Arnold's Story: August 17, 1944

Alongside the description of Les Wolfe Jr.'s military funeral, this letter mentions Hazel's youngest brother James Ellwood Wolfe, his wife Rubye Keller Wolfe, and their children Walter and Jane. 

I did not realize that Hazel considered herself a fundamentalist, but perhaps that designation had a less extreme interpretation in the 40s than it does today. Her views as a Presbyterian were largely quite mainstream, as I surmise from her letters, family remembrances and her large collection of books on religion. One family memory from the early 1970's was her annoyance at a commercial for Crest toothpaste in which children interrupt parents yelling "I have no cavities". Children were not to interrupt adults, in her opinion. She boycotted Crest after that.

Marine Raiders was a 1944 war movie showing a fictional depiction of the 1st Marine Raider Battalion and 1st Marine Parachute Battalion on Guadalcanal, recreation in Australia, retraining in Camp Elliott (where much of the film was made) and a fictional attack in the Solomon Islands. It starred Pat O'Brien, Robert Ryan, and Ruth Hussey.

Secrets of Scotland Yard was a 1944 espionage thriller based on a story "Room 40, O.B." by Denison Clift, about a British police detective uncovering a Nazi spy in Britain's cryptanalysis organization. 

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Arnold's Story: July 29, 1944

While Arnold was in college, he spent his summers working at a lumber camp. He used to keep his scratchy wool plaid lumberjack shirt in his closet into the early 1980s, and I think each of his sons wore it at some point until we got too big for his shirt. Arnold had a slim build, but none of his sons were so slight of build, so by age 14–15 we had already gotten too large to wear it. I assume that McCloud is the location of that lumber camp; perhaps it was the famed McCloud River Lumber Company he worked in.

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