'What a lucky man I am to have a girl like you'

I often come across World War II postcards and letters written by lonely soldiers to their sweetheart back home. Sometimes they mention that the girl sent the soldier a picture of herself. Such is the case with a postcard I recently found on eBay, and the story behind it is particularly interesting.

Back in those days, taking photos and having them developed was a bit of an undertaking. It was not cheap and not very fast, nothing like today when digital photos can be transmitted instantly.

The card is from James, an Army Private First Class stationed in Alaska, to Marjorie in New York City, (I’m omitting last names for privacy). It's dated 10 July 1944. In the postcard, James gushes about the wonderful photographs he received from Marjorie, and concludes by saying, “Your coiffure is stunningly, enormously attractive. What a wonderful, lucky man I am to have a girl like you.”

Ah, young love. But it turns out they weren’t

Front side of James' postcard.

so young, at least Marjorie wasn’t. She was 44 years old, a schoolteacher doing graduate work at Columbia University in New York City. She lived in Laureate Hall, Columbia's on-campus graduate student housing on West 119th Street in the Morningside Heights neighborhood. The building is still there.

Marjorie was a native of Portland, Maine, held an undergraduate degree from Wellesley, went on to earn a master’s from Columbia, and maybe even a doctorate. Records on Ancestry.com indicate she was a teacher in Maine, Connecticut, and New York City from the 1930s through the 1950s, and was later a state personnel officer in Albany, NY.

James is something of a mystery. His Army Service Number appears on the postcard. Usually, that number allows me to find the soldier’s hometown and year of birth in the National Archives' database of WWII enlistments, narrowing down the search, but not so with James. There are gaps in the database, and his record is apparently missing. There were dozens of men with his name in the Army during WWII, so he’s a needle in a haystack.

Marjorie's photo from Wellesley College
1922 yearbook

A bit of luck from a Google search gave me hope of finding more about James, but it was another dead end. The University of Alaska Anchorage / Alaska Pacific UniversityConsortium Library has four letters James wrote to Marjorie, and I was able to obtain copies thanks to their very helpful staff. It’s obvious from the letters that James was well-educated. He had an extensive vocabulary and used perfect grammar. It’s also obvious he was smitten with Marjorie; at least that’s what he wrote. (Who knows, maybe he was like the sailor who had a girl in every port.) Nonetheless, the letters are full of praise for Marjorie’s brains and beauty, chit chat about friends and relatives, and admonitions for her to not work too hard at school. But in all his flowery prose there was not a word that would help identify James.

I don’t know what happened to James and Marjorie after the war, but I do know they didn’t marry each other. She died in 1995 at age 94, still with her maiden name. As for James, he’ll be one of those mysteries I’ll probably never solve.