Albert is having his suit fitted next week + as I told you yesterday seeing he can’t make the rehearsal the night before you can go down to church with him a little early the morning of the wedding + tell him what to do. Don’t worry about him being ready. Everything will work out.
We have to go out to Roseland tonight + give them the number that will be at the breakfast + an approximate number that will be at the reception. There are 27 – that’s what we’re telling Roseland tonight anyway + about 60 for the reception.
Dearest, as I told you before my cousin Eileen is giving a shower on me this coming week-end. (Sat. from 3 to 6 in the afternoon). So I expect to be home by 6:30 or 7. Maybe you won’t get into Bpt. ’til about 8 o’clock anyway but if you come about 7 – I’ll be home very shortly if I’m not here already. I sure hope you can come this week so you can see Eddie Hammer + the minister. Well, dearest, you said you hadn’t written to them at the time you wrote Monday’s letter. I think you should write even if you do see them but I know you too well to think you will (ha ha). “Last minute Kleiny” that’s you.
Lots + lots of love, dearest.
xxxxxx Rita xxxxxx
Friday 4/14/44 – 5:45 pm
Hello Walter Dearest,
This afternoon I went downtown + inquired about wedding pictures in Janetty’s – on Broad St. I think it would be a good place to have them taken. I’ll tell you all about it over the week-end, anyway, dearest.
Cele + I have to go to Larry’s, the florist, tomorrow night at 7:30 to make arrangements about the flowers. We’ll probably have to go when we come home from the shower. Well, dearest, if you come you can wait a little while.
Just think, darling, next week at this time we’ll be excited + counting the hours practically – ’til we march down the aisle. I do hope everything works out so there won’t be any delay in getting your furlough.
I’ll be so glad to see you this week-end, dearest. I hope you won’t have any trouble getting your pass like you did last week.
Love Always,
X X X X X X Rita X X X X X X
P.S. It doesn’t seem possible that a week from tomorrow we’ll be Mr. + Mrs., heh, dear? I love you so much.
Sunday, May 7 ’44 1:00 pm
My Dearest,
I hope you arrived back safely at Camp + that you aren’t finding it too hard to adjust to the old routine.
This morning I made our bed (yours + mine, dear) dusted a little, read the papers awhile + now I’m writing to my dearest husband. It seems so strange, Walter dear, to call you my husband. I’m not used to it yet.
I miss you so much, dearest, but still I’m very happy because we had such a wonderful two weeks together. All our wedding plans worked out perfectly + the days we spent together – our honey-moon in N.Y. + here at home were such happy days. Last night I prayed for you, dearest, + thanked God for giving me such a wonderful husband. I’ll never forget these past few weeks – they were the happiest of my life. I know we’ll have a full + rich life together too – we’ll be together spiritually – have a fine companionship + as husband + wife when you come home. We’ll always be very close to each other even tho we are separated by distance. As time goes by I hope I can show you how much I love you.
You deserve the best life can offer + I’m going to do my utmost to be a good wife to you, dearest.
I’ll be thinking of you ’til I see you again, Walter dear. Please take care of yourself – for me – we belong to each other now, darling.
Love Always,
Your little wife Rita Marie
~~~~
The story of how the collection of letters survived for three-quarters of a century is almost as exciting as Rita and Walter’s story itself.
When Walter returned to Connecticut on weekend passes, he would bring Rita’s letters home in small bundles. These precious packages were given back to Rita and placed in a box for safekeeping. Virtually all letters both ways ended up being stored in the same small cardboard storage box.
At the close of the war and the return of peace, Walter and Rita decided to remain in their new home in Southern California. They opted to store the boxed letters along with other items in the home of Walter’s sister, my Aunt Martha Mahlo, in Easton, Connecticut. The boxes remained untouched for half a century.
The years passed. Walter never retrieved his stored belongings, not even a stash of wedding gifts received in 1944, gifts that my mother, Ellen Klein (1914-2002), later claimed were never opened.
As for the letters, they didn’t come into my possession until much later. After her husband Adolph’s death, Martha lived alone until suffering a stroke, when she went to live with her daughter, Joyce. At some point during the winter of 1996/1997, the vacant house in Easton experienced a furnace failure and lost its heat. Pipes froze, including those that serviced the baseboard radiators. Water burst forth from the frozen pipes and ruined much of the household contents, especially in the then-crammed basement. To compound matters, field mice entered the unoccupied house, which still contained food in the kitchen cupboards. The house and contents became permeated with mice urine and droppings. In sum, the Easton house was no longer habitable. In the midst of this debacle, Walter and Rita’s boxed items remained undisturbed and unclaimed.
On the weekend of my 40th high school reunion, on Sunday, September 14, 1997, I visited Aunt Martha and Cousin Joyce at Joyce’s home in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. After a pleasant visit with Aunt Martha, Joyce and I drove the brief 15-mile trip to the Easton house. As we inspected the house and its deteriorated condition, I noticed some boxes of Walter’s stuff in the basement. While Joyce was contemplating gutting and landfilling the destroyed contents, I asked for Walter’s boxes. In all, there were about eight. One box, as it turned out later, contained the collection of Walter and Rita’s wartime courtship letters. Please recall that both Walter and Rita were deceased at this point.
One saving grace was that the boxes, while in the water-soaked basement, had fortunately been placed high on a ledge and were only slightly impacted by the water. Subsequent inspection showed that only a small portion of Rita’s letters were water damaged, approximately six letters from December 1943.
Given these grim circumstances and at my request, Joyce gave Walter and Rita’s stuff, including the letters, to me. My actions snatched the letters from certain destruction—and in the nick of time. Aunt Martha passed from this life in July 1998, ten months following my visit. Soon after, Joyce’s son Mark Nagel gutted the Easton house. Four 20-cubic-yard containers of debris were removed and landfilled. He then remodeled and restored the house, where he and his family currently reside.
The letters contain daily descriptions of the family and life in America during the 17 months spanned by the letters (starting on January 13, 1943 and ending in June 1944). I feel a sense of joy and honor to have helped to preserve these letters, and to be an instrument in sharing them. The story told reveals much about America in the era of WWII—a time characterized by a massive national mobilization and personal sacrifices. The letters make clear the intense devotion and love that Walter and Rita shared.
I continue to be impressed and inspired by the letters. Peace and blessings to you.
Editor’s Note: To read more of Walter and Rita’s letters, see Kisses When I Get Home: Letters of a Long-Distance Courtship During World War II.
Stop Looking and You’ll Find It
Vicki Lesage
Perhaps the most annoying advice I’ve ever received was to stop looking for a guy, and then I’d find one. That’s right up there with “If you love them, set them free.” Or “Everything happens for a reason.” Or “The best things in life are free.” (They must’ve never had a banana Nutella crêpe from a street vendor in Paris.) These ridiculous clichéd quotes are pretty much the opposite of what you want to—and think you should—do.
Which is exactly why it’s good advice.
In my late twenties, after getting out of a three-year relationship and bei
ng on the Parisian single scene for longer than I was comfortable with, my good friend Anne Marie bestowed this infuriatingly accurate wisdom on me.
“You’re trying too hard, and that’s why you’re only attracting wankers,” she declared, true to her blunt Irish nature.
Harsh, but spot on.
When I went out on the town, I must have been giving off a scent of desperation that I couldn’t detect, but men miles around could. The good guys weren’t attracted to it and the creeps sensed a chance to take advantage of a vulnerable girl. No wonder I was striking out all across the City of Light.
It didn’t help that I was a stranger in a strange land. I’d assimilated well enough over the years, I suppose. I could cook French-ish food and could speak French-ish words. I could mail letters at La Poste and they probably ended up where I wanted them to. I could pay EDF and Orange bills and didn’t have my electricity or phone shut off. But even after several years in France, I didn’t have any French friends. All my amis were fellow expats—Irish, English, Swedish, Australian. Basically, if you spoke English and weren’t born in France, we were likely to hang out.
That greatly limited the dating pool. At any given time, there are tens of thousands of expats living in Paris. But once you eliminate the women, married men, guys too young, guys too old, guys who acted too young for their age, expats who were only there a short period of time, and anyone who didn’t go to The Long Hop (my favorite expat bar), options became greatly limited.
At the same time, I wasn’t ready to start swimming in French waters, having not particularly enjoyed the few times I’d previously dipped my toes in.
“OK, then. I’ll stop trying,” I lied to Anne Marie.
I fully intended to stop trying to find a guy but it’s hard to just switch off like that. I still liked to party and I couldn’t help keeping an eye out for cuties.
About a week later, Anne Marie and I were enjoying a little too much wine at her apartment and were discussing my latest crush, a guy who looked like Colin Firth and was just as aloof as Mark Darcy. I was hopelessly in lust with this sexy, unattainable bad boy.
“I thought I suggested you stop trying,” Anne Marie said, topping up her glass of wine. “Sorry sweetie, but this jerk clearly isn’t into you. His loss.”
“Ugh, I know. But it’s hard to give up! He really should like me more than he does.”
“Totally. But… he doesn’t. Now, I’m going to the loo. When I come back you better not be texting him, missy.” She even shook her finger at me to emphasize her point.
I tossed my phone into the beanbag chair across the room to emphasize my point. “See? No texts.”
Satisfied, she left the room. As soon as the bathroom door clicked shut, I rolled inelegantly off the couch to fetch my phone. Due to the inhuman amount of wine I’d consumed, I could hardly make out the screen. I had to cover one eye to avoid seeing double as I typed out my masterful text to Mr. Darcy:
You really should like me more than you do.
Send!
“Are you doing what I think you’re doing?” Anne Marie’s voice rang out as she returned from the restroom.
Busted. No point in lying. “Yes.”
“Let me see that,” she said as she yanked the phone from my hands.
I cringed while she read the text out loud.
“I thought you needed some tough love, Vicki. Now I don’t know what you need. You’re gutsy—I’ll give you that. But I hate to see you wasting your time on blokes who aren’t worth it. More wine?”
I needed the tough love. Probably didn’t need the wine. Definitely realized it the next morning when I woke up with the world’s worst hangover.
But you know what? Something had finally clicked that night and I felt different now. I felt like I could go out to bars without needing to scope out guys. I could party with friends and not be thinking about dudes in the back of my mind.
On the night of what would have been my four-year anniversary with my ex (who I met at The Long Hop), I enjoyed a relaxing massage. The massage had been a gift from one of my thoughtful friends who anticipated that the day might be hard for me. After my appointment, I went out with the girls to—you guessed it—The Long Hop. I had no make-up on and my hair was greasy from the massage oils. I really and truly was not thinking about meeting anyone.
Then, after a few drinks and several uncoordinated robot moves on the dance floor (my trademark), I locked eyes with a hunk of a dude. Tall, dark, and handsome. A walking French cliché.
I headed over and struck up a conversation.
“I can’t decide—should I get a beer or a margarita?”
It was my classic move to show a guy I wasn’t trying to get him to buy me a drink. Much as I like free stuff, I don’t ever like feeling like I “owe” someone a chat just because they sprang for a cocktail. And I don’t want to start off the interaction having someone thinking I’m only in it for a free drink.
Now that the conversation had begun, it flowed easily. I was generally relaxed about the whole thing because I was finally not looking for a man. If something happened with Tall Dark and Handsome, fine. If not, also fine.
Welp, something happened.
Now, seven years later and counting, I’m Mrs. Tall Dark and Handsome with two small, dark, and cute kids.
I’ll be darned if Anne Marie’s advice wasn’t the best advice I ever received.
A Distant Memory
“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Uraniums
Kristopher Jansma
The Uraniums played just one show before splitting up for good in October of 1963. This was at the infamous 92 Club, a dank pub basement outside of Cambridge, best known in those days for booking folk acts like Dylan and Baez for in-the-know Harvard and BU undergraduates. Fire codes mandated a maximum of 175 persons, but receipts from that night show that 238 ticket stubs were sold and ripped for what would by morning be known as a truly singular experience in Rock and Roll history.
When I say it was singular I mean all aspects of this word: uncommon, peculiar, never reproduced. On the powder-blue graph paper of a mathematician, a singularity is a point of un-definition. An exceptional set which fails to behave as expected. A seemingly ordinary course of data suddenly “explodes” (their terminology) to plus-or-minus infinity and loses all describable character. This is precisely what Theodorus Hamilton and his cohorts accomplished that night in Boston, in 1963.
But think also of the impossibly empty universe of the astronomer, whose “singularity” refers to a black hole—a point with no volume and infinite density, where all matter is obliterated by limitless gravity. These words could also apply to the vibrations of Sarah Dickens’ mandolin, and to the guitars of Roger Barnacle and Jackson Press. If it could have been recreated, we will never know. All we know is that it was not. By morning the nine members of The Uraniums would all go their separate ways.
What’s even more startling though, is that The Uraniums had never played all together before that night either. As a ninesome, no one quite anticipated what the results would be. The only time keyboardist S.L. Miles showed up to the early sessions, accordion player Penny Orbach was being held for questioning by the Boston Police in connection with graffiti that had cropped up over in Chinatown. By the time she was released, Miles had been forced out of town by a family emergency. The result being that even the nine members of The Uraniums had no expectation that the history of rock music would be irreversibly altered on that evening in 1963. Indeed, absolutely no one expected much of anything, which is why, tragically, no recordings were even made. The Uraniums had spoken about the gig at the 92 Club as little more than a toe-in-the-water, just a rehearsal for a bigger show a month later at the nearby Watertown Community Center—which would, for various complicated reasons, never happen. As I’ve said, the 92 Club show would be their only performance and were it not for the
238 witnesses (myself included) the impact of The Uraniums would have fizzled into nothingness.
~~~~
Theodorus Hamilton was, ostensibly, the founder of the nontet. He penned the lyrics to the songs they sang that night and led the improvisation of several additional songs when the band soon ran out of material. Instrumentally, however, his role was always relatively background. A mercurial demon on the flute, a satanic wizard on the tambourine and triangle, Theodorus was by day a Harvard Divinity student with a penchant for rabble-rousing. He’d held his first rally about 10 minutes into the first day of classes, in fervent protest of the school cafeteria’s mass-produced strawberry jam. He marched around to the neighboring tables, sampling each of their jams. Finding them all to be distasteful, he rose up onto the central table and raised the rancid jam toward God, to whom he declared it to be an offense. He had such a presence, such a way with words, that soon 200 other breakfasting students rose to their own tabletops, and 14 members of the serving staff jumped ship as well. Theodorus then led the students in a rowdy smashing of the offending jars and marched off across the campus and into a community garden in Cambridge, where fresh strawberries turned out not to be available, and so they instead had plums.
All this to say he was quite notorious already by the start of his junior year, and so when Theodorus began asking around about forming a band, large numbers of Harvard students, locals and friends from sister schools turned out for the audition.
His perfectionism at first threatened the whole enterprise. Theodorus rejected dozens of singers, violinists, drummers and saxophone players. It was not until the second day that he discovered mandolin player Sarah Dickens, who’d traveled out from Amherst for the occasion. A slim and severe girl with a caustic attitude, Sarah had grated on Theodorus from the first moment. She wore all black with a high-buttoned collar, and she kept her mouth covered with her hand, even while speaking.
Legacy- an Anthology Page 7