^^^^ ^^^ WOW! What an honor to have met him. He died in 2007!
That saved correspondence links lives - lost to time. Those people mattered greatly. Just consider, someone kept those letters. They meant something to them - a great deal probably. Who knows, maybe a relative or landlord tossed them out after that person had moved or died.
Written letters are rarer and rarer as our "immediate culture" expands to email, texts and phone calls - all vanish in time.
TLDR;
I've continued to hand-write the very few holiday cards I send yearly. This past February, I got a delayed response from one of my college buddies. When I opened it, it was note from his wife. My friend had died in late 2021. She was still in shock. I did not know and no one called or emailed because of COVID. He lived in FL. She conveyed that he always delighted in reading my cards and had kept them all over these many years b/c there were hand-written and were far more than a simple "Happy Holidays" greeting. (I typically fill up the white space and sometimes continue on the back!)_
So what's the point with all this? Why do I still do hand-write when most people have stopped writing or sending cards or just include type-copied letters of family updates. Sure efficient but that's not what the real purpose is and becomes.
True story, about 4 decades ago, I was coin hunting one beautiful Sunday afternoon with my dad at a very old, abandoned country farm house I'd ridden by 1000 times. It was only ~ 3 miles from my home. Sometimes, coins fall through the floor-boards of these homes, literally. So on a whim, I shimmied underneath the edge of the home to check things out - all the while keeping eyes out of snakes and other critters you do not want to meet in such places. There resting by a brick pillar was an old WWII letter from a Private to his brother - still in the envelope to where you could read the name and address clearly. The letter, which had somehow fallen there, or maybe it was hidden there, had not gotten blown away all these years was unmistakable and even writing this sends shivers down my spine.
So, I took the letter home, read it, and put it in my dresser. I almost tossed it but something stopped me. IDK what b/c I had no hope of finding the owner. As I recall, I could not even drive at the time. Fast forward another 25+ years when my parents died.I was cleaning out that same dresser and the letter surfaced again! By this time, I used the internet to locate a possible SON of the writer who lived in major city several hundred miles away with the similar / same first, last names which was not a common surname. I gave him a phone call and got an answering machine. A day or two later, he called back and thought this was some sort of "scam" or prank - at first. We talked a while and I explained where and how I'd found his father's letter. He wanted to know more b/c his mom had tossed out all of his father's war letters when he died and they moved many years earlier. His family did not recall him EVER living in this house. No one could explain how the letter came to be there which made it even stranger - an entangling enigma.
The letter was ordinary and mundane - just a catch up with family at home: hoping to get back and what should be happening on the farm. there was only so much they could convey - censors. I returned the letter to his son, via registered mail. From my research the, the son was more than just some John Doe. He was a doctor or psychiatrist if I recall and active in the AIDs / LGBTQ / PFLAG community. To this day, I still remember the feeling of "saving his history" and changing at least this man's life, even slightly, by giving him a piece of time, history and his father's thoughts he would have never had or seen. When I returned the letter, I included the full provenance of how/when I'd found it plus the geo-coordinates of where. That old homeplace was long ago razed to ground so it was all trees now.
That's what really grabbed me about COUF and would have driven me too had I found the same as Berube. Sometimes, history grabs you by the @@ and sometimes it's decades later. Talk about a flashing episode of déjà vu!. Oh, yeah. That's also why I still hand-write holiday cards. V.
Excepts from my letter to the son:
"Enclosed is the original personal letter we discussed on 20 Feb 2010 from your father Pvt. xxxxxxx to his brother xxxxxxxxx dated Monday, 23 Oct 1944, Belgium."
...
"Cherish this letter from your father as it provides a unique glimpse into your father's past and specifically what was "on his mind" during the events of 23 Oct 1944 in Belgium during the war. The letter has been folded all of these years in its original envelope, and given its rarity, I advise speaking with a state archive / conservator about de-acidifying and preserving it in Mylar to prevent further degradation. "
