NaNoWriMo Day 22 - Romance, History, and Now...Fame

Yesterday got derailed...

...my daughter and I declared the day as "unplug Thursday"...so no electronics!!

...our lawn service guy hadn't shown up to take care of the leaves, so I was frantically raking the leaves to the street for the LAST day of the city's leaf baler pick up.  I raked like a mad woman for three hours finally getting at least the front yard and sides of the house done before my legs felt like jelly and my hands would no longer grip the rake.  With snow predicted, I knew this was my last opportunity and pushed myself to the brink of a heart attack.

...the contractor we hired is finally getting around to our request for putting in an egress window.  Unfortunately, I have been using the room in the basement where we want the egress window as my "letter transcription room."  So....had to move my operation to the furnace room.  Yes.  You read that correctly...I'm relegated to the furnace room.

...and,

...I had signed up for an evening art class that I was looking forward to that I wasn't even sure I would be able to stay awake for after my day.  It ended up being a good night, though, and I came away with a new Christmas decoration for the season.

As you can imagine, every muscle I didn't know I had hurts today.  It even hurts to breathe!

So, it was a perfect day to just sit and immerse myself in long ago...

Of the cousins Grandma went to visit in North Carolina in 1926, there was a family by the name of Seats.   Today I transcribed a letter from cousin Sallie Lee Seats to Grandma after Grandma had returned to Iowa from her visit.  I'm having a hard time keeping all the names and relationships straight.  My mother tells me each one of those Carolina relatives had a nickname...

Alberta was "Tootsie"

_________ was "Dude"

Charlotte was "Baby"

Tom was "Bun"

Kate was "Sis"

Sallie was "Fat"

Fourteen years after Grandma visited her Carolina relatives, her cousin, "Bun," played for the Big Leagues!  So not only am I getting a sense of the romance that was budding between my grandparents with the letters, but there are so many historical references that I'm finding incredibly interesting, and now to discover we have a baseball player in our lineage as well.  I have never been overly interested in genealogy, but that may change after this revelation!

Thomas Edward Seats
Pitcher
Dodgers/Tigers 1940-1945
Final Game:  September 28, 1945

TOTAL WORD COUNT = 29,213

NaNoWriMo Day 19 - Tickets, Kisses, & Stamps

The summer of 1926 after my grandma graduated from high school, she traveled with her mother and brother from Iowa to North Carolina to stay with cousins for a month.  She left her new beau, Florian, in Marshalltown to pine away for her and...

...write letters.

I didn't find the letters she wrote back to Grandpa from Advance, North Carolina--only the letters he wrote to her.

One of the letters contained a cardboard ticket which he explains in his letter...

"I weighed tonite 162 lbs.  The ticket sure read funny.  I am sending it to you.  I wonder if I wasn't supposed to get that or is it all B.S."

Grandpa signed one of the letters with a series of "kisses"...

"Can you pick out the different kinds of kisses? Your Rudolph Valentino, Florian"

And just so Grandma would know that any mail coming to her cousin's in North Carolina was intended for her, Grandpa strategically placed the stamp on the envelope...

TOTAL WORD COUNT = 25,463

NaNoWriMo Day 17 - A Girlfriend and a Cousin

Only transcribed two letters yesterday...one from Velma and one from a mystery woman.  The mystery woman signed her name "Wop."  I'm wondering if it is her friend Nadyne.  (I think I'm going to have to go back into the dreaded shoebox and pull out some "Nadyne" letters to compare the handwriting).  There was no name or address on the outside of the envelope, but there were a couple of interesting lines...

"listen - when you come thurs. come to my house after me if I'm not there you go to Billiard hall and 'Gib' will tell you where his house is...What I've got to tell you concerns "Handsome,"  I'd write his name But haven't any Idea How to Spell it."

My grandpa's name is Florian--a very unique name, for sure, and one people probably had trouble spelling.  So, I'm guessing that "Handsome" was referring to Grandpa!


Velma was grandma's cousin from North Carolina.  The letter from Velma was dated June 15, 1926, and talked about Grandma coming out to visit.  Velma couldn't spell grandpa's name, either.  She kept referring to him as "Floren".

As they say in the letters...

"Will ring off now for this time."

TOTAL WORD COUNT = 23,430

NaNoWriMo - More than a Labor of Love

I really don't think I'm imagining the sensitivity I seem to have to the black mold from the letters.  After shuffling through the stack yesterday morning, my throat was raw from the effects...but oh, the finds!!  Letters from Harold, Marvin, and Walt...oh, my!  The question is, do I use them?  Are they relevant enough to the story to further risking my health to sort and transcribe?  The letters from Grandma's girlfriends (Velma, Nadyne, and Inez) are also in the stack and could shed more light on the subject depending on how much Grandma wrote to them about her love interests.

The letters from Harold were from the fall of 1924...grandma would've been starting her junior year in high school.  While I only found five letters from Harold (and he didn't have the best grasp of grammar, spelling, and punctuation), there were a couple of sentences that seriously cracked me up:

"This town sure is the snails antennae for excitement.  All a guy can do is drink and fight or else stick up the bank, and I don't believe they'd wake up then enough to make it interesting."

There were a number of letters from Marvin who seemed to be just as enamored of Grandma as Grandpa was, and the time frame of those letters overlapped with the correspondence between Grandma and Grandpa.  Was Grandma working on securing a "second" in the event Grandpa didn't return from California?  What if Grandpa hadn't returned from California?  I wouldn't be here blogging about it, that's for certain!

Then there was the summer of 1926 after Grandma graduated from high school that she spent with family in North Carolina.  I found several letters written back and forth between Grandpa in Iowa to Grandma in North Carolina.

The letter from Walt in the fall of 1928 is the puzzler, though.  By then, Grandma and Grandpa had come through some of their insecurities and trust issues and seemed to have formed a more solid bond.  So who was Walt? And why did I only find one letter from him?  I haven't read the letter, but I absolutely fell in love with his penmanship...it's just oozing scholarly romanticism.

TOTAL WORD COUNT = 22,705

Grandpa with Nadyne