June 4th - Getting into the first collection

Ah, so my work continues on the letters of the Air Corps pilot trainee...his collection is entirely composed of letters to a friend from Astoria, New York, where it appears they grew up together. This collection in particular was forwarded to the WWII Museum archives from the Florida Maritime Museum, which doesn't collect such items. Unfortunately this makes the provenance cloudy--I was unable to tell who originally might have donated the letters or why--the author, the recipient, or the families thereof.

Each collection is comprised of the personal correspondence of one veteran from any of the services and any other person; generally the collection donors are the family of a serviceperson, and sometimes they are the family of a civilian who corresponded with a serviceperson or persons; sometimes they come from other institutions whose interests did not encompass World War II correspondence. The majority of the collections Lindsey has lined up for me to choose from appear to be consistent correspondence between a member of the armed forces and one civilian, typically a close friend or family member.

The collection number is 2013.331, indicating it was the 331st collection acquired by the museum that year. There are 36 letters total, and I am assigning accession numbers to each of them in the format of 2013.331.0XX. In these collections we aim to assign numbers in chronological order, and luckily these letters are in that order already; however if they weren't, they are all dated by hand and have corresponding post-marked envelopes that could give me a very close approximation.

My pilot friend has turned out to have a roving eye almost immediately. Writing to his friend Mike, he gives a little lip service to the beginnings of pilot training for the Army Air Corps, and then launches into the real news--what the Mississippi girls are like. They will "give you just about anything you want if you buy them drinks and show them a half-way decent time". In a subsequent letter, they are also "slim and pretty, but not they way we like them--built like my Fannie and the girls we know", Fannie being his wife (!). The language and insinuations are there, and this seems to be a topic he wants to discuss with Mike a lot. I guess we'll see...I feel really voyeuristic already!