Dart seems shocked that a day went by without him writing to Dot. He had no excuse except that he was simply tired of writing. I have to keep reminding myself that he corresponds with several people and is fairly loyal about answering each letter soon after he receives it. How hard it must be to either write something new to each person, or write the same thing several times over.

He is glad he and Dot have the same taste in radio programs, although he also thinks they have more than that, plus their mutual attraction and admiration. Isn’t it fun how universal it is for people who are just getting to like each other find comfort in the things they have in common? Later, it seems they are sometimes equally happy to discover each other’s differences.

He appreciates the photo of Kay Hepburn, especially since he left Dot’s photo with his other belongings when he was rushed to the hospital all those weeks ago. He’d welcome a replacement photo anytime, but now he has the lovely actress to “keep him company.”

His letter-writing has been interrupted by a bed-bath, a back rub and a discussion among the patients of Sherlock Holmes drug addiction. Now the mail has arrived, bringing yet another letter from Dot.

He is sorry he isn’t able to join Dot in her “meditation” after the Fred Waring radio show. The ward he’s on has lights out at 9:00 PM, so he is fast asleep by 10:15. He’d like her to choose another time for them to mentally commune, although he admits to thinking about her much more often than a couple of minutes each day.

He tells her not to mourn the loss of his chin whiskers because they were most unattractive. He then illustrates with a drawing in the margin to prove his point.

He wishes her a good time in Cleveland this weekend and thanks her for the special message she wrote inside the envelope. He doesn’t recall exactly what he said to induce her response, but he meant it, and he vows he does not say it to anyone else.

Dot starts her first letter of the day in her window display class and fills the page with riveting facts about mannequins and painting techniques. She continues later that day with a second letter.

She has glowing comments about the snapshots Dart sent her of his parents and promises to return them to him with special care. She quips, “You have your mother’s eyes, the same shape face as your Dad. For all I know you have your grandfather’s teeth, and you’d better give them back.”

She will try to quit griping about the mail service. Her roommate’s fella’ is a flyer over England and she hasn’t heard from him in days. The roommate is getting quite frustrated (and maybe a little scared?) and has just flown into one heck of a tantrum. She’s busting up records, throwing things and cursing like a …sailor? Dot expects to be strangled in her sleep when the roommate returns.

Dot reports that her mother, who is her husband’s “secretary” in his small business, just wrote to say that Dot should be prepared in case both her parent go to jail. Their crime? Neither can figure out their income taxes or how much they owe! I doubt it was really all that bad. Dot’s mother was a graduate of Wellesley and her dad attended Yale. I’m sure between the two of them they had the brain power to get the job done.

Dot finishes up the letter so that she can write to her brother. She signs off with “Good nite-sleep tight. Don’t let the nurses bite!”

Here’s a short, but ever so sweet letter from Dart, written on the last sheet of fine stationery Dot sent him.

He’s happy she liked his recent poetry. He says it seemed to flow freely onto the paper – real inspiration.

He says he has been reading a lot of magazines lately and often runs across a story that reminds him of Dot and himself; how they met and fell in love, how he had to leave her so quickly, the disappointments and challenges they’ve faced. He writes “So much of our friendship has borne a trace of resemblance to those happy-sad-happy stories that I don’t see how our story can have anything but the happiest of endings. At any rate, I hope so sincerely.”

He dreams of the time when they can be together again.

Continuing the theme of short letters, Dot writes a two-pager on Andrews school letterhead, left over from a typing class she took. I love the school’s motto: A practical school to render Girls self-supporting.

Today, Dot’s teacher Mrs. Wall asked her about that “nice young gentleman” she brought to the October dance. Dot filled her in on all the particulars of Dart’s experience since he was last in Willoughby. Mrs. Wall then inquired about his mother’s maiden name, because she recalled that Dart’s mom had at one time worked at Andrews. When Dot told her, Mrs. Wall raved about Helen Burke Peterson being the finest woman on Earth. She says she wouldn’t have a job if not for Helen and that her son would have to go a long way to live up to the standards set by his parents. Dot warned him that he best take note because “I’ve got my eye on you.”

In other news, Dot got her pictures developed and was sending them to Dart, and she had to study for a Consumer Education exam before leaving for a weekend in Cleveland.

Here’s a chatty, somewhat inconsequential letter from Dart. He’s spent most of his day in good conversation with his fellow patients, so he’s left with little time to write.

He has determined the cause of the sporadic delivery schedule of his mail to the outside. Outgoing letters are collected from the ward at 9:00 PM. The corpsman going off duty then is supposed to sterilize the letters (!) and they are sent to the post office the following morning. Several glitches can cause delays: The corpsman forgets to gather the mail, the sterilizer is being used for medical purposes, the mail bundle is too large to fit into the sterilizer, the day corpsman forgets to retrieve it from the sterilizer.

Dart can sympathize with Dot’s roommate who had a tantrum after not hearing from her guy for several days. Dart admits to throwing rather mild, quiet fits when his mail call has disappointed him. All this just underscores how incredibly important letters from home are to these guys!

Dart is listening to the “Hit Parade” on the radio as he finishes his letter. He says it sounds as though Sinatra has a cold tonight. That was a revelation to me because it indicates that the “Hit Parade” is a live radio program! When was the last time we heard anyone singing the hits live on the radio?

He explains that he filed income tax, but since his Navy pay was a paltry $300 in 1943, he doesn’t owe any taxes. Wow!

Dot’s letter was a quick one, dashed off after midnight from her friend Janice’s house in Cleveland. She’s having a good and busy time of it on her weekend off campus. She enclosed a couple of snapshots she had taken in a photo booth at the dime store. (Sadly, they have disappeared over the intervening years.) I’m sure Dart was delighted to get them, even though she claims they make her look like an inmate at some institution other than Andrews.

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.