Dot’s letter today is actually two letters, written from Dart’s home in Cleveland, where she and her mother have had a nice long visit for Dot’s graduation from Andrews. She began the first letter at 1:24 PM, according to the new watch she received as a graduation gift.

As she writes, the three parents are in the Peterson’s living room looking at Dart’s baby pictures. The photos are so cute that Dot vows to throw all of her baby pictures away when she gets home, lest they pale in comparison. She feels a little guilty going through his childhood photos and laughing at them when he’s not there to defend himself, but she’s sure his vocabulary is sufficiently large to convey to her how he feels about her behavior.

His parents have been very generous in allowing Dot to read the seven letters that have arrived from Dart since she got to Cleveland. She’s hoping that today the mailman will deliver one to her that might have been forwarded from home.

When she read that he’s been on the USS Coontz, she remembered that a coworker at Franklin Simon has a brother stationed on that same ship. Unfortunately, he’s a Marine, but Dot hopes he’s a nice one, like Fred. She asked if he’d happened to meet a PFC Pfeiffer.

She explains that her mother is returning to Greenwich tonight. Just before they left to come to Ohio, she received the tragic news that her brother, Dot’s beloved Uncle Carl, had been killed in a train accident. He left several children, including Dot’s cousin Waddy, who’s in the Navy and looks very much like Dart. I grew up hearing a family story about the death of Uncle Carl:  When Dot’s brother Gordon was aboard ship in the South Pacific, he was dismayed to read the news of his uncle’s death. Just as he was reading the letter about it, he heard a shipmate cry out in anguish. The other guy was at that moment reading about a dear family friend who’d also been killed in a train accident. When he and Gordon compared stories, it turned out they were both talking about Carlton Pierce!

Dot closes the first letter in order to accompany her mother to the station. She follows later that evening with her second letter of the day.

She draws a cozy picture of his family in the living room; Dart Sr. is sitting at a table, writing a novel-length letter to his son; Burke is fiddling with his camera across the room and Helen is taking a cat nap at the other end of the couch. I imagine it gave Dart great comfort to visualize Dot in familiar surroundings in the company of his family.

She describes the beautiful locket that his folks gave her as a graduation gift. As lovely as it is, the part she treasures the most, of course, is a great picture of Dart that Burke took.

Her graduation weekend went well, with 60 of the 63 classmates returning for the festivities. She already misses the girls and wistfully wonders if, or when, she’ll see any of them again. She’s a little unsettled by high school being behind her now. She doesn’t like the idea of growing up, and says it’s a sad day when a girl her age delights in hearing she looks 15 years old! She wishes especially that the war would end so that Dart would be around to grow up with her. Would he please speak to the Admiral and see if there’s anything that can be done about that?

She, of course is waiting for the day that he comes home, and she reminds him that he’s not to tell her when that day comes. She’s quite sincere about wanting to be surprised.

Dot is over the moon with joy! She was awakened this morning by Helen Peterson throwing a stack of 11 letters from Dart onto her bed! (She also received a $10.00 money order from Gordon for graduation.) She declared that she would always have a wonderful day, if every morning brought a pile of letters from Dart,

Although much of the news in his letters was the same news she’d already read in his letter to his parents, she was delighted to read it all again. “Some of the humorous passages, of which there were many, I read to your mom and pop, but I didn’t think the idle ‘sweet nothings’, as you call them, would have held much interest for them.”

She writes that his mother and Burke came to her graduation ceremony along with her own mother and Cynthia, visiting from Oberlin College. She says Burke practically went cross-eyed, looking at all the pretty Andrews girls. Now he’s trying to make arrangements to get out to Andrews for a date night. “If he succeeds, I hope he and his date hit it off as well as his brother and his date did. Or should I say as well as his brother and and his brother’s roommate’ date did?”

He has her permission to collect that congratulatory kiss whenever he wants. Although she received kisses from both her mom and his after the ceremony, they somehow just weren’t the same as one from him!

She doesn’t envy him the tropical life. Sometimes she feels discouraged when she sees more snow, but she’s cured of her self-pity by thinking of Dart and Gordon in the hot South Pacific.

Because she has heard Gordon’s description of the Marines aboard his ship, she wouldn’t be shocked to hear Dart’s, so he needn’t hold back.

How sad that he was gypped out of most of his 21st birthday, but the day made quite an impression on his folks. They shared with Dot a beautiful letter he’d written them on the occasion, and she reports that they were thrilled beyond words by what he wrote. How she wishes she had his gift for writing!

Speaking of wishes, she would pay nearly any price not to be a blusher. Yesterday when reading a letter from Dart aloud, his mother got to the part about hoping Dot would keep her promise to wait for him. When she heard that, she blushed to the boiling point. Ever since, his family has teased her about it. She curses the fate that reveals all her inner-most feelings by the redness of her face.

She concludes the letter with a gentle chiding that he should ever doubt her promise to wait. She’ll never send him a letter telling him that she’s married someone else! He better get that through his head right now!

To get him the mail promptly, she didn’t take the time to check for mistakes, “but it’s no mistake that I love you.”

Just before Dot leaves to go shopping in downtown Cleveland with Dart’s mother, she jots off a quick note to tell him about her recent activities.

She went to Oberlin College yesterday to visit Cynthia. While they were touring the conservatory of music, they ran into Dart’s cousin, Margaret practicing piano. As soon as Margaret saw Dot, she jumped up and asked where she had seen that face before. Then she instantly remembered all the pictures Dart had shown her of his girl, and she began to pepper Dot with questions about him. Dot was happy to tell all she had learned about his situation from his 11 letters to her.

The beauty of the Andrews campus has spoiled Dot. She wasn’t too impressed with the Oberlin dorms, but says the girls she met there were very nice. The school has recently opened a beautiful new gym, complete with swimming pool and a three-lane bowling alley.

Dot plans to leave on the 8:30 train tonight, even though his parents have asked her to stay longer. She doesn’t want to over stay her welcome, and she knows the longer she stays with his family, the harder it’ll be to leave. Oh, how she wishes she lived in Cleveland!

With a reminder that she loves him very much, she says she’ll try to write more later – maybe from the train.

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.

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.”

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.

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.