Della's Recollections
Page 2
Danny wasn't much of a writer. He would write, "I miss you" or "I love you"; but he never wrote that he was homesick. I would get his letters and they would be all cut-up or mostly blacked out. He would say that he had just arrived and everything else was blanked out by the censors or that he was leaving and then some more black ink. I sent him letters all of the time. Sometimes he wouldn't get any of them and other times he would have a whole bundle waiting for him when he got back. They (government) were not too interested whether we got each other's mail. I had an APO address to write to. I think that I wrote care of whatever steamship company owned the ship that he was on. I am not sure if I knew the names of the ships when he was on them. I think that I did put the name of a ship on them.
It was before we were married that I wrote him that he ought to write his mother because she was worried about him. He even wrote her once after I said something to him. After we got married I think he just wrote to me. He gave his letters to the Captain when he was overseas and I guess the Captain sent and received the crew's mail through the military. Before he left the States he would send a letter through the regular mail and he'd used Western Union to telegraph when he got back or to wire money home. Sometimes when he ran out of money and was stranded someplace he'd telegraph me to wire him money to get home.
His great aunt, Rose Traverso Faust, was good about writing him. Danny was raised with her sons, Tony and Bobby who were twins, and Harry and Donald. Big Aunt Rosie always remembered Danny and no matter where he was she would send him a few dollars or whatever she had. She always remembered his birthday and at Christmas time. She wrote him all the time that he was gone.
Tony Faust was killed in the Pacific. He was radio operator on a carrier that was bombed and sunk. Danny and Tony were together the last night Tony spent at home before going overseas. They went out on the town together.
Before we were married I was working at the Austin Insurance Agency. The owner's name was Austin. I quit there because he didn't want to give me any time off to get married. He said I was "being inconsiderate of the company. " I can't remember whether I worked at the Southern Select Brewery or the Bell Telephone Company first after quitting Austin Insurance. I worked at the telephone company as an operator until they tried to put me on nights. I was a light operator at Southern Select. I worked on the production line. The bottles of beer passed between me and a bright light so that I could see any impurities in the bottles. I saw all kinds of fuzzy things in bottles. I pulled those bottles out of the line.
The brewery paid well and we were mostly women on the production line. We would talk mainly about our men - where they were and wondering what they were doing. We all went to the movies and tried to keep up with what was going on in the papers. The movie newsreels had scenes of sinking ships, burning cities, and tanks in North Africa. We tried to follow what was going on especially where we thought our men might be. The pictures showed terrible terrible things that the Japanese were doing in China. Some of the women had brothers and husbands being called up. If not about men, then we talked about rationing. Everything was hard to get.
For a while after I got married, I lived at home with my mother and my younger sister and brother, Mary and Henry. My mother was a widow with seven children, but my older sister, Josie and my brothers, Johnny and Jaime, were gone into the service and one younger brother, Raymond was already married and living with his wife. After a few months I rented my own apartment.
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