Love, Lefty
Shortly after our dad passed away in 2011, we came upon a shoebox of letters dated from 1946 to 1948. It sat untouched for decades in an attic.
The box was a treasure-trove of correspondence between our father, Donald Pegler, a 17-year-old soldier in the Army in 1946, and his family in Chicago. While the bulk of the letters were written while he was stationed in Japan, his service in Texas and Washington, as well as the arduous voyage to Asia, were also documented. Apparently, his parents and Grandma Pearl saved every letter, photograph and cartoon. The collection depicts the life (and imagination) of a young soldier.
We learn how he coped with ailments, from scarlet fever to ringworm, insatiable hunger and extreme weather. He describes being severely injured when he drove a jeep into a wire tied across a street.
It was priceless reading about the friendship he forged with a Japanese teenager. He talks about the similarities he noticed between American and Japanese life.
He also covers maintaining old high school friendships and his experiences with other soldiers. He writes of fellow soldiers’ struggles, of his high school girlfriends and of the ruins and beauty in the places he visited.
Even the small surprises delighted us. For instance, Dad always insisted that he didn’t eat candy, yet his correspondence proves that he was
quite a fan of candy and fruitcake while he was in the service.
The letters often feature little cartoons he drew that further explain situations he writes about.
But even more profound than the content itself is the obvious familial connection maintained among the young soldier, his parents
The Army issues you a sleeping bag that requires a 150 IQ to put together. Anyway, we got ours assembled and threw them in the tent and proceeded to crawl into them. Now I know how a corset feels...
and his grandmother, whom he always called “Gram.”
In a top drawer of his dresser, we found a sketchbook of his Army experiences. The beginning of his sense of humor, for which he was known as an adult, is there on the pages he composed as a teenager.
We collected his correspondence and sketches into a family book called Miss You All ... Love Lefty, which is how he signed many of his letters.
Our dad returned home to marry, raise seven kids and thoroughly enjoy a lifelong career in advertising. In 1962, he joined Foote, Cone & Belding in Chicago, where he used his skills as an illustrator and his sense of humor for one of the agency’s most successful campaigns: the Raid bug ads for SC Johnson.
In 2015, the Museum of Broadcast Communications named the Raid bugs as one of advertising’s 10 greatest icons. •