USA TODAY International Edition
Daughter shares WWI love letters
SPARKILL Marjorie Jamison Douglas was visiting her mother one day in the early 1970s and found her preparing to burn a trove of letters she and her husband had exchanged during a World War I courtship when they both served in France.
Douglas implored her mother to spare the letters — some 1,200 pieces of correspondence on unlined stationery — that told a story that was at once intimate and historic.
But it wasn’t until years later that Douglas began a decade- long process of transcribing seven boxes of hand- written letters and arranging them chronologically.
“Whenever I would mention ( the letters), somebody would say, ‘ You should write a book,’ ” Douglas recounted. “So, finally in 2013, I was diagnosed with macular degeneration and I thought to myself, ‘ If I’m ever going to do this I better do it now because I don’t know how long I’m going to have my eyesight.’ ”
It took two more years to turn the correspondence into a memoir, Pidge and Jamie: Two Lives Transformed By Love and War, which she recently published at age 90.
“It was a real love story,” she said recently. “They were devoted to each other all their lives.”
Marjorie “Pidge” Carr and Robert “Jamie” Jamison met and fell in love in Cleveland, but just 10 days after they became engaged he was gone. Jamie had joined the National Guard and was called up in 1916 along the Mexican border, where Germany hoped to spark war between the U. S. and Mexico.
While Jamie served stateside and trained for deployment overseas, Pidge joined the Smith College Relief Unit mission to France from August 1917 to February 1918. The couple married in spring 1918.
In October 1916, Jamie wrote from the border of how vital their correspondence had become:
“You will never know how much your letters mean to me in this environment. They are a link to all the best in my life and a daily reminder I have something more than my present duties to look forward to.”