February 19, 1944 The Letter, The Student Teaching and How to Make a Laundry Bag from a Feedsack

Dear Mother & Daddy,

"We were disappointed when we didn't get a letter yesterday, but it came this morning.  Yesterday we got a letter from Buddy.  You must have been telling tales out of school because he mentioned several things you had said I wrote.  I'm glad Grandma is better now.  Thanks for the stamps.  There were so many we can have lots of things.

Tuesday is Washington's birthday so we have that day off.  There are two men in B's classes at Yale that we've been wanting to ask over for a long time so we have asked them to dinner Tuesday night.  One is a bachelor from Penn. and the other one is a married man from California.  They are both nice.  Sully came this morning and is going to eat supper with us tonight.

School gets more interesting all of the time.  The reason for us having just Jewish and Italian children is because of the location of the school.  It is in a poor, Jewish neighborhood so of course the children have to go to that school.  There are other schools scattered over the city which are used for training new teachers.  They all range from poor children to well-to-do children.  We have to go out at four different times for training and are sent to a different school each time, so we get a view of each kind.  It just happened that I was sent to a poor school first, and I like it and the little kids are just as sweet and smart as any school.  They are so funny to watch and we have lots of fun.  They give you such funny answers to questions but you can't laugh.  The other day we were talking about dikes in Holland.  I asked how storks helped the Dutch people.  What I wanted them to say was that the storks ate worms out of the dikes so they wouldn't become full of holes and weak, but one of the smartest boys seriously said the storks brought the babies.  No one cracked a smile so I just said, "And, what else?" and went on.  I've been teaching reading and sewing to a group of girls.

It would be a relief to know that Nobel is 3C.  He isn't having a very nice birthday with the flu.  We were so sorry about Edgar Shelton.  B always liked the Shelton boys.

I'll try and tell you how I made my laundry bag. I doubt if you can follow this, but I didn't have any pattern, so I just sewed.

Write soon."

      Lots of love,
 
         B & Bonnie
  
NOTE from Ann:  Edgar Shelton, a hometown boy, was killed on the last day of the Battle of Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, February 3, 1944.
(Source:  Pulaski County Missouri
obituaries) Use the link for information on this particular battle.  http://worldwar2database.com/html/kwajalein.htm