A Letter From a Soldier to His Family
A Soldier Sent a Letter to His Mom in 1945. It Was Just Delivered.
A letter from a 22-year-onetime U.Southward. Regular army sergeant serving in Deutschland was finally delivered final calendar month to his widow in Woburn, Mass.
Angelina Gonsalves answered the doorbell to find her longtime letter carrier standing in front of her, with registered mail in his hand.
"Hi, was your husband in the service?" Ms. Gonsalves, 89, recalled the letter carrier'south saying. "Yes, he was," she answered. "Only I didn't know him and so."
The letter carrier handed her an envelope. "Well, I'm pretty sure I take something that's personal for y'all," he said.
Inside the envelope was an unopened airmail alphabetic character that her husband, John A. Gonsalves, had sent to his mother in Woburn, Mass., when he was a 22-year-onetime Army sergeant serving in Frg just later the end of World War II.
"Dear Mom, Received another letter from you today and was happy to hear that everything is okay," he wrote on Dec. 6, 1945. "As for myself, I'm fine and getting along okay. Only as for the food, it's pretty lousy most all the time."
Prototype
In an interview on Friday, most a month later on she opened the letter, Ms. Gonsalves recalled the flood of emotions she had felt equally she read her husband'south words, his neat cursive on faded paper in an envelope with a 6-cent postage stamp.
"It was amazing," Ms. Gonsalves said. "I actually felt like he was there with me."
They met in 1949, when he gave her and her girlfriend a ride domicile from the shoe factory where they all worked in Woburn, outside Boston. The couple married in 1953, raised five boys together and were married for 61 years, until Mr. Gonsalves died in 2015, at age 92.
His letter had been discovered in a Pittsburgh postal facility, Ms. Gonsalves said, and had been delivered to her business firm on Dec. ix, forth with a letter of the alphabet from the Post.
"We are uncertain where this letter of the alphabet has been for the past seven-plus decades, only it arrived at our facility approximately six weeks agone," the alphabetic character read, co-ordinate to WFXT-Goggle box, which reported on information technology.
Citing the letter's "age and significance to your family history," the Mail service said that "delivering this letter of the alphabet was of utmost importance to us."
Kim Frum, a Postal Service spokeswoman, said she could not annotate on the alphabetic character without additional details.
"In many cases similar this, it does non involve post that had been lost in our network and later found," she said. "What we typically detect in cases of old letters and postcards is that they are sometimes purchased at flea markets, antique shops and even online and re-entered into our system."
Ms. Gonsalves'southward oldest son, also named John Gonsalves, said that postal workers had been trying for weeks to track downwards the family so they could deliver the letter. The original recipient, Mr. Gonsalves'southward female parent, died decades agone, and her old accost in Woburn is no longer a family dwelling.
In Nov, Mr. Gonsalves said, he received a phone message from a postal employee in Pittsburgh who said he wanted to speak to him near his begetter. Since his begetter had died years ago, he said, he had assumed the telephone call was a scam.
A secretarial assistant at the church where Mr. Gonsalves'due south funeral had been held also received a telephone call from the postal employee, the son said, and had relayed the message to Ms. Gonsalves. She, too, assumed information technology was a scam.
"We kind of let it go, our entire family, and, then, 9 days later, my mother gets the registered letter from Pittsburgh," the son said. "It was crazy."
Mr. Gonsalves had sent his letter from Bad Orb, Germany, a town well-nigh a Nazi prisoner-of-war army camp, Stalag IX B, that had been liberated by American forces months before.
In the letter of the alphabet, Mr. Gonsalves asks his female parent not to send him any more packages, telling her he doesn't call up he volition be there much longer. He laments the "lousy weather" and asks virtually his friends Jim and Neb. He says he hopes to be home in Jan or Feb of 1946.
He signed the letter, "Honey + XXXXX, Your Son, Johnny. P.S. I'll exist seeing you shortly, I hope."
Afterward the war, Mr. Gonsalves earned an engineering degree and worked for years for GTE Corporation.
He used his engineering science skills to run copper pipes from the family unit'south sprawling Victorian to a hot-h2o tank on the roof of the garage then in that location would exist plenty water for everyone to shower, his son said. He likewise devised an LED console that would evidence which lights in the house had been left on.
"His mind was always going," the son said. "He was always thinking of things."
Ms. Gonsalves said that she missed her husband and that the letter reflected how much he had loved his family unit and worried about them, fifty-fifty when he was serving overseas.
"It was just so nice that he cared so much about all of them, because that's the way he was," she said. "I could've sworn I felt his presence here while I was reading the letter of the alphabet, honestly and truly, which is foreign, but that'due south how I felt."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/08/us/wwii-soldier-letter-delivered.html
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