May 19, 1943. A letter from Stanley to Dad. There were two letters from Stanley dated May 19th . The previous post covered one of them. It looks like this is the first of the two that he wrote while home on furlough. He tells about the train trip from Ephrata to Albany, noting “I did start out that Thursday morn at 4:15 AM and arrived here at 4:20 AM Sunday. That was exactly three days traveling time on the nose.”
Stanley did not have sleeping accommodations on the train. He details how they managed to sleep as follows:
Stanley describes how he managed to sleep on a three day train journey from Ephrata Army Air Base in Washington State to Albany. Click on the above image to see a full size scan of the excerpt, then click the “back” button of your browser to return to the post.
He also says that at one point they were in a “streamline type car with the nice soft seats” that had “enough room to move around”, but on the leg from Chicago to Albany they “had some kind of old seats made of canvas” that were “tiresome”. He writes that they covered “eleven states along the Canadian border” and passed by Glacier National Park. He says that they saw seven deer and that he “never saw so many pheasants”.
He corroborates Anna’s letter in that when he got to the house Anna was awake to greet him and “Everyone else was fast asleep. Then one by one each one got up. I sure felt lost and felt like a stranger in the house. Then I took a hot bath and went to bed. I got up a few hours later and went to high mass. Boy did I feel tired and exhausted. I was as weak as a flower without water.” Apparently Stanley has been in the Army so long that he complains ”The food here and the weather here does not agree with me right now. I suppose it will after you stay a while…”
He also reports “I went to the ration board and they gave me some green slips – four of them in fact and one was for a pound of sugar, the other for one pound of coffee, another for 16 points for meat and the last one for 19 points for canned goods. Anna gave me her ration stamp for shoes and papa and me went on the avenue and got a pair of shoes.”
He catches Dad up on some news in the neighborhood:
- He ran into two of their friends on the street; Joe Falkowski, and Ruth Allmendinger (who went to Albany Business College with them).
- Joe Miller went for a physical exam and is expected to go away in the Navy.
- He heard from Florence Morawski that their cousin Eddie Morawski was “somewhere on the West coast” and was “going over again”.
He tells Dad that they took a few pictures and that either he or Anna will send them to him. From there he signs off “till you hear from me again.”
Stanley and his cousin Catherine Murawski taken while Stanley was home on furlough in May of 1943.