e) fearful of her upcoming report card.

She tells Dart that “This month I’m on display at the retail store…”  I take that to mean that she as been assigned to the display tasks in the school store and must come up with ideas for Valentine’s Day displays. She’s asking for any ideas he may come up with.

I think she is unaware that he has been diagnosed with measles because she makes no mention of his delayed leave.

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January 27, 1944

Well, Dot’s sure mad now! Mad, sad and bitterly disappointed. She’s responding to Dart’s latest news about measels, confinement and his delayed leave.  “I have now abandoned the theory that ‘Wishing Will Make it So.’ Because if ever I wanted anything in my life, it was for you to come home the end of February so I could see you.  Every time I breathed, I wished that, but it now seems to have been a silly waste of time.” (Note: Dot will finish her schooling in February and then probably return to Greenwich, Connecticut for several months to do her practicum. Distances in 1944 were much larger than today, so her chances of seeing Dart anywhere but Cleveland were slim.)

Deciding that such sad talk was probably not doing Dart much good, she switches gears. “Today we inexperienced, just plain no-good typists had our second lesson. I like it more every time I hit a key (which is, unfortunately, comparitavely seldom.)”

She also mentiones a new movie called “Dust to Dust”  which Andrews girls are barred from seeing. Apparently the headmaster of the school sent an editorial to the local paper and the Cleveland “Plain Dealer,” stating that it was not a movie for ‘nice young girls to see.'” (Makes me want to rush right out and find it on Netflix!)

In typical Dot fashion, she ends the letter on an up beat. First with a cheeky definition of a sailor, and then with a cartoon drawing that depicts one of the food shortages folks on the homefront had to endure.

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January 29, 1944

Here’s a cheerful, ebullient letter from Dot, guaranteed to bring some cheer to a blue, quarantined sailor.

She talks about two old movies she saw tonight; “In Old Chicago” and “With a Banjo on My Knee.” It sounds like they weren’t great movies to begin with, but by 1944 they were so dated and corny that they seemed funny to Dot and her friends.

She reports that she was thrilled to receive a phone call during dinner from none other than Dart’s mother. She was calling to say that Dot shouldn’t be concerned if she didn’t hear from Dart for awhile because he was in quarantine. Dot is so impressed that Mrs. Peterson would think to call her. She says she’s getting so eager to meet this lovely woman, if Dart doesn’t get home soon, Dot says she just may drop in to see his mother herself.

She mentions that she had two companions for the school’s official date night – namely her roommates Andy and Cathie.

Claiming total fatigue after a long day, Dot ends the letter, sending “get well quick” wishes from all the girls in her house. She signs the letter with a typical teenage girl closing – Puddles of Purple Passion, Dot.

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