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You may recall, I made up a WoW just a couple of weeks ago in which I annotated a 1962 Valentine and a newsy letter from my paternal grandfather to my brother Bruce, who was nine years old at the time. Our family was living in Virginia in 1962. I suspect Bruce read that letter once or twice, wrote a reply to it, and put Grampa’s letter back in its envelope.
I suspect our mom then placed the envelope with others of that era into a shoe box, and it traveled along with countless tons of household goods throughout our parents’ changes of residence from Virginia to Kentucky to Wisconsin to Maryland to Hawaii to Virginia again and to Wisconsin again, where it stayed in the basement in a house in the Village of Rio and, at last, along about 1994, came to rest in the basement of the house on the Rio farm where Mom and Dad lived out the last couple of decades of their lives.
Sometime, a year ago or so, my Dad discovered the shoe box and brought it up from the basement to his little office in his house and set it on a card table heaped high with an amazing and mysterious assortment of magazines, letters, photos, financial records, and whatevers. That is also the present condition of that card table.
Dad did not give the 1962 letter to Bruce, and he didn’t give it to me. I have no reason to suppose that Dad or anyone else ever laid eyes upon that letter until I just happened to find it myself a few weeks ago while marveling at the strata of that card table. I shared it with you on March 7.
Well, lo and behold, I now have another letter for you, one I found in a TBF (To Be Filed) pile here in the house Carol and I share in town, a letter from February, 1960, from me to Gramp and Gram Grossmann, when I myself was just ten years old, practically the same as Bruce’s age of nine when he received Grampa’s February, 1962, letter. And so I smile at the coincidence. This letter, mine, Dad did lay eyes upon; he found it somewhere in his house and gave it to me sometime last fall. I looked at it and set it aside. It’s an undated draft, in my handwriting, a single page and then two lines more on the back, in black ink of a fountain pen, on lined paper without holes. As you’ll see in a moment, it just peters out and and lacks a “Love, / Buddy” and surely was never sent, though I do hope I copied it over and sent something like it to the intended recipients.
If you want to see my handwriting, look up another draft, contemporaneous with this one, which I published as a WoW dated February 1, 2015. Go to my Archives Page and hunt for it.
So, here’s a transcription of the 1960 letter, without showing the strikethroughs, insertions, misspellings, and errors of punctuation. I won’t give you any further annotation today unless you beg me for it.
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Dear Grandma and Grandpa,
So many things happened here and I can’t possibly write about half of them, but first I’ll tell you the plans of our class’ trip to the Isle of Hawaii.
We will leave Honolulu on Feb 5 at 8:00 A.M. and leave Hilo, Hawaii sometime around 7:30 P.M. on Feb. 5. We will eat lunch at the black sands beach, see the orchid fields, macadamia fields, and other points of interest. We will see the volcano in action but will not fly over it at night or probably not any other time. We will see some of the main islands as we fly over them. The plane fare is $17.60 and the bus fare is $4.35 = $21.95. I’ll write more after the trip.
Many children fly kites and so do Bruce and I. Today we weren’t doing very well and a man told us we were using string that was too heavy and that he had some and that he would give me some that wasn’t very heavy (HE HAD FIVE MILES OF IT AND HE GAVE ME PLENTY)
[The last eight words are on the first two ruled lines of page two, as follows]
We use american triangle kites or Japanese kites.
[End of draft. In pencil, in my mother’s hand, are seven lines of math computations having no relation to the contents of my letter. ]
♦
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