73 years ago on ward island

as i have been unable to come to a conclusion on how to go about sharing these fantastic artifacts of my family history - for starters, these letters between my great grandpa rex and great grandma katherine - i've decided to wing it.

my late grandma in all her glory, seems to have put all the letters from 1945 into chronological order. she used the letters from boot camp held together with rubber bands, as a book mark, separating the letters of 1944.

when i opened the box initially, i pulled out a letter from one end of the box - that one being from november 7 of 1945, so the stamp on the envelope indicates. i picked the letter from the opposite end of the box and found that it was from december of 1944. as i worked my way back from the initial december 1944 letter i found them slowly moving backward in date - all dated december 1944, all from ward island, corpus christi, texas.

rex farrell larsen

naval service 1944 - 45

i began typing out the december letters i had come across and decided that i would post these finds first, as it is almost december and it feels somewhat fitting as they were written in the same month 73 years ago. how wild is that?

i figured out that i can queue posts here on blogspot so, in a cheesy attempt to encourage everybody to take step back into the past with me i've decided to schedule every letter from december of 1944 to post on the day they were written by rex larsen.

i have all the ones i've found and typed out so far ready to go on their dedicated days.

i still have the remaining stack from 1944 to go through. hopefully i will find a few more december letters to add to this strangely fitting holiday collection of old memories.

as it goes, the remaining hundreds of letters, may not be so interesting to type them all out word for word. i am trying to find a way i can gather information from each letter that will be interesting to read and somehow put it all together as a remembrance of rex and katherine, an acknowledgement of the differences of those times, the difficulties of war, and a real, personal look into a certain love story that defied distance, and lives on through these individual pieces of paper.

rex & katherine larsen

wedding photo 1937

these letters, these findings and memories, may not hold any interest to those who did not know rex and katherine larsen. some of them may even seem boring to those who did, so i am searching for a way to summarize the letters and see if i can somehow make these hundreds of letters into a solid whole.

i hope to do these memories, their memories, justice. bear with me.