‘I Think Up Card Tricks to Play on the Boys’
January 20, 2012 Leave a Comment
Yet another letter from Babe that has a "censored" notice on the envelope. Obviously, I have no idea what was censored. But I can't even figure out how it was censored. There are no markings on the letter, nothing trimmed out. I need to better understand how censoring occurred.
Dated July 1, 1945; no postmark.
Dear Folks,
I received your letters the other day and I was glad to hear from you.
You don’t have to mention furlough or pass to me in your letters because if I can get one, I will, and if I can’t get one, which I can’t, then I won’t. I can’t tell them I want a furlough; all I can do is ask and if I don’t get it all I can do is growl, when I get out of earshot, of course.
All I know about myself now is that I am classified as a radio operator. I don’t know what outfit I am in or anything like that. In the army, you get kicked around here and there and they tell you this and that and in the end, you don’t know what they said or did to you. Read more of this post
Letters from an Everyman in WWII
Entering the Army Through Camp Upton
December 6, 2011 Leave a Comment
Site of Camp Upton, purple, and Babe's hometown of Mount Kisco, N.Y., in red.
Babe was born on Oct. 9, 1924, so the day he wrote this postcard to his parents, he would have been 18 years old. It is the earliest correspondence I have from Babe’s service in the military. I assume there should have been intake documents, draft papers or whatnot; I haven’t found them yet.
It also makes sense that it was his earliest correspondence, from Camp Upton, which sat on what is now the site of the government’s Brookhaven National Laboratory toward the eastern side of Long Island, N.Y. The map locates the site of Camp Upton, as well as Babe’s hometown in Mount Kisco, just north of New York City in Westchester County. Read more of this post
Filed under Commentary Tagged with Birth Date, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Camp Upton, Mount Kisco