Arnold's Story: August 30, 1944

Hazel reports that merchants are anticipating the surrender of Germany soon, but it does not come until May 1945. In this letter Hazel enclosed a newspaper article about a brush fire near their home in Glendale, about a block uphill. Their property on Mountain Street stretched from Cavanaugh Road to North Jackson street, with the house on the Cavanaugh side and a large patio and fruit orchard on the Jackson side. (In the mid 1960's Bill Nevis divided the large lot in two, built another house on the Jackson side and sold it. They sold the original East Mountain Street house a few years before 1968 and moved to Whittier to be closer to Leonard and his family.)

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Arnold's Story: August 24, 1944 MHN

Hazel Nevis writes with family news and describes a lazy Sunday. I see that they call their fruit trees an orchard rather than a grove, as I may have earlier. If I recall, Leonard was first posted to Bougainville Island, at Cape Torokina.

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Arnold's Story: August 24, 1944 Al Grote

Al Grote writes to Arnold from Chicago, where he is in the Navy attending radio school.

 

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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: August 7, 1944

Hazel writes to her son Arnold about his sister Laura, who had just had her tonsils removed at the hospital. Also, Hazel's brother Les has had to arrange a funeral for his recently deceased son Les Jr. (killed in a Navy plane crash in Miami) in San Bernardino, California. Marie is Les Jr.'s widow from Oklahoma City. 

Hazel was a staunch Presbyterian until late in life when she converted to Catholicism so that Bill Nevis may have mass said at his funeral. In those days a mixed married between Catholics and Non-Catholics denied a Catholic the honor of a church mass, and younger Hazel refused to bring up her children as Catholics; after menopause she did not mind agreeing to raise her children Catholic. After Bill died, Hazel joined and attended the Church of the Nazarene in Whittier, California, where they had move from Glendale in the late 1960s. I recall that Hazel was a fervent reader and had accumulated a large collection of books on religion by the time she, too, passed from this world in the 1970s. 

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Arnold's Story: August 6, 1944

Arnold has just celebrated his 23rd birthday at the start of August, so now he is thanking his family for their gifts.

Around August 4, 1944, Arnold received a copy of his grade from the Engineering 260-29 class in the Officers' Training Course.

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Arnold's Story: August 4, 1944

This letter contains the sad news about Les Junior's death in a plane crash on his return from battle in Italy. Les Jr. is Hazel's brother's son and Arnold's cousin. I think I never met any of the Wolfe relatives, and I do not know why.

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Arnold's Story: July 31, 1944

Hazel is still using the old stationery with the West Fairview address. I don't know why Los Angeles businesses and department stores would be closed on July 31 and August 1 unless a severe cold season was keeping employees sick at home. 

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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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Arnold's Story: July 24, 1944

Arnold has recently received his commission in the Army Air Forces in Technical Training for radar and now moves on from Yale to Harvard for officer training.

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Arnold's Story: July 9, 1944

Long Distance phone calls were quite expensive in the 1940s and remained so for decades, so letters were the more common means of communication. Hazel crossed off the street address of the letterhead, so I guess she is using some old stationery from before they moved to Mountain Street. 

Arnold finished his Army Air Forces communications training at Yale University, got commissioned as an officer, and headed to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for more instruction. At the time, the Army was obsessed with intelligence testing and Arnold was a very good test taker apparently. 

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