LOVE LETTERS IN THE ALLEY
When a city cop finds a stash of old letters in the trash, he’s transported to Chicago during World War II. And vows to get the letters back to the family.
One day this summer, in the midst of the pandemic, Eric Wolforth took awalk to the store to buy milk and diapers. He followed his usual route, west along Catalpa Avenue, then a right turn into an alley. A few doors up he spotted piles of junk around a cluster of garbage bins. Knowing that Chicago alleys often contain discarded treasure— he once salvaged a fancy stroller— he headed toward the mess. On top of one garbage bin sat a small box. Poking fromthe top were red and blue stripes he recognized as the marks of old airmail envelopes. He pulled out several letters.
In the upper left corner of the envelopes was a return address for Mrs. Leo Paul Lee at 5506 Glenwood Ave. The letters were addressed to LT ( j.g.) Leo Paul Lee aboard the USS Broome, stationed in New York. Theywere postmarked 1945.
“These look interesting,” he thought. He tucked the letters in his reusable grocery bag and resumed his trip to Jewel.
That night in his basement, where as the father of a newborn and a toddler he spends a lot of time doing laundry, Wolforth began reading. The earliest in the batch was dated January 6.
Dearest angel, Gosh, hon, I am sorry that Imade you sad. … I didn’t think I was writing sad letters to you.
The writer went on to lament Chicago’s weather (“so cold”), to say howmuch she loved receiving her husband’s letters (“so do write”) and
to wish for a Florida vacation (“after thewar”). It was signed “Cathie.”
Wolforth, who is 42 and a Chicago police officer, found the old-fashioned cursive handwriting hard to decipher so he read only a couple of letters that night, but on subsequent evenings, once his family was asleep, hewould carry another letter or two up to his living room. Sitting in a chair with these fragile envelopes, whichwere fusty with age and ornamented with purple 3-cent stamps, hewas transported back to mid-20th century Chicago, to aworld threatened not by a pandemic but by a globalwar, to an apartment where a 25-year-old woman named Cathie lived with her family, waiting for her husband to come home.
CATHIE’S WORLD
Tuesday, Jan. 9
Dearest Lee Bee,
Gosh, it is below zero outside. I have had a slight sore throat. …
I hate to call (the doctor) as he will giveme the sulpher pills and make me go to bed. They make you so weak. … Darling, please keep safe. The news said last night that N.Y. orWashington could expect a V-bomb attack in the next 30~60 days. Isn’t that terrific.
We have heard bad news. Dorothy Twohey’s husband was wounded in action, shrapnel in the legs. They are sending him home. … This war will last a long time and I only hope you will have safe assignments for the duration.
Allmy love to you, Cathie
In 1945, Edgewater on Chicago’sNorth Sidewas a thriving communitywith an abundance of Catholic churches. AsWolforth would learn, CathieMoran’s familywent to St. Ita’s, named for a sixth century Irish abbess and built in the grand style of a Gothic cathedral. Her father, John J. Moran, ran a fur shop in the Garland Building downtown while her mother, Corinne, focused on their four children, Cathie, Jack, Tom and Bob. Theywere a close-knit family in a close-knit neighborhood, living a life unlike the one Leo Paul Lee had known.
Lee grew up privileged and lonely under the care of two affluent uncles. He attended boarding school then PrincetonUniversity before transferring to the University ofNotreDame, intending to become a priest. His plans for priesthood ended when, through his roommate, he met CatherineMoran, andwas welcomed into her big, Irish family.
In 1944, while millions of Americanswere enlisted in WorldWorld II, Lt. Leo Lee came home for his wedding at St. Ita’s. After a reception and honeymoon at the Edgewater Beach Hotel, he rode the train back to hisNavy ship, while Cathie stayed with her family in their second-floor Glenwood Avenue apartment with its bookcases, big windows and Chickering piano.
A few months after their marriage, the letters destined for an alley 75 years later began.
Dear baby. Dearest Leo. Darling. Angel plum.
Cathiewrote Leo almost every day, sometimes several times a day, letters full of endearments and professions of love, along with compliments (“You are so handsome when you are tan”); accounts of domestic duties (dishwashing, sewing, pie baking); and family news (her little brother Bobwas throwing snowballs, her motherwas sick).
In some letters, Cathie thanks Leo for his gifts. They include corsages for her and her mother towear to church (“You are an angel to send them to us”) and a Parker 51 pen and pencil set (“I amthrilled”). In response to Leo’s offer to send stockings, she writes, “Don’t get silk stockings as I don’t consider them any better than the rayons that
we get now.” But a few days later:
Darling, I have changed my mind about the stockings. I would love some silk ones. … I tried to get stockings downtown the other day and there weren’t any in the store.
Woven into all the talk of silk stockings, lemon creme pie andmovies at the Bryn Mawr Theatre, however, is a darker feeling: worry.
Cathieworries for her friend Betty, who has a baby and whose husband may be sent to fight in the Pacific when thewar in Europe ends. Sheworries for her 23-year-old brother Jack, stationed in England, who could be sent there too.
Sheworries for Leo, that he might fall fromthe ship’s deck while on nightwatch, that he might get seasick out on patrol in the Atlantic, that, according to photos he has sent, he has gotten too thin.
And sheworries for herself.
Thursday, Jan. 11:
Honestly, I don’t know what’s gotten into you to apply to gunnery and fire direction school … when you know it would mean the Pacific and you wouldn’t see me for years … and then you’d come home all shot up.
Friday, Jan. 12
Darling, you are everything in the world to me and I would die inside if anything ever happened to you. … I haven’t worried about you since you were in the navy, except for the time you were on the French destroyer. I want you to be safe above all things.
Monday, Jan. 15
Ayear ago today Mother and I went downtown and bought my wedding dress. …
I don’t know why I ever waited so long to get married … As I told you the main reason was that I didn’t want to have a baby during war time.
The letters continue through the frigid January of 1945, love mixed with fear, the mundanity of daily life mixed with the gravity ofwar. And in a hot summer decades later, Eric Wolforth has a realization:
He needs to get these letters back to Cathie Moran’s family.
A QUEST
Some of the letters included copies of the 1945 Moran Weekly Bugle. The Bugle, drawn in pencil on white paper, had a staff of two: Tom Moran, 15, and Bob Moran, 10. Cathie’s little brothers.
Tomand Bob served as the Bugle’s editors, cartoonists and columnists, supplying news of the family and neighborhood, along with Chicago sports scores, weather and a “jokes section.”
In one edition, “Bob’s column” reported that Bob got a haircut and that Sister Josepha kept Bob after school for fighting with a guy named Tippy.
“Tom’s column” on page 2 began: “It is an outrage! This column, recently adjudged the nation’s finest, has been pushed back onto the second page. I won’t stand for it.”
As Wolforth read the Moran Weekly Bugle, it occurred to him that Bob or Tom might still be alive. His search, however, revealed that therewere many Bob and Tom Morans in the world, and he gave up on finding the right ones.
Still, he continued to followthe love story of Cathie and Leo. He spent an hour online researching Leo’s ship, the USS Broome. Curious about the
building on Glenwood, he figured out that it had been sold for a gut rehab this July, but not by anyone in the Moran family.
And he kept reading Cathie’s letters, occasionally chided by his wife for caring more about the family in the letters than about his own.
Therewere no letters from March and February of 1945, but they picked up again in April, with a different return address. Cathie now wrote froman apartment on the naval base in Portsmouth, Va., on new stationery embossed with her full married name, Catherine Moran Lee.
She recounted the fun shewas having with the other women in the apartment complex— Gloria, Barb, Anne, Sid— all of them apparently waiting for their husbands, who apparently sometimes visited.
The women took a driving trip to Norfolk in Barb’s ’34 Buick, which broke down along theway. They went shopping at the commissary, where they used their ration books. They cooked, knitted, went to movies, played garbage poker.
April 14, 1945
Dearest Leo,
Gloria and I are sitting in the back yard in our bathing suits trying to get tan. … We are having a marvelous time so please don’t worry about me. …
I really am enjoying myself here. It is so much fun having our own apartment. … I feel married when I am away from home. I don’t know how I stood those months at home just sitting around all day. It was so boring. …
I love you very much, sweet. On Tuesday, May 1, she wrote Leo to say she loved him with all her heart and soul and felt sure hewould be coming back soon. She was right, and that letter was the last one in the pile. Oneweek later, Germany would surrender and by September the war was over. Itwas the letters from Virginia that gave Wolforth an idea. On Cathie’s new letterhead, he’d seen her full married name for the first time. So late one night this August he Googled “Catherine MoranAnd there itwas, a Lee.” 2012 obituary in the Chicago Tribune: Catherine Elizabeth Moran Lee, loving wife of the late Leo P. Lee. Beloved mother of Robert (Susan) Lee, Corinne (William) McClintic, Richard (Terry), Stephen and the late Patrick Lee.
Allmy love to you, Cathie
But in Virginia, as in Chicago, worry intruded on daily life, and in this world before TV and the internet, worry, along with hope, often came via the radio. Through the radio Cathie received the shocking news in April that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had died, then heard the speech of his successor, Harry Truman, “a simple, direct speech and I liked it.”
Friday, Apr. 27
We are so behind in the news since Gloria took her radio to the repair shop.
Sunday, Apr. 29
Last night Barb and her mother came over and
brought their radio. We listened to all the news broadcasts. I do believe the war with Germany is in its last stages. It does seem encouraging with all these peace rumors going around. He spent another few minutes searching the internet, then sent an email.
At 11:30 p.m. that same night, while on vacation with her family in Michigan, Corrine McClintic looked up fromher needlepoint and glanced at the email on her phone.
“Who is EricW olforth?” she wondered.
She read the message, whichwas from some guy talking about how he’d been walking to the grocery store and found some letters, and she thought, “Is someone messing with me?”
Then she sawthe photo he’d sent, of her mother’s stationery.
When her email popped into his inbox, two minutes after he’d sent his, Wolforth felt “electrified.” At last. He would get the ending to the love story.
“Itwas like a big soap opera,” Wolforth said recently, “and Iwas left dangling. What happened to the family? To Grandma and Grandpa? Iwanted to know these big story arcs.”
‘FOREVER INDEBTED’
A fewweeks later, Julie Sullivan, Bob Moran’s daughter, dropped by Wolforth’s to pick up the letters. Therewere 65, including some to Leo from Cathie’s parents. Sullivan’s mom, Bob’s widow, speculates that they had been stashed under the basement stairs and forgotten when the Morans moved
out in the 1960s. Leo must have brought them home. Where his many letters to Cathie wound up is anyone’s guess.
That night, at a safe social distance because of the pandemic, Sullivan helped Wolforth piece together Cathie’s world after thewar.
Cathie and Leo enjoyed a good life, but not without hardship. They had five children, one stillborn. They moved around a lot because of Leo’s career with various steel companies. When Leo developed early onset Alzheimer’s, they settled in a condo in Wilmette, and she efficiently took over managing the finances. After he died, when shewas 65, she had an active life with family and friends.
“She never let on to us howmuch she missed him,” their daughter Corinne McClintick said recently. “Itwas not until the day she died that she referenced my father coming to get her. Her love and excitement was evident that day, and she could hardly wait formy father to ‘pick her up.’”
As for Cathie’s siblings, Bob, who went into the fur business, and Tom, who became a doctor, married and had kids. So did Jack, also a furrier, after returning home devastated by the loss of his three best friends, killed in thewar. Bob, who outlived all his siblings, died in 2013.
But they all live on in the fusty, fraying letters, which have been passed around the family tenderly, evidence of life once upon a time, when the great crisis of the world was different than it is now, but no less daunting.
“We are forever indebted,” McClintic said.
Eric Wolforth also is grateful.
“I think about the letters frequently, and they’ve evoked a lot of thoughts,” he said.
He hears a lesson for today in how the Morans stuck together, with hope, in the midst of hard times. He visualizes Bob and Tom walking to St. Ita’s past his house, and wishes the same sense of fun for his boys. He thinks of his own life. “Like who will remember my family in 75 years?” Emails and iPhone photos, he fears, will never capture the past aswell as penmanship on paper.
He knows he wasn’t meant to read someone else’s love letters, but in doing so, he learned about the unique power of letters to communicate life, and to preserve it. He thinks with awe about how far those letters traveled through space and time before landing in an alley, then back into the hands of a family who, through them, learned more about themselves.
He thinks, too, about howthe crises of theworld come and go, and so do people, and how, in any era, there’s serendipity in the ordinary acts, like walking to the store for milk and diapers.