NaNoWriMo Day 25 - My Thots for Today...

"Something funny happened tonite so thot I would start another letter and keep writing a little at a time until I get one from you which should be tomorrow or next day.  Well, I went uptown this evening to get a magazine to read.  I saw a pair of scales, it was one of these fortune telling kind and I put it at 'What work am I most suited for,' and dropped in a penny.  The hand came up & said 'Raising a Family.'  I don't see how I'm to do it all alone tho do you?"

While Grandpa clearly had an excellent grasp of grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, and spelling, there were some words in all his letters consistently spelled incorrectly.  That being said, I feel like they were actually abbreviations he used rather than misspellings...

• thought = "thot"
• tonight = "tonite"
• though = "tho"
• through = "thru"

Besides the climate change from Iowa to California being favorable, I think Grandpa really appreciated and enjoyed all the fresh produce.  His letters often mentioned fruit...

"I just got thru eating a pear.  They're just getting ripe, and my dressing table is covered with pears & peaches, prunes & plums."

Definitely explains why he and grandma had several fruit trees on their acreage throughout my growing up years.

TOTAL WORD COUNT TO DATE = 34,688

NaNoWriMo Day 24 - What's in Your Cigar Box

In Grandma's letter to Grandpa on July 31, 1927, she writes:

"Your letter was waiting for me when I came home from work yesterday noon.  Was rather surprised but I always look in the mail box (or rather cigar box) every day."

In Grandpa's letter back to Grandma on August 5, he responds:

"You always want to look in cigar boxes dear so that you won't be surprised--sometimes it's hard on the heart and I don't want my little girl to have heart failure you know.  Besides you can't always tell what you will find in cigar boxes, you might even find me there some night." 

I did some checking and could not find any reference to a mailbox being called a cigar box.  So I can only assume this was an inside joke between the two lovebirds.

TOTAL WORD COUNT SO FAR FOR THE MONTH WHICH INCLUDES 39 TRANSCRIBED LETTERS TO DATE = 31,868

NaNoWriMo Day 23 - ...fame AND Fortune

Yesterday I mentioned finding fame in the family line, but I would be remiss in not mentioning fortune as well.

Grandpa's letters were not only steeped in an all-consuming love for Grandma from the very beginning, but they were RICH in poetic prowess.  The eloquence in every letter articulated not only his true adoration but his insecurities.  Reading his letters is akin to watching a Broadway musical.  He blends humor with honesty and quotes from great works of literature right alongside bits of scripture.  Sprinkled throughout for effect are lines from songs of the era.

At this point, I'm afraid if I tried to incorporate a story to go with the letters, I would not do the character justice.  The letters speak louder than words and perhaps just need to stand alone as a collection for the family genealogy records.

Here are just a few of the songs which Grandpa used lines from in his letters:

[**my apologies to those of you reading this blog on a tablet that doesn't support Flash, as the following YouTube videos are apparently done with Flash**]

"Gimme a Little Kiss, Will 'Ya'? Huh"

"Let Me Call You Sweetheart, I'm in Love With You"

"Yearning (Just For You)"

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 20 - This is Spiraling out of Control!

Imagine my surprise today when I opened up the letter from Grandpa dated August 6, 1926, and found this...

Grandpa was clever in both the WAY he wrote and the way he WROTE.  :)

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