Letters Found

August 7, 2013

Letters crinkled in the heat of forty San Antonio summers.  Wrestlers at the Chase and glass eyed dolls shared the decades with them.  They waited in a cedar chest collecting dust and memories.  The letters remained hidden for forty years.  They were unearthed when my Great-Aunt's coffin snapped shut.  They were created when a woman answered the call to war.

Yeoman First Class Elizabeth "Betty" Jean Shannon enlisted as a WAVE (Women Accepted As Volunteer Emergency Service) in the Navy in 1942. She wrote 112 letters to her folks and her sister during her time in the war.  She tells of her training, her daily life, and her movements across the country.  She tells the story of how she met Walter "Bud" Robinson on a train to Miami and their eventual marriage.  Bud even writes a few letters home.

Betty was the best teeth whistler known to man and knew every phrase uttered during the 1940s.  Home again, home again, jiggity jig.  You could find the right buttons to push in about five seconds.  Pushing the right one would send her into a dither.  She loved to laugh and have fun.  But as we all know, life is not all fun and games.  She died when I was 14.  I am her only granddaughter.  I have never read her letters and I feel that I wasted my time with her on this earth as only an adolescent can.

So, in an effort to understand this enigmatic woman, I am reading all 112 letters in a year.  That averages about two letters a week, with a third sometimes thrown in for some weekly flavor.  I need to know who she was so that I might honor her memory and understand who I am because of her.

On this day in WWII history