Donna Reed kept her GI fan mail

This is touching and hardly even a bit creepy:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/arts/25donna.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all

All told, Ms. Reed held on to 341 letters, some typed but many written in the kind of elegant Palmer method cursive script rarely seen today. Taken as a whole, the correspondence offers a candid glimpse of a vanished era, a time when six hard-bitten Marine sergeants could write that “we think you’re swell” and mean it in something other than an ironic sense.

“The boys in our outfit,” Sgt. William F. Love wrote on Aug. 18, 1944, from the jungles of New Guinea “think you are a typical American girl, someone who we would like to come home to!!!!!” On March 28, 1944, Sgt. John C. Dale of Tennessee, a tail gunner on a B-17, told Ms. Reed, then 23, that he wanted her “to be the girl back home that I am fighting for.”

Cpl. Bob Bowie wrote of how seeing Ms. Reed in “The Human Comedy” made him long to be back home in Los Angeles and wishing “I could see my Mom.” He added: “I don’t know how it affected the other fellows, we never discuss our feelings with one another.”

I also didn't know this (I'm guessing James Stewart was pissed):

Later in life, however, Ms. Reed became an ardent antiwar campaigner, serving during the Vietnam era as co-chairwoman of a 285,000-member group called Another Mother for Peace and working for Senator Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 presidential race. In his biography, Mr. Fultz quotes her as saying that “she looked forward to a time when ‘19-year-old boys will no longer be taken away to fight in old men’s battles.’ ”

Later in life, however, Ms. Reed became an ardent antiwar campaigner, serving during the Vietnam era as co-chairwoman of a 285,000-member group called Another Mother for Peace and working for Senator Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 presidential race. In his biography, Mr. Fultz quotes her as saying that “she looked forward to a time when ‘19-year-old boys will no longer be taken away to fight in old men’s battles.’ "

awesome story, thanks for sharing Morbs... (xp)

im guessing this was above the fold for the NYT cuz its memorial day today??

yes max, they gave their readers one day off from gingerly-worded pieces about how Obama is largely a continuation of second-term Bush.

does Dennis Perrin get GI fan mail?

morbius sends dispatches from the ilx battlefield ;-)

Perrin was in the Army.

I don’t think I like this show. I really really don’t like the son.

The son seems to me the least plausible character in the family yet delivers the most laughs.

In other words he’s TOO smart (-ass)