A love that was not to be denied
Norma Isabelle Milford (nee Healy), New Zealand’s first female postmaster: b June 25, 1923, Whanganui; m Maurice Milford (deceased); 2d, 1s; d July 24, 2016, Auckland, aged 93.
After her death, a dozen red roses arrived for Norma Milford. The sender, her American fiance, with whom she had reconnected after almost 70 years apart, would send the flowers regularly to his sweetheart. This bouquet was sent with a heavy heart at losing the woman he had first fallen in love with in 1942.
Milford was 19 when she first met Richard Tracy.
World War II had broken out and Tracy had been with the 1st Marine Corps Division, the first US servicemen to arrive in the country at Wellington.
The division was based in camps at Paekakariki and only stayed a few weeks before the battle at Guadalcanal. He was among the few ordered to stay behind.
The pair met when Tracy, a 23-year-old from Franklin, Ohio, went along with a friend to make up the numbers with a young woman from Palmerston North whose own fiance was away fighting. When that young man arrived home unexpectedly, Milford took her place.
Love blossomed for Tracy and Milford after their second date. Then Milford got meningitis, missing a date with her American beau and ending up in Wellington Hospital.
‘‘I was put in the ward for the dying,’’ she said years later. ‘‘My mother managed to get word to Richard just as he was about to board a ship to Australia.’’
But their short love affair ended abruptly a year later when Tracy was fighting in the Pacific. He and his comrades found two bodies of Australian and Japanese soldiers that had been lying in New Guinea’s undergrowth for a year and the grim discovery made Tracy reassess his future.
With many of his friends killed he decided to save his fiancee the pain of losing him or having him return badly wounded. He wrote to Milford ending their relationship.
It would be decades before the couple rekindled their love and become engaged once again.