Before there were e-mails and text messages, there were letters. You read them, sometimes over and over, and if they were from a sweetheart or husband overseas in a war, you caressed them, maybe even held them to your heart.
Estelle Cooper says it was an exciting time when ladies would gather at the post office in Carrollton, where she worked as a clerk while her husband, Bill, was gone in World War II.
“All the girls came to the post office to wait for letters,” she said. “It would be crammed full of people waiting for the mail. It came by train twice a day. We tried to get those letters up first. We knew how important they were to people.”
Sometimes the letters were two or three weeks old, and they might come in out of order.
“You saved them and read them again to try and figure out what they were doing and where they were,” Mrs. Cooper said. “Some of the letters were censored, with holes all over them. They had a hard time figuring out what was being said. Bill wasn’t always in a combat zone, and he knew what he couldn’t say, so they didn’t get censored.”
Cooper remembers the day she heard Pearl Harbor had been bombed. “Everyone had their radios on night and day after that, listening for news,” she said. “People were drafted. Because of his importance to local farmers, Bill did not have to go, but eventually he signed up. He felt like he should go, since we had no children at that time, and others who were fathers had to go.”
In addition to tender expressions of love, the letters sometimes included funny stories, such as the night the laundry got away. One read, “Last night we tied our laundry to the pier to beat against the coral and get clean. There was a storm, and the laundry blew away. I guess my pants are halfway to America — coming home!”
There was talk of day-to-day happenings, such as whenever there was any particularly good food — an unusual occurrence during wartime. Even if the food was good, Cooper’s letter would always say, “but not as good as what you cooked or mama cooked.”
Cooper also made clear that he didn’t participate in all the recreational activities of the down times, such as going out to bars. He would tell about them but add, “but I didn’t go.”
Letters went both ways, of course. “The men were thrilled to get them, anxious to know what was going on at home,” she said.
Carrollton was a wartime town, Mrs. Cooper said. “Every house or apartment was filled with someone in the service, or women whose husbands were gone to war. There were stars in the windows to indicate how many from a family were gone to war.”
People also helped each other out by sending food or doing other things. It was a difficult time, Mrs. Cooper said.
“Everything was rationed — food, gasoline. You only had enough gas to get to your job,” she said. “We carpooled. Some of us would get together and go to a movie once a month. We tried to make fun out of everything we could.
“We would not think about being unfaithful, but we would get together and share information, go to a movie, laugh a lot. Some thought we should be crying and moaning all the time, but we didn’t see it that way.”
Even the dog missed his master, Mrs. Cooper said. “He had a bird dog he loved. He was so smart. When Bill left the dog didn’t know what to do, but he would come to town to lie under his car every day.”
Besides his family and friends at home, the one thing he missed was his church, she said, but he helped to build a chapel in New Guinea and even delivered a sermon when the chaplain was gone.
The family members who were left behind worried a lot about their soldiers, especially when hearing of sickness. “He got violently seasick and airsick, and when he came home he was sick with malaria, as most were,” she said. “He called from California and said they were sending him home and he was going to a hospital in Georgia. But he wound up in Texas and I didn’t hear from him for a week. I found out he had been very sick and couldn’t call.”
Cooper keeps the letters in a plastic bin, and her daughter is typing them so that even as ink fades, there will be a family record.
