As an eleven-year-old, I stored my clothes in the top drawers of an old dresser that used to be Mom’s and Dad’s. One day, bored, I explored a lower drawer filled with black and white photos. There I found a three-inch stack of letters in original envelopes sent to Mom by men in the service during World War II. Many were marked “free,” meaning postage wasn’t required. Others bore various stamps from the 30s and 40s, some new to me. Seeing no reason why I shouldn’t, I decided to open and read the letters. It looked like somebody had drilled holes through them.

I went downstairs and asked Mom, “Why do these letters look like Swiss cheese?”

Mom said, “The censors snipped every word that looked suspicious.”

“Why?” I asked.

“If someone told where their ship was located, that had to be removed.  If they said something that just might be secret code to give something away, snip snip,” Mom answered, scissoring with her fingers in the air.

“Did the censors think your friends were spies?”

“They assumed anyone could be. You never knew. Every country tries to get information that gives them an advantage.  The Germans did it, so did the Italians, the Japanese—and we were doing it too. That’s what war is like.”

“Did the Germans have censors?”

“War is war, I’m sure they did.”

“Can you make sense out of the Swiss cheese?”

“We were kids together,” Mom answered. “We went to the same church. We sang, danced, created memories together.  That helped me guess what silly things these guys might be saying. But, sometimes, I had no clue.”

“If you couldn’t understand the letters, why’d they matter?”

“Because if I got a letter from Uncle Al, that meant Uncle Al was still alive. If I got a letter from Snoozie, it meant Snoozie had something he wanted to tell me.  I knew every letter could be the last time I heard from them.”

“The war ended thirteen years ago.  Why’re you still keeping them?”

“Because those were our boys. I hung onto their every word, hoping I’d see them again.

“But they all came home, right?”

“No, some of them didn’t.  And this is all I have to remember them by.”

“Are these guys in those pictures?”

“I have pictures of everyone. You like me to show you?”

“Yes, but not now.  Can I tear off the stamps?”

“Sure, just put every letter back in the envelope it came in.”

War or no war, there was only one practical, cost-feasible way to stay in touch with someone far away: by letter.  Long-distance telephone was cost prohibitive. For example, a post-war 20-minute call from New York to London cost more than my Brooklyn birth—obstetrician’s fee, delivery room, nursery, a week’s recovery in a shared room, even a baby bracelet.  The telegraph could get a message almost anywhere in the world within hours but senders paid by the word so most stayed under 15 words.  Example: “IT’S A BOY CONGRATULATIONS SENDING LOVE.”  Or, when 1954’s Hurricane Hazel delayed Dad’s return home from a business trip: “HAZEL HOLDS ME CAPTIVE TONIGHT.”

For thousands of years, people had two main ways of communicating: over the fence or by letter.  Letter writing was taught in schools, encouraged at home, and practiced from childhood.  Students wrote to each other as classroom assignments. Exchanging addresses with other kids so letters could later be exchanged was de rigueur at summer camp.

A family often listened to important letters read aloud after dinner. Some were preserved, perhaps at the back of a linen drawer or in a lined box, so they could be re-read at will. Letters from deceased family members and special friends were often passed on from generation to generation.  For centuries, a handful of letters—and, more recently, a single photograph—might be the only evidence that a far-off friend or family member ever existed.

Growing up decades before free long-distance telephone, cell phones, email, and texting, my age group communicated mainly by letter and over the fence.  Even phoning someone who lived ten miles away, across county lines, was often cost-prohibitive. Communicating with anyone whom I couldn’t readily see in person required writing a letter, though I was also known to ride a bicycle as far as thirty miles.

Becoming a Committed Letter Writer

I entered the world of committed letter writers in 1961 at age 14.  It began when Dad invited me to watch the Eichmann trials broadcast from Jerusalem. Dad reminded me that my uncle’s brother Henry had represented the United States as a court stenographer and Italian translator at the Nuremberg Trials. Day after day we watched, mesmerized and drained, as witnesses testified to Eichmann’s orchestration of the holocaust. As Hannah Arendt observed, Eichmann appeared detached, ordinary.

Before the trials were over, I sent a letter to People to People, founded in 1956 for the purpose of “promoting peace through understanding.” I asked for a pen pal in Germany. They sent me two my age: Lothar the sailor in Lübeck and Renate the xylophone player in Dusseldorf. Every six weeks for four years, we avidly exchanged postage stamps and letters, initially in English and later a German/English mix. Their handwriting was tight, small, different from ours.  I began a lifelong habit of saving every letter received in its original envelope.  When Renate’s father died, she invited me to visit. I wasn’t able to explain satisfactorily that I wasn’t a globetrotter.  After high school, we wrote less often. Within two years, we stopped altogether except for a blip after Renate and I turned 35.

When I began college, I turned into an irregular correspondent.  If I couldn’t avoid it, I wrote Mom and Dad.  After responding, Dad dutifully filed my letters away in an oversized shoebox in chronological order. Eventually, he added more shoeboxes, incorporating occasional letters from my two younger brothers.  I began my own archive of letters received too.

From 1970 through 1975, a post-college period in which I moved often—as many as seven times in one year—I typed letters on a manual typewriter and kept carbon copies. My correspondents were all over the country. I documented in letters and notes whatever I saw, touched, heard: I witnessed and participated in massive public protests, emergence of new social movements, development of systems for monitoring police activity, and the coming together and falling apart of multiple so-called “urban communes.”  I was one of a handful of white psych grad students at HBCU Howard University. My note-taking trailed off as I put my head down to focus on career and raising a family.  By 1978, I placed my notes and carbons in a cardboard box and sealed it.  I stopped keeping notes but kept writing letters.

Access to word processing increased my letter writing output in the 1980s.  However, the universal arrival of email in the 1990s meant that even long-term correspondents mostly shifted over to email.  We still wrote the sorts of things we formerly addressed in letters, but now everything was digital and appeared on a screen instead of in an envelope delivered by USPS.  Those digital messages sometimes didn’t get the attention they deserved; and, emailed letters didn’t feed the archive of letters received.

My steadiest correspondents were Mom and Dad, who wrote letters by hand.  Mom stopped in 1998 after a stroke turned her handwriting into chicken scratch, which upset her, because she previously sent cards and letters regularly to dozens of old friends.  Dad’s last letter came in early 2000.  He enclosed an article by pundit Ben Stein about the last letter he received from his father.  And then Dad died.  I wanted to say something to Dad about the irony of all that, but he wasn’t around to share it. When he—the repository of memories personal and societal—died, I became obsessed with the question, where did all those memories go?

Letters as Mom’s Post-Stroke Voice

After Dad died, I inherited Mom, and she moved to an assisted living facility near me.    She didn’t have telephone access and, even if she did, her moods and attention span were variable. She was too far away from old friends for them to readily visit. She had been accustomed to writing letters and cards, but the stroke had taken away her ability to write legibly.  It pained her to see how her words looked on paper.

I offered to help Mom stay in touch or even regain contact with old friends. Her memory, sense of humor, and desire to maintain social contacts were intact. So, when she was in the mood, she dictated a generic letter to me.  Then, I asked her one friend at a time whether she had any personal messages to add. My job was keying the generic letter, merging the personal inserts, and mailing the letters after Mom signed them.

Everybody knew I was keying the letters, but Mom’s personality came through, her friends experienced the letters as coming from. Her first began, “Welcome to my estate.”  Most friends wrote more letters back than Mom sent out, a few called, two even visited. The letters kept their shared memories alive while building an archival record of shared history

Mom’s Secret Archive of Letters

After Mom’s stroke in 1998, I looked for the spaghetti letters Mom had received over 50 years earlier.  When my daughter came across a metal tin filled with letters, at first I thought I’d hit paydirt. But when I saw the black-and-white postcard of Devizes Castle, I knew I’d found the letters from John and Lily, whose son Sam used to teach Mom piano and me accordion.

In the 1950s, my accordion teacher, whom we called Uncle Sam, had been stopping by the house mornings for steamy coffee and crumb cake. Our families were close. When Sam’s parents, John and Lily, came to visit from England, they took to Mom and began inviting her to Sam’s for lunch. Then there was a blowup at Sam’s, John and Lily hastily booked passage back to England, and Sam fired me, saying I had no talent, didn’t practice enough, and he couldn’t waste any more time on me. That was the last time I saw him. Weeks later, Mom received a letter from Lily with the Devizes Castle postcard. An arrow marked John and Lily’s apartment.

The tin box contained 21 letters from John and Lily, marked #2 through #22. Letter #1 was MIA.  Forty years had passed since Uncle Sam fired me. In each letter, Lily or John reminded Mom that Dad was a reliable man of great character, whereas Sam was gutless. “Forget Sam” was Lily’s clear message.

In letter #4, Lily wrote, “We have never forgotten the way Sam declined to go on teaching him only because he was ordered to do so by a very sad case of a woman whose word is law. Only a weakling like Sam would succumb to dictation from such a source.” For decades, I’d believed Sam’s firing me had caused the rift between our families. Now Lily’s letter made clear that Sam had dumped me because his wife had issued an ultimatum. Mom was the one getting dumped. I merely got hit with flying shrapnel.

I’m glad Mom kept those letters. Did finding them mollify 40 years of sting? No. The sting ran deep and is unalterable. Too bad someone couldn’t impart the truth to me earlier. But that truth might have led to the unravelling of the fabric of the illusions we called reality.

Digging through Dad’s Stash of Letters

When I decided to resume writing creatively after a 35-year hiatus, there were several pieces I wanted to write that had roots in the 1970s. I opened the box I had sealed in 1978 and, viola! a genie jumped out.  My notes were sufficient to write a piece about living in one “urban commune” that deteriorated into Quaalude addiction, academic failure, rampant sexually transmitted disease, and rapidly declining health.  Although I had been a note-taking, non-participating observer, I didn’t share those tales with the folks.

I dug into Dad’s shoeboxes in search of evidence on several topics, among them: (1) surviving my job substitute teaching in the D.C. Public Schools; (2) participating in major demonstrations against the Vietnam War, including service as a Quaker-trained Marshall.

Substitute Teaching.  I approached the piece about substitute teaching with several clear memories. One was eight-year-old Antonio’s novel incorporation of the required spelling word “smother” as follows: “My, oh my, why, do they smother our cry?” Reviewing carbons of letters to friends produced almost nothing. Then, I began reading the letters I sent home and discovered an almost day-to-day accounting. Most of it came as news to me.

The turn of events that gave me greatest pause:  I’d observed eight 4^th-grade girls shove and pull two scrawny, passive boys into the girls’ room. They beat up the boys, then called for help, claiming the boys had barged in and attacked them. Jumping to the boys’ defense, I said, to the contrary, the girls forced the helpless boys into the girls’ room. Said the vice principal: “Some of those girls were angels, until today.”  Decades after the fact, I felt the weight of realizing that, had I not jumped to the boys’ defense, a millstone might have hung around their necks for the rest of their lives.  I couldn’t have written the piece without the documentation contained in letters home. The resultant article, published by Columbia Journal, has been read by thousands via multiple venues.

Protest.  In 2015, motivated by the massacre at Charlie Hebdo’s office in Paris and protests over excessive use of force by police in various U.S. communities, especially against Blacks, I decided to write a piece about protest. My central premise was MLK’s statement: “Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.” To find documentation of my own experience in major protests, I broke out Dad’s shoeboxes. In no letter to him did I even mention that protests were taking place, much less that I participated. Evidently, I knew it would be a sore subject, so I didn’t bring it up.

I switched to reviewing carbons of letters I wrote to friends. This proved particularly helpful in documenting the April 24, 1971 Vietnam Out Now Rally, the May Day demonstration that created chaos because that’s what certain Yippies wanted, and the government’s response in marshalling thousands of police and military troops to suppress and detain anyone who looked like they might be a protester.  That retrospective resulted in several publications.

The Pandemic’s Effect on Letter Writing

            As the pandemic drove us to reflect more and reach out to old friends, people of all ages began writing letters. Doing so added meaning to their lives. I began exchanging letters with seven people. One high school classmate, with whom I used to exchange written letters in the 1970s, spontaneously began sending letters and postcards by USPS.  A college classmate began penciling letters, scanning them as image files, and emailing them as attachments.  After I found another college classmate after 50 years, we began exchanging letters via email until she expressed a desire to switch to mailed letters, so now we do a mix, and even met twice..

At one point, my son dropped a box of unexamined old letters in the family room. I extracted letters from three people whom I had lost contact with decades ago. Miraculously, I found all three, they all responded, and we’ve continued to go back and forth.  Even though letter writing is popularly portrayed as a quaint pastime reserved for farmers on the frontier, soldiers in foxholes, star-crossed lovers, and old folks at home, there’s reason to believe this resurgence in letter writing and memory preservation will continue.

Does Letter Writing Still Have a Place? 

Close friends have often looked to me as the arbiter of memory. Based partially on reviewing Dad’s stash of letters, I’d argue that no arbiter’s memory can ever be fully valid because we keep rewriting memories to fit the emerging themes in our collective lives. An arbiter needs resources to document what at one time we believed happened. I was fortunate to have Dad’s stash to refresh the immediacy of experience. What happens if we have no archive?  Saved letters historically provided archives for families, communities, societies.  Now, we have many additional resources at our disposal for maintaining archives, but will we use them effectively as a means of documenting our lives and preserving a record?

There is something in our brains that demands whatever letter writing offers.  The task of writing letters tends to spur people to collect and compose their thoughts to nurture relationships. On paper, those letters also feed an archive that will outlast and remain more accessible than electronic records. If we believe that there’s a value to slowing down, and that future generations can benefit from knowing how we lived, perhaps letter writing plays a role. And if we can’t find like-minded souls with whom to exchange mailed or digital letter, we can still reflectively try to retain key messages, incoming and outgoing.

             Or maybe any effort to create an archive misses the mark.  Does it even matter in the 21^st century that we possess a remotely-accurate record of our lives and of those who preceded us? Is it more prudent to acknowledge that respect for the historical record is nearly dead, and to choose to live mindfully in the moment without the burden of having to preserve the record, and without fretting about whatever came before?  Recent events have helped demonstrate that we’re all engaged in a continuous process of re-writing memories. And, perhaps people have more need to engage others in reflection, one solitude to another, as opposed to firestorms of text messages, than was previously thought.

 

Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research. With a graduate degree from Howard University, in eight years he’s published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, photography, hybrid, interviews, and plays in nearly 200 journals on five continents. Photo publications include Alchemy Spoon, Barnstorm, Burningword, Camas, Feral, Marathon, Phoebe, Stoneboat, and Stonecoast. Photo-essays include DASH, Kestrel, Litro, NWW, Paperbark, Pilgrimage Magazine, Sweet, and Typehouse. Recently nominated for Best of the Net in Nonfiction and Art, he also wrote/acted in a one-act play and appeared in a documentary limited series broadcast internationally. Jim’s family splits time between city and mountains.