July 20 and 21, 1945. Stanley writes two letters, which he describes as “more jabbering and gossip rather than a letter,” to Dad from Albany. I’ll spare you the jabbering and gossip and get to the meat of the letters.
It’s been a few days since Stanley has been able to write “between taking care of Terry…going downtown for this and that and seeing Anne in the afternoons at the hospital and in the evenings going here and there.” It is expected that Anna “will be coming home tomorrow afternoon.” For now she can’t write but “she promised to as soon as she comes home.”
After updating Dad on a few things going on with some friends and family in the neighborhood, Stanley writes that he has received Dad’s letters from July 11 and 12. He comments on a few of the things that Dad mentioned, specifically the transoceanic transportation. “I am sorry to hear that you had to cross the Pacific in the boat which you call a contraption. I imagine it was a very small one and had a few thousand on it. You probably traveled in a convoy. When we crossed the Atlantic we were on our own. We did not go in a convoy either way. If anything would have happened we would have all had it. But thank God we made the trip safely back and forth.” In another comment on troop transports, Stanley writes that he “…just heard on the radio where 7 transports including the Queen Elizabeth were due to dock today at New York bringing in over 31,000 men. That is the greatest number in one day or so the announcer said.”
On the 21st Stanley writes that he, Eddie and Terry “…went to the hospital to get mommy and baby and bring the both of them home to roost. …We came home about 3PM with the whole family. …Judith Anne is improving greatly. She is pretty cute. She hasn’t been doing much crying lately. She has brown eyes. …the christening might be either this Sunday or the next.”
On the news that friends are also expecting, Stanley reflects, “The city is really cleaned out of fellows. All’s left is women and kids and old men.” Even so, he writes, “…it sure feels good to walk around the streets with all the lights on. Over in England they had a black out for six long years. Just take the States here…what a stink people put up just because they had a blackout for only twenty minutes or half an hour.”
In other news from home:
- Pop has a week off coming up soon and he will be repainting the front of the house.
- Stanley met their friend Regina Wilk (Rajczewski) “on the avenue.” She is expecting her husband to come home soon from Europe.
- He spent some time at a “little get together” with the choir after their rehearsal. They had “some potato chips, cookies, cake and pop.” Isabelle Pawluc and “the professor were playing duets on one piano.”
He closes his letter, “I don’t have much else to write about except that Ed’s mother and father came over in the evening to see the baby. My vacation days are going by pretty fast and it won’t be long before I have to go back to Ft. Dix and then from there to South Dakota. I have to report at Ft. Dix 3 Aug by midnight.”