Dear Folks

The round black ink postmark on the envelope reads “Kansas City MO AUG 20 9PM 1929.”  The red two cent stamp is upside down; George Washington is standing on his head.  This letter must have been sent in a hurry.  The envelope is addressed to Mrs. Ira S. Kunkler, 309 East Jefferson, Clinton, Missouri.  A letter from my grandfather to his parents.  It is one of several pieces of correspondence bundled in with the others in the letter box.  I open up the single page letter to discover several additional pages of another letter tucked inside.  I found it.  The letter we have heard about all these years.

Tues.

Dear Folks-

This has to be short.  I am sending you the letter I got from Mary Potter.  As a little explanation-The fellow she was going to marry was 10 yrs older than she.  I talked for a year to stop it, and I succeeded.  Her mother didn’t want her to and her father didn’t want it.  So I surely wasn’t wrong.  She knows it now.  

Don’t you think that is one of the sweetest letters you ever read?  When you are through with it, save it for me someplace where it won’t be lost.  I want it.

I will mail my laundry tomorrow.  I’ll be home Sat. if possible but please get it back before then if possible.  Mail it so it will get here Sat. if you can.  I’m working pretty hard now.  I’ll write more in a day or two.  I haven’t done anything to tell you about.

Love,

Jim

I can’t believe it.  I can’t believe I found THE letter.  I can’t believe that it is in one of the first envelopes I open. I can’t believe it is in an envelope with another letter.  I can’t believe Jim sent the letter to his parents to read. I can’t believe that after 83 years, the letter was not lost.  I can’t believe my grandfather sent his sweaty, dirty clothes home to be laundered.  And with a clean clothes deadline, too.  Really?  If my son ever did that I’d send the filthy load back with a coupon for Tide.  But when I stop and think about it, the only time my son sends me anything through the regular mail is my birthday and Mothers’ Day.  Believe it.

THE Letter, Part One

All of my life I have known the significance of THE letter.  This special correspondence is pivotal in my family history.  A single piece of mail is the catalyst that brought my grandparents together and is the true genesis of their relationship, a relationship that endured more than 70 years.

My grandfather, Jim, relished in telling the story of THE letter.

Mary and Jim met sometime during 1927 while they were both students at the University of Missouri in Columbia.  The details of their meeting and their first date were never highlighted.  These particulars were never all that important, at least in Jim’s mind.  All that mattered to him was THE letter.

They dated, briefly, but then, as Jim puts it, “Mary quit me for another boy.”  Mary dated and, in fact, became engaged to someone else.  She also quit school, which I find interesting because dropping out of school would have been forbidden to me.  The idea of quitting school would have been forbidden.  Thinking about the idea of quitting school would have been forbidden.  Still, she dropped out of the university and began planning a wedding.

As it happened, the love affair between my grandmother and this other unknown man had a really unhappy ending.  It was so traumatic that her father, who was an attorney for the Missouri Pacific Railroad, sent Mary, her mother and her best friend on a trip to the Pacific Coast.  He put them on a train in Jefferson City, Missouri bound for California in the summer of 1929.  Her father figured that the distance and the sunshine and fresh air of California would help to heal her hurting heart.  He was right.

Somewhere  along the way home, Mary wrote a letter, THE letter to Jim from the train.  She was writing to inform him that the engagement was off and that she had told the other boy goodbye.  She wanted to know if they could be friends again.  We all understood this to mean more than just friends, but boyfriend and girlfriend.  Jim liked to tell it that “she wanted to know if I was still interested in her and would take her back.”  Which he did, of course.

My grandfather would always get a little teary eyed recounting the story.  (Turns out real men do cry.)  He would also always point out that this piece of private correspondence arriving in his mailbox forever changed his life and was the origin of our family.

Somewhere in the stacks of bundles is THE letter.  I sort through the envelopes, searching postmarks and addresses for clues.  Most of them are stamped 1930 or later.

It is exciting and wondrous to think that somewhere amid the hundreds of envelopes in the letter box is one that holds the most important family communication of all.  What is really in that letter?  What exactly did she say?  What were the words that melted his heart?  What other secrets might she reveal?  I suddenly realize this is very personal, to them and to me.

The Letter Box

My Grandparents' Courtship Correspondence

The courtship between my grandparents took place largely in letters.  An old-fashioned, romantic notion for those of us who live in the modern information age of technology.  Most of our interpersonal communication is electronic.  Cell phones, email and text messages were conventions barely known to my grandparents. Their social media consisted of stationary, a fountain pen and a two cent postage stamp.  For nearly four years, from 1929 to 1933, Mary Potter and Jim Kunkler wrote letters to one another every day when they were not together.  Sometimes twice a day.

Some years ago my mother happened upon a bundle of letters while cleaning out the basement of my grandparents’ home in Ohio.  It wasn’t surprising.  My grandmother was a saver.  She kept everything.  We found trunks filled with all kinds of stuff like World War II ration stamps, old baseball game programs and powder puffs still in their original packaging.  Newspaper clippings with names of people she knew were tucked within the trunks of items for someday use or reference.  The bundle of letters, though, were a valuable find, a true keepsake.  Further sifting and sorting.  More letter bundles were discovered.  My mother had uncovered virtually all of the letters my grandparents’ wrote to one another during their courtship, along with some additional assorted correspondence.

My mother boxed up the letters and gave them to me for safe keeping.  She also urged me to “do something with them someday.”  I put them in the attic.

Someday came a few weeks ago when I realized that this treasure might be too easily lost forever like a deleted email.  This cherished piece of family history, the story of Mary and Jim and their letter writing courtship needed to be shared with my children and preserved for future generations.  Now was the time to do something about the letters.

So, I climbed up in the attic and began to rummage around the cardboard boxes and plastic bins.  Our attic is a repository for cardboard boxes and plastic bins.  We have a varied and extensive collection of cartons from such moving companies as Mayflower, United Van Lines and U-Haul as well as numerous shapes and sizes of Rubbermaid containers. (I guess I must be a little like my grandmother.) Finding the box with the letters was going to be a challenge.  After an hour of searching and almost giving up that they were gone, I found the box.  Behind the Christmas decorations, next to our daughter’s American Girl Collection and underneath a box with my high school yearbooks and memorabilia was the box of letters.

This correspondence has been read by only two people.  Until now.  As I read these personal letters, my twenty-something grandparents are both well known and strangers to me at the same time.  The letters are like reading a conversation between two people that loved each other and that I happen to love, too.  I just didn’t know them then.  Strange but not fiction.  How I wish they were still here to ask about the friends they mention and the funny anecdotes they record!  Still, like any great mystery or adventure, there are clues to be explored to point me in the right direction that somehow will lead me to understand, just maybe, a little more about them.  And perhaps myself in the process.