Love Letters Lost
Before you get too excited that you are going to be reading some long lost letters that have been found, I want to tell you that you won’t. The letters are still lost. At least to me. Some of the contents of the letters are still available, but the letters themselves have been lost or maybe just destroyed. Yes, they could have been intentionally destroyed!
The letters I’m talking about were letters written by my parents in 1952. Daddy went off to basic training for the Air Force in San Antonio after he and my mom were engaged to be married. I’m sure they missed each other when they were miles apart and my mom was not someone who liked to talk on the phone much. Besides, it was expensive to make long distance calls in those days. There weren’t many plans to choose from! So they sent letters to each other and included photos of some of the things they were doing.
Of course the main thing that was included were pictures of themselves for their enfianced. This is my mom Betty Lou Bucklin looking sweet for her beau Bob Landry. I used to always think of my mom as a naive young girl who got lost easily and wasn’t very assertive.
But in retrospect, I think I was wrong. My mom got exactly what she wanted out of life. Her dream was to find a nice young man that she would want to marry, have lots of children, and have a family band together. She didn’t hang around her quaint little country home town of Hathaway to see what would happen. She went to the big city of Lake Charles and gave herself an option of an education to fall back on as a standby. The standby was never needed.
This second shot is a photo Betty Lou with her sisters Loris and Alma. This must have been in the summer of 1952, which was a few months before my parents’ marriage in early November. On the back of this photo my mom wrote “anything to make you happy.” I suppose my dad must have appreciated these photos, because he saved them and we’re looking at them today.
Here is one of the photos that he sent to her. This was taken at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio in August of 1952. His photos were a little more serious than my mom’s. After all, he was a young man in training for the military. That’s pretty serious business.
I’m not really sure how frequently they wrote to each other, but it was nowhere near what would be exchanged between people nowadays. They’d be sending texts and photos every day. Times were a bit different then.
One of the other differences is that they didn’t have the cloud to save all of their information for them. They had to put the photos in boxes or albums and the letters in a file or drawer somewhere. They did do that, because me and my sister Jamie came across those letters years ago. And being the nosy children that we were back then, we opened up those letters and read them. I don’t really remember much about the contents of the letters, but I do remember giggling a lot.
We got into trouble for that, which was another thing we giggled about. But we never saw those letters ever again. When we cleared out my parents house, we kept an eye out for them, but we could not find them. I’m afraid that I will never see them again. I’m not giggling about that.
Lagniappe – Thought I would add these two other photos to this post. One of them is my mom with her younger brother Austin. The other one is my mom’s Pin Up photo. A photo of her in a two piece swimsuit.
Update! Don’t want to give a spoiler, but that lack of a giggle was wiped off my face.