Umnak Island, 28 August 1944 -- "no two men are on speaking terms"

My Darling… 

 

I am smackdab in the middle of changing shifts. We make the shift of shifts every month. It gives me cramps. I was supposed to go on days but Al Hesse, the third censor, who was to get graveyard wanted to stay on the daylight detail, whereas I have a passion for the obscure delights of early a.m. work when labor there is little and leisure much. So we swapped. As payment for the change, I drew the sixteen hour workout of my regular swing session and the new corpse-hour siesta combined.

The current change of shifts is fabulous. If I credited our Chief Operator with imagination I would believe he had arranged the swing shift with an eye to ridding himself of all his problem personnel in one climactic chance-medley. He stocked the place with more guys who hate each other than Agatha Christie would put on an island in a murder mellerdrammer.

If it were not for Ted Godfrey, the chief censor, who will also be swinging low, I doubt the anything could be accomplished as no two men are on speaking terms. Godfrey will act as interpreter or intermediary, like the good Padre Jose Maria Cuevas between the Cristeros and the government. Methinks his job will make him section eight stuff. 

As a matter of fact, the arrangement of the swing shift is so Machiavellian that a number of fellows accused Martin of machinating it in a subtle attempt to sabotage the administration. But as Ted mentioned when someone called his attention to it, the only way to get a shift which didn’t run afoul of the feuds would be to have the censors do it all. They don’t feud because there are only three of us and we never work on the same shift, seldom see each other, and get along fine. 

There are more vendettas here than at a diplomatic function in Lisbon or a staff meeting on Time. The number of deep dislikes among the forty-odd men is surprising, especially when you consider that nearly all have a deep desire to get along, a conscious will to make the best of a long and at most a bad year. On the other hand, it is surprising that the feuds don’t seem to really hamper the efficiency of the outfit.

They spring, in part, from the very effort to avoid them. The consciousness of the effort to be friendly militates against normal relations. There is too much tension.  …

There are many other factors besides the tension of loneliness which cause friction up here. One of the worst is race prejudice, overt and secondary. A number of our more noxious characters feel themselves superior to other denizens of this dump on grounds of nationality or race. Tim Egon, for example, dislikes Jews, Negroes, Swedes, Norwegians, Germans, Danes, Englishmen, Poles, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Italians, Mexicans, Hollanders and, I imagine, Aryan Hindus and cross-eyed Celts. He has a lot of company, although few of the men have such ample hates. Any conversation which deals with race is likely to do so in terms of kikes, wops, spics, dagoes, niggers.

It is strange that there can be so much prejudice in a group which has few representatives of minority races. The stock here is predominantly British-Nordic. There is one Pole. Two of the boys are Jewish. We have a few second generation Germans and a number of Scandinavians. For prejudice to crop up in such a group in a democratic army seems incredible. Yet the seeds are sprouting.

"It is strange that there can be so much prejudice in a group which has few representatives of minority races." 

Secondary race prejudice is my own type. I am prejudiced against those with prejudices. This complicates my relations with my friends—mainly the Rebel.

Another cause of trouble is sectionalism. Texans seem to be generally unpopular in the army. Here we have little trouble with our lone Lone Star because he is essentially likeable. He is very much the puppy when he is not morose … 

 

Other sectional dislikes are for New Yorkers, and hillbillies, and sometimes for Californians. Then, here in the ACS, there seems to be a sort of Seattle against the rest of the world feeling. These are all more or less minor dislikes, and have little to do with the sometimes strained relationships of the enlisted personnel. But differences in military background seem to play a big part now, and in the recent past played an even more important role.

Not everyone in the ACS wants to be there. Or ever wanted to.  A lot of men have been transferred in, not even knowing what they were getting until they reached Seattle. Most of these men had Signal Corps training at Monmouth. They feel themselves to be, consequently, superior to the “ACS commandoes,” the men who do not care for GI life and like the comparative freedom of the ACS. Since most of these transfers are in one branch of work, it makes the differences even more obvious and tends to divide our camp in to groups. A second military difference is between the pre and post Pearl Harbor soldiers. Tim Egon again is a shining example. Whenever he gets drunk, which is often, he goes into details about what he thinks of any man who was not in uniform before Pearl Harbor. He does not even like guys who volunteered after Pearl Harbor. He talks one of the best fights I have ever heard, but, as is often pointed out to him, he asked for duty in the ACS in order to stay out of the infantry. A final difference in this type is between the men who like the Army (there are some) and those who don’t.

…

Among the more beautiful feuds now in full blossom are those between Martin and Egon; Hesse and a wild-eyed boy named Coleman who wants to stay in the army when it’s all over; Rebel and Mochkatel, a society boy from Seattle; the poet Traina and the perverted bridegroom to be Graffunder; Bender and a long, lank interesting kid from Oregon named Cobb.

The best comment yet on the swing shift personnel: “It’s not sabotage, it’s an act of Godelewski.”

…

I’ve often told you about our black mountain, the basalt cone of which dominates our local scene. Yesterday morning at sunrise it was red, a deeper red than our hill at Patzcuaro, the red of drying blood. It was so beautiful that I decided to climb it then and there. But before I could get more than a quarter mile from camp it was completely covered by clouds, and before I got back: rain. With the days free during the next month, however, I hope to climb it.

 

You asked in your last letter about [page] makeup. It is awfully hard to think of anything in that line without knowing the type of stories, whether long or short, the type of paper, the number of cuts [illustrations], etcetera.  …  On the next page I’ll draw three possible make-ups for such a paper. All are predicated on your suing off-set and have free use of pictures.  … There are a few don’ts--Don’t have stories break next to each other below the fold unless there is a good

I doubt there is much to help you there, Nunny. If you’ll send me a few of the papers I might be able to make suggestions. Also tell me how many pages and how many pictures and how much they will let you try typographically. By the way, there is a rather good chapter on tabloid makeup  in the book we have on newspaper makeup. I believe the book is by Allen.

Your being in the Press Photographer’s Union really pleases me, my pet. How are your relations with the Newspaper Guild? Also being CIO in Beck’s town [Dave Beck, longtime Teamsters Union leader] is even better than being CIO in New York. Do you get touched by the CIO Political Action Committee?

Love of my life, the war news is better than I had dreamed it could be. But don’t start counting on my being home ahead of time. We’ve got the biggest half of our other war to fight yet, and it would take a military miracle to end that one in time to get me home before my year is up. Just set your sights on our staying together when we get together, for that is the most important thing of all. I can’t help hoping for miracles myself, but I am almost superstitiously afraid of hoping too high. 

Your letters are wonderful, Nunny. I’m glad you liked, or rather approved, of the short story. I sent Ann a copy the same time I sent you one, so she should have it by now.

…

M

Umnak Island, 28 August 1944--This has been a good day, one of the best

Dearest Nunny…

This has been a good day, one of the best. For a change the weather was fickle, the right way. When I went to bed, around noon, after a post-breakfast trek to the commissary for more Nescafe and pineapple juice, the sky was dull and the wind heavy and damp. But when I woke about five the sun was out and the meadowland flashed silver and green and the soft and warm wind undulated
the long yielding grass. 

I decided to give my stomach a break and instead of inflicting a dinner for breakfast on it, brewed up a bit of Nescafe over the hotplate and then went to wake up Jack. He was reading “Life and Death in a Spanish Town” in his sack, had started the morning with a quart of overly sweet grapejuice, and was in such a Hitlerian humor that the local absence of rugs was probably a good thing. 

Mount Recheschnoi, Umnak: Chris Nye photo

 

 

 

 

We went for a walk. Today marks his anniversary on the island and about his 29^th month away from the States. That probably accounted for the mood. He told me about his memories of his first day: he had gone, all unwilling, to a movie. There was a line outside and while waiting the fellows he was with read a very funny letter. They giggled as they passed it to him. It contained gags like “I wish you luck like pork, that is in a pig’s ass I do.” And “I hope you fall through your arsehole and break your back.” He does not remember the show, but on his way out an MP bawled him out because he had not brought his rifle with him.

The anniversary was, I believe, more pleasant. We walked to the Bering, but to a stretch of the beach we had not visited before, a spectacular pile of basalt boulders which thrust abruptly from under the grassy topsoil into the corrosive sea.

We reached the shore just before twilight, and as we clambered over the twenty-foot rocks, lamenting our leather-soled GIs, the moon came out, large and lustrous and lopsided. Behind us, far behind, the mountains of our island: one distant and white, the other near and black and fleetingly fog-girdled, both flowing down into green valleys. Close behind the tall grass, fireweed flamed. Under our feet the prehistoric, elephantine rocks. And nowhere a hint of habitation. In all the miles our eyes could cover, not a sign that man had been there before. 

Perhaps it was because of an article I read last night. The piece was “In Pursuit of the Earliest Americans” in the July Harpers. It is the story of the Folsom man, who lived on this continent nearly fifteen thousand years ago and disappeared not long after the last Ice Age. His remains have never been found. All that is known about him has been reconstructed from the flint lance-heads he left imbedded in the bones of such animals as the American mammoth and the pygmy horse. But these points are expertly shaped, much more adroitly than those made thousands of years later by the Indians we know. A Negro cowboy found the first point, and since then they have been found regularly, mainly in an area just east of the Rockies and south of Montana. Then one turned up on a Ketchikan curio store, and the scientists turned north. Near Fairbanks they found huge deposits of mammoth bones frozen in the muck. Many still bore flesh. The scientists sampled steaks from animals extinct for millenniums. Naturally, the steaks tasted like mud and sand, but the dogs liked them very much. Chilled dinosaur might be the answer to the dogfood in wartime problem.

 "Chilled dinosaur might be the answer to the dogfood in wartime problem"

The scientists next went to the Alaskan coast and there, in a stormy inlet on Kodiak, they found another deposit of Folsom points. Before they could complete their studies—and they were not sure whether the Folsom man came across the Bering straits or along the Aleutian chain—there was a war on. Perhaps you have heard of it. And so their studies were suspended temporarily, which, perhaps, is a good thing, for it left me free to stand on the slate colored rocks and look down the moonpath and wonder about the early man who, before the pyramids were built or the great wall started or the first word written came along this coast in his dugout, paddling down the moonlit streak in the sullen sea.

Or Baranoff, a mere hundred years ago, standing off our island in his little sailing ship, the water speckled with the kayaks of the Aleuts. Not even the rocks would have changed much since then; a few inches of erosion, a little more or a little less water in the lagoons. But otherwise, the scene unchanged. I was feeling sheepish about my romancing when Jack said, “I’d marry the woman who understood how this makes me feel.” And I knew you would understand how I felt.

…

We walked back from the Bering by moonlight and talked of many things: planetariums, Sorel’s theory of the political elite, over-writing, Al Storz from whom Jack received a Museum of Modern Art postcard of a Uraguayan painting today, the merits of the graveyard shift, Machiavelli, and the confusions of modern education.

Murray, at right, fighting it out on the pegboard chess set

By the time we reached camp we were well talked out and, going to my hut, brewed coffee and looked up references to various topics we had talked about. And, turning the pages, hearing without listening the goodnight tunes on the radio, we decided we did not want to go to midnight chow in the mess hall. So we cooked two cans of Campbell’s chicken soup, made some more coffee and broke out Phyllis and Otto’s cookies and spent a long, leisurely hour sipping and sampling and talking of Henry Morgan and Dick Pack. It was my best evening in the Aleutians.

Your letter today was as your letters always are -- the best substitute for you that can be delivered in these parts. The idea of Haj developing an Aleutian stare rather worries me: if she gets too deep in reverie that rabbit may sneak up on her some day…Your project for shipping bees here to go with the fireweed is unnecessary. There are some here already, huge bumbling fellows at least an inch long. They make so much noise as they waddle through the air that everyone calls them bee-17s. I don’t know if they produce honey out of their efforts for no one seems to know where they shack up… Carmen’s story on anti-semitism and negrophobia on her father’s part seems incredible. Carmen still hasn’t written me, by the way… Your comment on “an armistice, if not peace, in Europe” reminds me that John C had a good article in the current Fortune on “Five Years After the War.” I liked it for a very smug reason -- his account of Europe in the first five years after the last war contained little that I did not already know. I was quite proud of my background on the subject. The article, incidentally, was one of John-boy’s best. 

As I told you the other day I have been filling in all my spare time while on shift by operating one of the local teletype circuits. Occasionally my regular duties make it necessary for me to talk to the parties at the receiving end of the messages. All last month I talked to a man who signed his initials merely LW. On the last day on the swing shift I talked to him not on the teletype but on the telephone. I had kidded him once about a bit of sloppy poking by saying “OK Finnegan, Wake up”  and he had come back immediately with “River Ran.” I didn’t get the allusion so when we had finished our business talk I asked him what he meant. It turned out the River Ran is the second chapter of “Finnegan’s Wake.” So we got to bullsessioning a bit and I found that he is a graduate, ’42, of Yale who was going to go to work on Time, except that the Army got him first. He comes from Brooklyn, does not like John-boy because of his prewar isolationism, and thinks John Hersey the best young American writer. His name is Larry Weistrub and the next time I go down to the library I am to drop over to his outfit and look him up.  It will be nice if there is someone literary to visit here after Jack goes out on rotation. Jack expects to be here about another month. 

Speaking of the library reminds me. Did you send my copy of The Prince? Also, could you send me a list of the packages you have started this way since I came from the old post. I believe I still have one missing that you sent here and the only ones received here are those containing the pajamas and the vitamin pills (but not the lime tablets). Did you ever find my Serb hat to send me? I’d like to have it especially as this will probably be the only time it will be useful besides spectacular. And it will be nice to have something to wear that belongs to us instead of the army. For the benefit of any food you might want to send and have not a request for—I want it. 

[The rest of the letter is a summary of Argentine history, from a book by John White]

Umnak Island, 26 August 1944 -- "I regard those cookies as a prisoner would a file"

My little one…

So little happens…

The last couple of nights I have worked on the novel, not getting my ten page daily quota completed on either night.  Or both. Each night I have gone to bed after sunrise and read until about eight, when the alarm clocks of the dayshift shift start going off at five-minute intervals. Something about an alarm clock makes me sleepy so about that time I drop off. Each time I woke about three, made coffee on the hot plate with the Nescafe from the commissary, and groped down to the operations building to deadtail it for eight long slow hours. 

What can I tell you about such days? What that I have not told you time and again in the last four months? 

Perhaps a bit about the feel of the nights. They are cool now, and longer. The last few nights have been cloudy with no moon and no stars. The other night Jack and I took a long walk down the road toward the Bering sometime between two and three. It was dark, so dark that we could not see our hands before our faces, or each other, or the edge of the road which shelves off into a several hundred foot drop. Once we walked into a low cloud and did not see it until we felt it. The flashlight, which we turned on, did not reach the ground. The night was so still that a mile from camp we could hear the click of the billiard balls and the chatter of the teletypes. We talked about everything from the formative influences of first impressions of light to forehand shots in ping pong. 

Jack is currently reading “Life and Death of a Spanish Town.” I don’t remember whether you read it in Patzcuaro. But I know you’ll remember how I bitched about the lurid hortatory paragraphs and the soupy sentimentalism. Manuel refused to finish it. But Jack, who is getting his first bit of backgrounding on the Spanish revolution, is tremendously excited about the book, and can’t understanding my lack of enthusiasm for the passages he quotes. Especially so since I recommended the book to him at the library the other day.

End papers of "Life and Death.."

PART ONE
4000 B.C. to 1936 A.D.
Dawn and Moonlight

There is so much revolution and class war going on in all parts of the world that I believe that it will be of interest to American readers to know how fascist conquest, communist and anarchist invasion, and the bloodiest war yet on record affect a peaceful town. By a town, I mean its people. I knew all of them, their means and aspirations, their politics and philosophy, their ways of life, their ties of blood, their friendships, their deep-seated hatreds and inconsequential animosities. Because Santa Eulalia is on an island [Ibiza], the inhabitants were unable to scatter and flee, and therefore I was able to better to observe them and to know what happened to them as I shared their experience.

The town was very much like any American seaboard town except that the various races there had had six thousand years in which to be blended, and consequently the population was more homogenous. Also the young men did not, as a rule, leave the island to seek their fortune elsewhere. Enough generalities! I feel self-conscious in writing about my dear friends with such objectivity. I loved them and their animals and the shadows of the trees that fell upon their houses. They divided their last pesetas and red wine and beans and gay spirit with me. I got away, and they did not. Their land is dying. Mine is not. This book is a debt I owe them.

Eliot Paul, 1942

As for my own reading, I have finished “Argentina, The Life Story of a Nation” and started on Man of Mexico.” The author of the latter is a devout Catholic and think I am going to have trouble refraining from damaging government property with the volume. The introduction left me feeling something like “Philosophy of Solitude” or “Look Homeward Angel.” But I aim to struggle through because the biographical sketches are all on men who could be of interest: Moctezuma II, Cortez, De Las Casas, Don Vasco De Quiroga, Hidalgo, Morelos, Iturbide, Santa Ana, Juarez, Maximilian, Diaz, Carranza, Calles and Cardenas.

The book on Argentina opens with a preface in which White apologizes for being pro-Argentine. But he is a poor propagandist for a I finished the book with a strong distaste for the argentine. About the only paragraph in the whole book which was pleasing as well as informative dealt with the gaucho (who has disappeared from the country) and his former way of life:

A strict gaucho code of unwritten law grew up on the pampas. It was a crime to steal a horse. It was all right to borrow one without the owner’s knowledge, because when it was turned loose it would return home. It was also acceptable to kill another man’s cow for food, but honor required that the owner of the animal get its hide. The gaucho also had a deep inborn sense of hospitality. He never under any circumstances refused a meal and lodging to anyone who might ask for it, even when he knew his guest was a hunted criminal. And, of course, he never admitted to the police who his lodger had been. No stranger ever got out of his saddle in front of a shack on the pampas without first calling out “Ave Maria” and waiting to be invited to dismount. If he responded to the greeting Buenas Tardes with Buenos Dias, that meant he had had no lunch, and food was prepared for him at once, no matter what the time of day. Throughout Argentina today, people still say Good Afternoon at eleven in the morning and Good Morning at three in the afternoon according to whether or not they have had their mid-day meal.

Speaking of food, I got a package of cookies and fudge from Phyllis and Otto yesterday. The candy and cookies were packed in separate boxes: one for garters, a couple of big matchboxes, the one which held the rum cakes we took down on one trip, and several others. I ate one box of fudge last night, but the rest of the food I’m saving until some day when dinner in the mess hall disgusts me too much. Them I’m going up and brew a batch of coffee and sit down to a Vienna fiesta, to foul up an idea internationally. Anyway I regard those cookies as a prisoner would a file. 

 

The food situation here is hardly pleasing, although I must admit that the lout Robbie has been behaving himself all right as far as I am concerned. But not some of the other fellows are griping. Tonight, for example, there were baked potatoes served for the midnight meal. Swell. Most of us like them very much, especially with butter and there was butter. But two of the fellows didn’t like baked potatoes. They preferred to get their starch in the form of bread. But when they went to butter their bread Robbie howled and yelled and cursed and threatened to throw things. The butter was supposed to be for potatoes. They explained that they hadn’t eaten potatoes and were using the butter they would have used on the potatoes. But Robbie, who is 5-5 if ever there was one, couldn’t figure it out.

…

 

One final little picture of our life here. It is six a.m. I am coming home from the operations building where I’ve been writing and Tim Egon is wandering in from the rec hall where he has been playing ping pong. Sunrise is about an hour along. Just at the steps leading down to our hut—which is dug in about five feet—we stop and look back across the swamp at the Bering. The sea is slate gray; the island beyond, black. A layer of flat, low, bruise-colored clouds cover nearly all the sky. But between the clouds and the black island, we can see the sunrise. You won’t believe this, but the sky was green. Greener than grass and as brilliant as the sheen on a bird’s neck. The green reflected faintly on the thin mist which rose from the swamp. Several poles stuck up out of the fog. On two sat bald eagles, turning their white heads slowly. 

From Wind Blown and Dripping, 1944

That’s the picture. “It’s beautiful,” I said. Before Tim answered, one of the eagles screeched. “Yeah,” said Tim, “incredibly beautiful. Sitting on an island in the middle of beyond watching a beautiful sunrise and nothing else to do but listen to screaming eagles.”

Which reminds me. The other night the boys were in a bullsession. It was very much like the old bullsessions back in college days for the subject was what we would do if there was a war. Everyone had plans for staying out of the army. One fellow said, “When the next one starts I’m going to find me some piece of geography that no one wants and go there and sit it out no matter how bad the climate.” And Egon said, “Hell, that’s what I’m doing in this one.”

How does Rumania being on our side strike you? It reminds me of the old gag about the Italians: “Insult them. If they are neutral they will pin down one or two of our divisions watching them; if they come into the war it will take three divisions a month to knock them out; but if they are on our side it will take two armies a year to defend them.” Those poor Rumanian peasants.

…

M

to Phyllis and Otto Goldschmid, Umnak Island, 23 August 1944 -- "this is a great place to get letters"

Once stationed in the Aleutians, Murray bounced from one island to another, from Adak near the midpoint, to Umnak closer to the Alaskan peninsula, to Attu at the westernmost end. He couldn't name the places, and could only provide generic descriptions.

 

Dear Two…

I can’t remember how long I have owed you this letter. Up here time seems to run in fits and starts, like our record changer. Sometimes it goes very fast and sometimes it does not go at all and there are times when I suspect it is running backward. The seven day week, the routine of the work, the same faces and the same entertainments, day after day after day, make it hard to remember according to ordinary sequence. So I don’t even know if I have written you since changing from the old station at APO 980 a couple of months ago. Anyway I am now at 948 and it is much better. 

The main thing is that I seem to have a little more time to myself. This is partly because our hut has only eight men instead of ten, the number at the old station. And the weather, while not up to Seattle or even a Grays Harbor winter (which it resembles), is better than at the old place. This means that we can be out of the hut some of the time and therefore do not get so sick of looking at each other. 

My main inside avocations remain reading and writing. I wrote a rather bitter short story [“Change of Station”] which is currently moving through the maze of censors which all literary efforts have to thread to get out of Alaska. And I am busy on the Mexican melodramatic novel [Day of the Dead], although my business seems to consist of rewriting the first three chapters timeandagain.

All the nice things you said about “A Job for Joe” were gratefully swallowed and only on the third reading did I admit to myself the possibility of polite exaggeration on your part.

As for my recent reading, it is fantastically varied. Before coming up here I subscribed to about half of the periodicals published in the U.S., and everytime we receive boatmail, I get a huge carton of New York Times, PMs, New Republics, Harpers, Time, New Yorker, Fortune, and miscellaneous periodicals that friends send. The “American Committee for Free Yugoslavia in Seattle, Washington” has been deluging me with brochures and pamphlets about the Balkans, and today they climaxed the assault by sending a first edition of Louis Adamic’s “My Native Land,” a sort of companion piece to our “Grey Lamb Black Falcon.”

I am reading, simultaneously, “Argentina” by John White (a CBS correspondent I knew indirectly while on Pomander Walk), “Harvest” (on which the movie we saw at the Thalia was based), “Men of Mexico” (a book to avoid), and “The Gladiators” by Koestler. Of recent books read I can recommend only Hemingway’s “Green Hills of Africa,” Mark Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi,” and a swell mystery by Raymond Chandler called “The High Window.” 

I suppose it seems silly to you that I write about everything but how we live up here. However I have written so often about episodes here to Rosa that I can never remember when I have told someone else and, though it sounds improbable, I don’t like to repeat myself.

Have I told you about chasing fox across the tundra? Or climbing our local cliffs? Or how the news of the invasion was received at the old post? If not, say so and I’ll try in my next letter.

By the way, if you hear of any good buys in waterfront property please do let Rosa know. We are definitely interested in getting a place on the Sound or the Canal, an island if possible but it is not essential, and if you can fix it up for us it will be just another of the million and one favors we are behind. 

I think Otto would like our library here. It has the most interesting cataloguing system I have ever encountered. I round “Puritan in Babylon,” the story of Coolidge, under Religion; Noel Coward’s “Present Indicative” and Ilka Chase’s “Past Imperfect” side by side on the grammar shelf; “How to Become an Officer” and “The Murderer’s Companion” under Useful Hobbies, and “The Last Time I Saw Paris” under music. There are other such listings, but it is six a.m. and I can’t recall them.

My best to you both. And do write. This is a great place to get letters.  …

Murray

Umnak Island, 21 August 1944 -- "saw the sun for a full two minutes today"

Hello Piltzer My Pet…

I saw the sun for a full two minutes today, heard “The Firebird,” got a letter from you only two days old and even so manage to be melancholy. It seems that the charm of any Aleutian station is only skin deep and wars off in weeks.

Today’s letter was the one you carried in Koestler for five days. You must have dreamed about doing the letter before, Nunny, because this was the first I had heard of your moments with the boilermakers. After a few months of this sort of thing you should be able to turn out a book which would make MBW’s [Margaret Bourke White] experience “Shooting the Russian War” sound as placid as a safari to Snohomish to snipe tulips.

 

Boilermakers. Rosa Morgan photo

The news that Carmen [Fett] is leaving distresses me some, as I liked the thought of your being together. But since she hated the job so much and was not able to break even even on Boeing pay, it would seem foolish for her to be apart from Bill. They seem to love each other more vocally at a distance but more effectively at close range....

Nunny, this may sound funny after all my fussing, but don’t kill yourself writing letters to me. They mean more to me than anything in the world—except your happiness and health. Every other day will be enough if you will be sure to make on every second day.

And be sure to send up all the publications which have your pictures in them.

I can’t understand why you should have to be worrying about film. Doesn’t your professional status entitle you to special consideration? And can’t the [Seattle] Star help you out in that matter?

One thing in your last letter worried me a little. It was that you not only hadn’t been able to save money but had had to dip into the bank for some.  I thought you were banking the entire government $50 a month and putting away a bit of your salary besides, so I am a little disconcerted. … Please don’t think I’m scolding about the money. I am merely interested. And I approve of all the expenses you have mentioned, especially those regarding the camera. Getting flash equipment for the Rollei these days is a real break. I heartily approve. Does Bill [Speidel] pay you for your flashbulbs and film? 

When you see Glenn and Shirley again, congratulate them for me on the simplicity of their wedding and the complete chaos of their honeymoon, which sounds as weird as our vacation from the Washie. Speaking of which, I just found Mrs. Roy’s address in my notebook the other day and I think I’ll write her a note. So far we have written her three letters: one from Seattle, one from New York and one from Mexico.

Nothing has happened since I wrote yesterday except that one of the fellows in the hut started the trip home today. Already he has sent a wire to one of the fellows announcing that he had a drink for him and a teebone steak for anyone who was interested. Before going Lyle gave me a photo of one of our local foxes and a waterproof money belt which may come in handy on the Mississippi. Remember the blue bag I wore on my belt last time?

I am terribly in love and terribly lonesome for you my Nunny. How can time with you go so quickly and time away from you take so long with its gummy minutes? It seems we have been married five days and apart five years, or ages or epochs. Today makes in an even four months since I sailed. It is so very long.

Your everloving

M