A partial notelet from the fiancee's mother saying she has invited me up for "Thanksgiving and Santa Claus". I think I went. I remember snuggling with him in his own bed, and being afraid someone would catch us, but he wasn't worried. I liked his parents. They drank. Mine didn't. When I say that, I mean that they drank socially. I remember having some creme' de menthe and some kind of liquour that came in a tall tapering bottle - an amber color, as I recall. Very good.

Toward the bottom of the page she says that "Nancy was married last Saturday. Dad gave her away, as her Father and Mother disowned her. She came back today. We left her have a few days off." I don't remember that story, if I ever knew it. She must have worked at the hardware store. She must have been pregnant.

"Next weekend. Phesant Season..."

A letter from the fiancee's dad - to the fiancee'. Don't know how it ended up here. Nothing earthshaking. His father owned a hardware store. That fact was a huge factor in my decision not to marry him. Because he had every intention of going into business with his father (and, in fact, he did). Today I would say, "wholesale hardware for me - whoopee" but I did not have that kind of sense in those days. This is the man (my fiancee') who introduced me to jazz and baked potatoes with sour cream, the Chicago Art Museum and minty liquours. I had some kind of life in the big city in mind. As he was more and more determined (and he was/is a very determined man) to go into business with dad, I was less and less entranced.

Dad says, "...sure miss you in the toy department." Christmas must be coming, since he also says "will put loud speakers outside tomorrow for Holliday spirit." It was a nice little hardware store, downtown in a small town. It is now a big hardware store - Ace or some such franchise - still in the family, but out on the road into the small town now. I've been there. I have no right to miss the old place, but I do. It sounds like a scene out of "A Christmas Story." That's the charm for me of these old letters. Not only do I get to analyze myself and how I got from there to here, I am also perfectly free to romanticize the life I never had. It's okay. I've had a pretty romantic life myself. If I had lived that one, I'd be fantasizing about this one.

This is peculiar...A list of things, written on a piece of Carthage College notepaper, in printing almost too small and now too faded to make out. I didn't write this. I don't think the fiancee' wrote this. I don't know who wrote it.

It begins with Stan Getz and ends with Ayn Rand.

In between - Charlie Byrd
Herbie Mann with "Common Home Baby"
Ben Hect, Quenten Reynolds
(all spellings are as I find them)
neopolitan
understand study person in light of his ideals
aim of every artist - arrest motion which is life by artificial means so that 100 years later when stranger looks at it it moves again
blessed be the meek
from each according to his means to each according to his needs
where have i heard that before
pajama tops
call anytime
Ship of Fools
Germans arise
Kiss me, she said
old experiences
freedom in diversity, strength in unity

January 1963, a letter from my old pal Dave in the Air Force. He's a maintenance guy. Newly assigned to Abilene, TX from Biloxi, MS. He says the planes he was going to work on here (B47's) are being replaced by B52's and need a larger runway. He's writing on cartoon paper that starts out "I'm finally writing you a letter because I need a friend."

He complains about there being nothing to do in Abilene, but I bet he found something to do - like a girlfriend - because this D.C. boy settled down in Richardson, TX (outside Dallas) - from whence he called me many years later.

I think I told that story already.

Just googled India 1962 - Apparently China attacked India in a territory dispute in October of 1962.

Army slang: USATC: You sorry ass tank commander...circa 1962

There's a little drawing of a tank at the top of his Fort Knox stationery. He's drawn a little tank driver poking out the top, and a caption telling me to "tell Smitty this is me."

I think I am attending Young Republican meetings on campus. I vaguely remember this. My father was an Eisenhower Republican. I have not yet become radicalized. That would not happen until reading a headline, not so many years later, about destroying a village to save it (in Viet Nam). I know I was for Kennedy, and that in my first presidential election, I voted for Johnson (after having registered Republic for the Chicago primary so I could vote against Goldwater - for a woman - Claire Booth Luce, I believe). Anyway, he mentions someone I could invite to my "Republican meetings." Maybe it had something to do with Ayn Rand. I would far rather reveal tawdry sexual liasons than the possibility that I spent any time as a Republican.

There is something about India - some kind of threat - but I have no idea what it was. I'll have to Google it.