Cleaning up the Blog Posts

On By BarbaraIn letters, process, scanning, transcribingLeave a comment

I’ve been going through all my blog posts over a period of time, deleting ones that no longer fit my vision for the project, and editing or adding dated comments to a few. I should have noted how many there were when I started. Oh, well, there are 98 now with this one.

I have very slowly been adding transcriptions of Ruth’s Letters. I have nothing else to say about that except that I have sure come to detest scanning. 🤷‍♀️ There are four page drafts waiting for me right now to finish. The last letters I posted were in February of this year.

As I mentioned long ago in a blog post, the nature of blog sites is that followers only get notified of new blog posts, like this one. When I add another transcription page, no one is notified. Readers must, for example, go to the page for Ruth’s Letters and see if any letter dates have turned into links. It’s a bad system for readers.

One of Ruth’s Letters

On By BarbaraIn family, lettersLeave a comment

Just posting that the first and longest of Ruth’s letters is posted. Over 30 pages long, because she doesn’t have Walt’s mailing address yet, it’s a good introduction to the lives of family who waited at home while their loved ones went to war.

The whole thing ends with this kiss

All of Ruth’s letters will be listed on this page as they are completed.

Ruth’s Letters

On By BarbaraIn family, letters, scanning, transcribingLeave a comment

After finishing transcribing all 359 of Walt’s letters, I fell into a winter slump. Let’s call it a vacation. I’ve crept back into transcribing by working on those two pilot logs (log1, log2), and now I’m starting on Ruth’s Letters by scanning them and filing them into folders—I hate that part.

Walt mentioned a few times that he was returning her letters for the scrapbook she planned to work on (but never did). Most of her letters were bundled into envelopes, except for four that were returned to her in their original envelopes. She might have picked those up when she went out to visit him. The last bundle is dated 26 July 1942. Walt doesn’t head out to Texas until November, so it’s unclear why the returning ended in July. Nevertheless, that’s all there is. Walt and Ruth would be together after December, so there was no need for letters in 1943. The war obviously made it unlikely that Walt could return any letters received overseas. Beyond that, I don’t know what happened to the idea of the scrapbook, even though there is a large one with photos of other soldiers in it.

My scanning plan is to scan all of an envelope’s contents into one PDF. For the transcribing, though, I’ll do that one letter at a time, with each letter page in JPEG format. Bear with me.

While there is nothing new to read, imagine me scanning and organizing.

Walt’s Pilot Log 1944-45

On By BarbaraIn documents4 Comments

Almost as soon as I declared that I hadn’t seen a pilot log that continued from the first one, I picked up a little notebook that served as a log for the remainder of 1944 and 1945 up to September. It notes the first time Walt flew a P-51, described in all caps as WONDERFULL, and even notes the date when Walt was shot down!

Mostly, it’s just a record of locations, aircraft, and hours flown. At the top of the first page, Walt lists his total time as 592:15 hours. That’s a lot of hours.

The two log books are very different in design, the second one being a small notebook that would fit easily in a pocket, although I suspect it stayed behind during flights and didn’t, for example, go into the water with Walt in January 1945.

  • The first book, from Walt’s stateside training, is leather-bound with pasted-down and blank endpapers. All the pages are folded and stitched together at one center seam through the endpaper pieces.
  • The later book is bound with a heavy paper cover, and the pages are folded and stitched to that cover at one center seam. The seam is covered in a paper binding on the outside of the booklet.
Inside covers
Center stitched seams

I’m creating a new page for this second log book and have added links to both of  them to the main Letters menu.

Walt’s Pilot Log 1943-44

On By BarbaraIn documentsLeave a comment

Update 5 March: My winter slump is over and all the pages have been scanned and posted for the pilot log.

I’m scanning Walt’s Pilot Log book, as it shows his locations from March 1943-Novenber 1944, much of that time when there were no letters from him. Not only do we get to see where he traveled, but in what airplanes he trained, and then in the second half of 1944, we can see all his overseas locations and a list of some of the missions he flew.

Based on the information in the log, he is in Thomasville, GA in January 1944, so that the letter I have posted for that month should really be dated 1945. I’ll be moving that letter to where it belongs with an explanation.

There is too much information in the log for a blog post, so I have given it its own page and also linked it from The Letters page. I have only scanned and posted a few log entries so far, but the page is published so you can read it as it develops.