Letter or Postcard – Letter
Sender – Ralph Peterson
Recipient – Phyllis Peterson
Postmark Place – St. Petersburg, Florida
Postmark Date – 10 March 1943
Letter Date – 9 March 1943
Text:
My dearest wife,
Now I can write when I have something to write about. You see, honey, I got your letter today – the ones you wrote on the 4th and 5th and was I ever glad to hear from you. I guess the mail’s maybe got screwed up a little bit. Just keep on writing like that and I will feel awfully damn good. Nothing much doing today got up at five and listen to lectures all day. Just sat around and got more sunburned instead of a tan, as you would call it. It does look sort of red at that, but you wait a few more weeks and then I can tell you I am tanned. The weather has been nice down here lately except for a little rain, although as I am writing this letter it looks like another hurricane is coming up – sort of dark and stormy looking. It looks like good old Wisconsin just before a thunder shower. We was down by the Gulf today for one of our lectures and I saw some people swimming and taking sun baths. So Gilbert is in Mississippi. Would you tell me what camp he is in? You see, there are a bunch of guys from Wautoma down there. Maybe I will let him know where I am and tell me what branch of service he is in. If he is in the infantry I will write him and poke fun of all his marching that he has to do. So you have got a pimple on your chin. I hope you have one on your chin when I come home and I can take you down and squeeze it out and you can see what I had to go through when you got me cornered. You said you was going to send Alvin my address. I have already sent him and Virginia a letter, so if I get a letter from him I will let you know what he wrote. If you don’t have enough reading material why don’t you come down here and get some. We have about five big tables full of magazines. Damn good ones, too. All the latest Life’s, Look, and Colliers, so we have plenty to read. Billy also got a big role of funny books from home. I think that’s all for now, as the news is kind of slow down here. More next time. Love and kisses, your husband Ralph.
PS – Keep up the writing.
Notes: Once again, by hurricane he means tornado. At first I didn’t know who Gilbert was, but after looking up the “Rohde girls” from a later letter I realized this must be Gilbert Rohde, one of Mom’s neighbors from Neshkoro. I see now he was mentioned in a letter earlier in the year. Not entirely sure where that pimple story is going.