The transcript:
Kokomo, IN
Feb. 12, 1931
Dear Elma,
You don’t know how good I felt this morning when I came home from work and got in my room there was a letter from my best of all friends, my most dearest friend Elma. Really you don’t know how good that made me feel. I didn’t have time to read it before supper because I was a little late coming in tonight and supper was ready when I got in but I felt just so good without eating supper tonight when I seen that letter on my dresser.
This morning when I got up or even before, while I was lying awake in bed I was thinking about you and thought for myself that I surely ought to get a letter from you today. Elma you don’t know how alive I felt all day until tonight. Elma I was talking to a fellow today he thinks he knows a whole lot once in a while, but I don’t doubt but what he finds out a whole lot of that stuff because he has a pull some way or another I don’t know, but the way he was talking I will most probably go to New Albany before long, if that is then I will be closer to home before long. The way he said it would be over time in March but I don’t know anything about it otherwise and am not going to worry the least, because if I would make some kind of other arrangement it would all be wrong anyway so don’t you worry about it or anything else either.
Here is some real news. Something that never has happened before. I bet you wouldn’t guess in a year. Just think I got a hair cut in Kokomo for the first time in my life. Oh my ain’t that something.
Elma I think Oscar is over to see his sweet baby Marie tonight. He is just about getting there now, It is now five minutes til seven o’clock. Just about time for Oscar to arrive to see Marie and to make you feel blue and me bluest of all to think there they are all together and having a real time quilting and cutting up cracking jokes and all such things and just think your old Al in Kokomo sitting in his room with his pen propped up on the dresser with his stationary box on his lap and a piece of paper on top of this box and writing these very words you are reading now, a letter to the most beloved friend in the world, Elma.
Well we were to have school tonight, but we got word this evening that we wouldn’t have school tonight. I thought there is where I will have another chance to write a letter to you Elma and after I get through this letter I might read a little in my specification and then go to bed and sleep a little and dream a while and then get up and mail and kiss this letter goodbye which is Evansville bound after it leaves me to greet you with a hug and kiss from me.
I wrote Oscar a letter last night. I guess he has got it by now I don’t know but he will let you read it tonight.
Elma did you know that my dad was 75 years old yesterday Feb. 11 the day you wrote your first letter to me at Kokomo. Elma, it seems to me while I have to keep on writing, but the trouble is you don’t hear me say it and I can’t ask you anything I won’t say. I will close this letter with lots of love and many kisses.
Al
Goobye Elma and sleep good.
My comments
- It is evident that my grandpa “had it pretty bad”. He was so infatuated with my grandma that he couldn’t wait to get her letter. Remember that he was 30, soon to be 31. He wasn’t a lovesick teenager, although at times he sounds like one.
- Who were Oscar and Marie? Marie was my grandma’s younger sister. She was 5 years younger than my grandma, so she would have been 20 years old here. She would go on to marry Oscar Nunning a year after my grandparents in 1932. Oscar was born in 1906, so he was the same age as my grandma. Here he was 25. Apparently, Oscar visited Marie every evening at 7 pm, and my grandpa was jealous that he wasn’t there to join in the fun. He felt like he was missing out on everything.
- He commented about my great grandpa Frank Weinzapfel’s birthday. He woul∂ live to be 90.