I remember hearing about “the letters” shortly after Grandpa Henderson’s funeral in 1971.
He had left few things behind. There was some clothing. (In our house, we weren’t above recycling anything that was still passable. And since Mom had boxed up some of his bib overalls, I found them and took to wearing them in high school and during my first year at USU.) There also was a chest containing mementos, mostly – arguably the most important of which were old photos and a collection of 136 letters Grandma had written to Grandpa while they were courting between 1912 and 1917.
Mom, Marie and Aunt Iva sorted through everything. Then photos, etc., were distributed to the siblings. The thing that piqued my interest, even back then, was listening to them speculate about the letters that weren’t in the chest. Namely, the letters Grandpa had written to Grandma – because Grandma’s letters make repeated reference to the letters she received from him.
Think about this for a minute. Any of us who knew Grandpa Dave and were asked to describe his personality would not offer as our first response that he was “sentimental.” Don’t get me wrong: He loved his children and grandchildren, fiercely, but he wasn’t much for saying it. He could be, in a word, ornery … as well as highly entertaining and given to laughter. (Indeed, he was quite a raconteur.) But the fact that he’d saved those letters all those years – this was 1971, and Grandma had died in 1929 – revealed a lot about how much he loved his wife and cherished her memory. It only makes sense that Still, where were those other letters?
Marie’s and Mom’s hypothesis was that Grandpa had burned them: His reason, I’m sure, was that he wouldn’t have wanted anyone else to see his love letters to her, even though they probably were nothing approaching mushy. On one or more occasions, the sisters recalled, Grandpa cleared “junk” out of the attic in the old house and had a bonfire. The way Mom remembers it, framed photos were included in the items being torched when she was very young, but I heard Marie dispute that during the last years of her life. Marie did, however, agree that Grandpa had staged at least one burning of items that included what most of us would consider family heirlooms. It makes me sick to think about what might have been lost, but logically, since he saved the photos and letter in the chest, maybe he didn’t get rid of vital family history items. Mom says she remembers a large family Bible with writing – with birthdays, baptisms, etc., inked on the inside cover pages – that went missing at some point, but I have trouble believing that Grandpa, for any reason, would have destroyed something like that.
Long story short: We have Grandma’s letters, but not Grandpa’s. We’re still fortunate. This week I’ll point you to the page with all the letters listed, by date. It was Marsha’s idea to scan them in as images; someday, I’ll undertake the job of transcribing all of them into digital text for searching purposes. (My brother, Tony, and his wife, Kris, already did this once years ago, but the original file was lost and I’ve never been able to locate an OCR program that will recognize the lovely font they were printed in. Oh, well.)
In the coming weeks, I’ll publish a series of posts here pointing you to specific letters and their content.
In the meantime, do any of you recall stories about the letters, the bonfire(s) or anything else? If so, please share them via the “comment” button below, or by e-mailing me.
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