From Dart comes another slightly distracted letter with more details about daily life at Navy boot camp.  He is particularly unenthusiastic about beans for breakfast.

Since this letter is written before he has received any mail at camp, he has nothing to respond to from Dot’s letters to him.

From Dot comes a typically chatty letter about life at Andrews.  She’s a little less reserved about letting Dart know she likes him and misses him.

My favorite passage is “How’s the place been treating you these days?  Hope they haven’t worked you too hard. I think if they worked any of what little there is of you off, you’d be ‘Just a Memory.'” Let’s face it, the man was skinny!

How hard it must have been for these two people to keep thinking of things to write nearly every day. I mean, they barely knew each other, and there has been a period of a few days with no letters being received on either end. I guess this was good practice for that time in the future when mail would not catch up with them for weeks. Personally, I am very glad they kept up the correspondence even when they didn’t have much to say.

Dot is already daydreaming about the day Dart gets his post-training leave. She imagines it will be around the 15th of December so that they will have about a week to see each other before she returns to Connecticut for the holidays. It’s hard to guess which one of these kids is more infatuated with the other, but they both seem to be in pretty deep after a few short weeks.

Dot’s mother is returning home on the night train this evening. I think a certain young lady will feel mighty lonesome over the next few weeks, with both her her family and her fella far, far away.

Dart’s letter tells of finally receiving two letters in his first mail call. (One from Dot, the other from his mother.) He swings back and forth throughout the letter between a wistful homesick tone and painting a more detailed picture of a “gob’s” life.  My favorite passage is “The worst thing about getting letters from friends is that the very letters you wait for are the ones which make you the most homesick.” He thanks Dot for the picture she sent and adds “I just sat and looked at it for a long time before I even started to read your letter.  Keep on writing letters like that and keep a sailor proud and happy.”

As he shares some of the daily happenings in his barracks, I can just see Dot drinking in all the details. I know she wants to be able to picture exactly where he is and what his days are like.

He signs off with “Love, (and some X’s, too).”

Now it’s Dot’s turn to be happy about receiving a letter. She compliments him on his obvious leadership ability.

I love her little story about finally having the courage to break the wishbone that her sister had sent to her via their mother.  This practical, sensible girl is surprisingly superstitious about a the power of a wishbone. She is nervous her roommate will get the wish. Phew! Dot wins! She doesn’t reveal what her wish was, but I suspect it had something to do with a certain young “sea-scout.” I wonder if Mom remembers all these years later what she wished for that day.

More tales about dorm life follow. My favorite is the one about her and her roommate trying to write letters in their room, but they are constantly being interrupted. Then, when people leave, no one closes the door. Finally, these self-professed “lazy seniors” (Dot and the roomie) start throwing shoes at the door rather than getting up to close it.

Dot encloses a pack of gum for Dart and promises to make him some fudge when he’s home for Christmas. It’s my guess that her talk of being together at Christmas was far sweeter to Dart than any gum or fudge could ever be!

Time and again as I read these letters, I am grateful for the permanence of the written word. Across great distance and time, these letters will be read and reread, combed for nuance and detail, searched for deeper meaning and cherished for the mere fact that the pages were once held by hands that are so terribly missed. You can’t do that with a phone call!

We open with a very short letter from Dart, which apparently contained a small token, left over from his first GI haircut. In his own words, “I’m better dressed now, but I look and feel naked.   … There isn’t enough hair left on my head for anyone to grab with a pair of tweezers.”

He has been recruited by the Chief to do the special assignment of stenciling everyone’s belongings – a task that will take a week and will be done on his “own” time.  He warns her his letters will be shorter for awhile.

His P. S. Reveals that sailors are not allowed to put S. W. A. K. on the outside of an envelope, so he put it on the inside.

Do kids these days know what S.W. A. K. means? Do they know what an envelope is?

In Dot’s letter of the day. she’s a little more open with the compliments than usual, but apparently doesn’t want to wade in too deep. After lavishing high praise on Dart by telling him about the raves he got from all the girls at Andrews, she quips “So, you see, you make a pretty good 1st impression, anyway. (Ouch!)”

Dot chastises Dart mildly for all his references to his “messy” letters, reminding him “What I look for in a letter isn’t the handwriting, I assure you!”

She tells an amusing story about an episode at dinner and reminds him to send another picture of himself (“Just a hint – there’s no limit as to what size picture we can have on our dresser.”) My favorite part is when she is commenting on his use of Case stationary. “I hate to be reminded of a school that didn’t have the sense to keep a good man once they had him.”

She signs off with an atypical “Loads of Love, Dot.”

There’s another letter from Dot written later that day, but since she did not write on the 10th of November, I’ll save it for tomorrow.

This is a long and newsy letter from Dart, accompanied by a short one with additional news.  In the first, he talks about how quickly the mail gets to him from Cleveland and discusses “that funny little mark” she made on her letter. (I think he was referring to a shorthand symbol she had drawn.) One of the guys translated it and then gave Dart a symbol that he should send in response. Fortunately,  Dart had the sense to distrust his fellow sailor and asked around to find that the real meaning of the shorthand he was about to send was rather vulgar!

He reminded Dot not to hope too hard for a letter from him. Not only did he still have to complete the stenciling, but he had eight other letters to answer! He talked about how hard it was to write or get any privacy with all these men around. He told her of the hours of drilling that he did with his platoon, adding that he now knows how sergeants and Chief Petty Officers learned to cuss so well.  He mentioned a guy in his barracks who saw Dot’s picture and recognized her as an Andrews student he had met once. He said the weather was sunnier so the place didn’t look so bleak. And, he told her he had not been able to attempt the swim test because of the cyst on his…er…let’s just say…his back.

In the brief note he enclosed later, Dart tells Dot he has been assigned to the hospital and will undergo surgery on the cyst. While he is reassuring that she should not worry and that the operation was really not that big a deal, there is a melancholy tone to this letter. He urges her to keep the letters coming during his recovery, and he talks about the full moon over Great Lakes making him miss her all the more. His words are ardent and urgent as he tells her he wishes he could see her again.

Dot received a letter from Dart and decided to answer it immediately, even though she had already completed one letter to him that day.  She noticed that although cheerful, his letter sounded a little homesick. What a poignant comment she made when she said, “If you do get rather homesick, please don’t say anything you don’t mean or that you’ll regret later on.” Translation: Don’t toy with my emotions  because you’re already very important to me.

She changes tone when she mentions his revelation that he had received no demerits while at Case. She “fessed up” to two in her Andrews career – one for chewing gum and another for talking to the cooks. “Aren’t I awful? I’m just beginning to catch on why my family sent me out here. However, I’m glad they did, now.” (How else would she have met her dashing sailor?)

In the next paragraph, Dot jokingly chastises Dart for lying about hitching a ride to Greenwich to see her over Christmas. “It would be lovely, of course, but don’t raise my hopes up only to be shattered on the ground.”

Throughout the letter, Dot bounces between letting her growing feelings for Dart come through and then poking fun at him or herself.  She’s sitting out the upcoming date night because her favorite date is unavailable. She offers him a pair of “mittens.” They’re boxing glove style “in case the boys don’t like the idea of you marching them around for two hours.”

She finally gets around to asking him to call her Dot and says she needs to get lights out so she can “dream of you.” In the margins she refers to a little game they have apparently started on the backs of their envelopes – writing a phrase using just the initial letters of each word. She reveals that B.B.S.F.L means “Bond Bread Stays Fresh Longer,” and concluded that he was probably expecting a different not meaning .

On this Veterans Day I’m thinking off all who have served in the military. However, because I am steeped in the 1940s through these letters, my mind is especially drawn to the rapidly dwindling vets of World War II. They truly made the world a better, safer, saner place – at least for a while. We owe them so much!

Dart wrote this letter from a hospital bed in the surgery ward of the Great Lakes Naval Hospital.  He is almost looking forward to a leisurely stay in a quiet and comfortable spot. He thinks surgery is a few days away, with another operation to follow two weeks after that.

On Page 2 he gets positively mushy. “I long for the day when I can come back to  see your lovely face and beautiful brown eyes. I want to see you smile again. I want to hold you in my arms again, as I did on our last date.”

Remember – these kids had just three dates before he left Cleveland.  Look  how far their letters have taken them!

Dot is in rare form for this letter. She expresses deep joy at having received his letter, tells him how lonely she gets between letters and begs him to keep on writing. Having opened her heart up, she immediately retreats to a stand-up comic routine!

She teases him about his hair cut, saying she liked him just fine the way he was – hair and all. She asks him to query the Chief as to why he did not take her preferences into consideration when he shaved Dart’s head. Then she tells a funny and supposedly true story about a girl she knew enclosing a lock of her curls in a letter to her beloved and the beloved’s shocking response.

She has a great one-liner about boys being so rare a sight at school these days that when you ask a girl  which she prefers in a man – money or appearance, the girl is quick to answer “Appearance – and the sooner the better!”

She wraps up with a chat about weekend plans, the housemates who are chasing each other all over the house, and each girl in the place listening to a different record or radio station at once. She paints a vivid picture of life in a girls’ dorm.