DRY ROT.
"I WON"T let it get me down," Joe used to say. He would mumble the sentence over and over to himself. "I ain"t gonna let it get me down! It ain"t gonna get me down."
What it was, Joe never stopped to say. It was the heebie-jeebies or the screaming meemies. It was rock-jolly, or island-happy, or G. I. fever, or the purple moo-moo.
It was h.e.l.lish stuff to get, and you got it when you had been on one island for a year or more. Joe had been on his rock for twenty-seven months, and he swore by G.o.d that it would never get him.
Not like it got some of the other guys! There was the soldier that stole a truck. On an island that had only three miles of roads he stole a truck. Then there was the other soldier that stowed away on a ship. Just a ship going anywhere. One fellow hit an officer. Six others ran the still under the cliffs and were sent up for terms at Mare Island. And then there was Louie, who sneaked into the nurse"s room that night the transport crashed. But that"s another story.
Joe watched these things happen, and hundreds of others. When something rough took place, there would be a court-martial. Everybody would say, "What the h.e.l.l? You ain"t gonna send the guy up, are you? He was rock-jolly!" But they sent him up, all the same. A steady stream of guys, just as good as Joe, went back to the States, under guard.
"Not for me!" Joe promised himself. "When I leave here for good old Uncle Sugar, I"m goin" on me own two feet, and they ain"t gonna be no guard taggin" along! It ain"t gonna get me!"
But it got some of the officers. Just like enlisted men. They weren"t exempt. Not by a long shot. There was the fine lieutenant who was always smiling. He stood the rock for about thirteen months. Day after day, doing nothing. Then one day he hitch-hiked a plane ride to New Zealand. He was so rock-jolly he went on to Australia and they finally picked him up in Karachi, India.
Just because you were an officer didn"t mean you stayed out of trouble. There was the old-timer, a dry goods man from Philadelphia. Took to drinking, and one day they found him breaking into the officers" club. Had to have some whiskey, and it was two o"clock in the afternoon. Couldn"t wait the extra two hours. They didn"t court-martial him. Just shipped him home, quiet like. Tried to keep the enlisted men from hearing about it. But they heard. And nine-tenths of them felt sorry for the old man.
It seemed as if old men didn"t stand the rock as well as young men did. There was that chief petty officer who started screaming one night. At first n.o.body knew what had hit him. Anyway, he yelled his head off, and they had to put him in a strait jacket. It took them two days to quiet him down. Found out he"d been drinking torpedo juice. They sent him home, too.
Now n.o.body on the rock liked a good drink of liquor better than Joe. Not a drunkard, mind you. But a d.a.m.ned good judge of liquor. Before he joined the Navy he had a little shoemaker shop in Columbus, Ohio. He worked pretty hard, saved his money, and drank with the boys every Sat.u.r.day night. He liked beer, gin, and whiskey. Wine and sweet drinks were for women. Rum tasted funny. Once or twice Joe had just about as much as he could handle. Went home singing till you thought his heart would break. Lullabys, mostly. Songs his mother sang to him a long time ago. She was dead, and he lived with a bricklayer north of the University. When he came home singing the bricklayer"s wife would tease him next morning. Joe would blush, feel tough in the head, and swear he"d never get drunk again.
Joe wasn"t able to keep that promise to himself, but that was different from getting rock-happy. He could do something about not drinking. That was up to him. But there was nothing he could do about the rock.
He and eight hundred other guys were put on the rock. Somebody had to be there. If it wasn"t Joe, it would be somebody else. There he stayed! He was on the rock when the Marines went into Guadalca.n.a.l. He was there when a new general named Eisenhower landed in Africa. Half the men on the rock thought he was a n.a.z.i big shot. But later on they learned. He was on the rock when Mussolini hauled tail, and on the rock Joe heard the news about Normandy. Some Marines flown out of Tarawa landed there, and then flew on. Eddie Rickenbacker was there for a few days. And so was Mrs. Roosevelt. They went on, but he stayed. For Joe the war was the rock.
It was a coral atoll west of the date line. From it you could see absolutely nothing but the Pacific Ocean. Only the flaming sun, almost directly overhead, told you where east and west were. At night half the stars were upside down and the other half you had never seen before.
The island within the atoll was a mile and a quarter long and a quarter of a mile wide. The airstrip for land planes used up practically the entire island. The seaplane base used up the rest. It was, everybody on the rock stoutly believed, the finest seaplane base in the Pacific. No one told them that there were at least a dozen better.
Trees had once covered the rock, but now only a fringe remained, like hair on the head of a bald man. Living quarters clung to the sides of the island or cl.u.s.tered at the southwest end.
The rock had one great blessing and one great curse. There was inadequate drinking water, and each night about seven a breeze blew off the ocean. Joe, in particular, used to say, "The only thing keeps me goin" is that breeze. No matter how tough the day is, you can always look forward to the breeze!"
In a way, the water problem was not an unmixed curse. It gave the men something to think about and something to work on. What they said about the water could not be repeated, but what they did about it was amazing. Every spare piece of tin on the island, every chunk of canvas, every old oil drum was put to use. First of all, men built a watershed. For this they used a large, flat, sloping surface. Most were of tin, some of wood, and a few of canvas. Then they built gutters around the sides, and sloped the princ.i.p.al gutter into a spout, which ran into a barrel. Ingenious men, like Joe, somehow procured lengths of rubber hose, which they fitted over the spouts. In this way they could fill three or four drums without shifting them. All they did was shift the hose. Joe was unusual, too, in that he invented the ready-made shower. He built his watershed out from a tree and placed his four drums on stilts. For a bath, he stood under one of the drums and let her go! The water was always warm. He never had a cold shower, but at least he got clean. That was more than he had been able to do for the first five months he was on the rock!
But no matter how much Joe washed, he still got skin diseases. Everybody in the South Pacific got the same diseases, but it was somehow worse when you got them over and over again, always on the same rock. Joe first noticed that something was wrong when he began to feel dizzy at two o"clock in the afternoon. He found out later he was short of salt. Sweating, sweating all day long for thirty days a month and thirty-one some months seeps the salt right out. Before Joe got wise, he had a case of p.r.i.c.kly heat. One morning he woke up just as usual, but soon after he put on his shirt he felt somebody stick a handful of pins in his back. Right between his shoulder blades. He jumped and looked around.
"Wha.s.sa matter, Joe?" one of his friends asked.
"Somethin" hit me!" he claimed.
"Where?" they asked.
"Right here!" He started to point to his shoulder blades, when he was. .h.i.t again, in back of his left knee. He started to scratch.
"Uh-uh!" the men shouted. "He"s got the itch!"
Boy, he had it! And he kept it! For three months. Every morning and afternoon he would be attacked by spells in which he could have sworn people sank darts into his body. It was no good scratching. That only made it worse. After a while large areas of Joe"s body were covered with a red rash. Acid perspiration had eaten away small flakes of skin. When new perspiration hit these spots, Joe would close his eyes and swear. He reported to sickbay finally, and there he joined a long line of other sufferers. A big pharmacist"s mate, who felt sorry for each of his patients, would appear with a bucket of white stuff and a paper-hanger"s brush. He would spend about twenty seconds on each man. Give him a real paint job. There was menthol in the white stuff, otherwise Joe could not have stood the furious itching that came back day after day.
As with all the other men, the itch finally worked down between his legs. Then his misery started. At night the man who slept above him would shake the bed and yell, "Joe! Stop scratching yourself!" Joe would grunt and roll over. But in the morning, skin would be missing from his crotch.
It was then that his legs and armpits became infected. In the morning line-ups Joe had noticed half a dozen men who stayed to one side until the big corpsman was through his paint jobs. He used to wonder what happened to them. Now he found out. When the simpler cases were dismissed, the infected cases were attended. With a small scalpel the patient corpsman sc.r.a.ped away acc.u.mulations from each blister. Then, upon the open wound, he placed a salve. The healing process was terribly slow. Sometimes a month. And all that time you had to work, just the same. Twenty minutes after you left sickbay, sweat was running over the salve. In twenty more minutes the sore was bare.
Then Joe noticed a funny thing. Everybody he met on the rock had some special medicine that was a sure cure for the itch. But everybody had the itch! The only thing Joe found that cured him was a preparation somebody sent from the States. The man who owned it tried it out, and it worked. A solution of salicylic acid in merthiolate. Four other men used it between their legs, and in half an hour it had eaten away their skin. They went to the sickbay. But even after that some fellows went right on using the dynamite. On some it worked. Joe was one of them. He would lie down, paint himself liberally, and then bite his knuckles. It hurt like the devil. "I"m lucky," he would say. "It works on me." He continued to have heat itch, every month for twenty-seven months, but he had no more infections. He felt most sorry for those who did. He knew they had a tough time of it.
Joe had only one other serious medical affliction. His feet! Like most men on the rock, he fought an endless battle against fungus of the feet. Unlike the itch, this fungus came and went. And it was never bad, unless you were one of the unlucky guys that got poisoned from it. Then your feet swelled up, and one man even lost three toes. It ate them right away at the roots. His friends, when the disease first started, told him he had leprosy. Later on they got plenty scared and a wild rumor sped through camp that it really was leprosy. The doctors put a stop to that in a hurry. Just a deep infection. But the guy lost three toes, all the same.
For the rest, you just took as many showers as you could, ate lots of salt, and hoped for the best. Once Joe got five big lumps under his left arm, but seven walloping doses of sulfa drove them away. "I drank about nine gallons of water a day," Joe told his friends later, "and didn"t go to the head at all! Where did the water go to?"
It was the atabrine that gave Joe his worst trouble. He hated the little yellow pills and wasn"t sure they did any good. The American Medical a.s.sociation said they were a waste of time, and Joe was pretty sure the doctors back home knew more than the sawbones on the rock. h.e.l.l, these guys couldn"t even cure the itch! But all the same everyone had to take his atabrine tablets daily. That was not so bad until you began to turn yellow. Then you got worried.
Joe started to wonder if maybe those stories weren"t true after all. "As I got it straight from a doctor," one of the men confided to him one night, "all this atabrine does is keep malaria down. It don"t show on you, see? You"re yellow, and it don"t show. But all the time malaria is runnin" wild! Down here!" He slapped the fly of his pants. "And when they got all the work they can out of you, they send you on home. A livin" wreck! They stop the atabrine and the disease pops out all over you." Then he lowered his voice mysteriously and slapped his fly again. "But mostly here," he said in doleful tones. "You"re nothin" but a burned-out wreck."
The men in Joe"s hut wondered if there was any truth in what the man said. It stood to reason you took atabrine only to keep something in check. If they were hopping you up with dope, only so you could work without falling down, that was bad enough. But what if taking atabrine for three months, say, made you lose your power? Did it mean you couldn"t ever have any babies? Or did it mean something worse? With wonderful funds of ignorance and superst.i.tion Joe and his friends considered the question from all angles. They found no answer to their informer"s devastating insinuation: "All right! All right! How do you know you ain"t losin" your power?"
Joe had no way of knowing. In fact, like hundreds of men on the rock, he had no reason to believe that he had any power. He had been in love once or twice, but he had never married. Nor had he slept with a girl. He had wanted to, once or twice, but morals, lost opportunities and all those strange things that keep men from doing what they otherwise want to, had intervened. He had to guess about his power, but he sure didn"t want to lose it. As days pa.s.sed and he became more yellow, he began to wonder darkly if maybe that guy was right. He wanted to talk to somebody about it, but he had noticed that whenever you got started on something like that, you got into trouble. Bad trouble.
Two months before, Joe was lying in his bunk. It was about eleven-thirty at night. Suddenly he heard a loud shout and sounds of a fight. With the rest of his hut he scrambled from bed in time to see two officers and three enlisted men rounding up a chief petty officer and a young seaman whose nose was bleeding.
A third officer hurried to each of the huts. "All right, men!" he said quietly. "Back to bed. Break it up, men. Break it up!"
Next morning hushed whispers flamed through the camp. No one ever said anything officially, but the C. P. O. and the seaman disappeared. Later Joe got the word. The chief got sixteen years in Portsmouth and the seaman two years in Mare Island. Eight nights later Louie sneaked into the nurse"s room. The one whose plane was forced down. Louie went to jail, too. After that Joe just stayed away from everything to do with s.e.x. It was an expensive luxury on the rock. "And," he had sworn, "it ain"t gonna get me!"
Fortunately, a smart young doctor got wind of what was troubling the men. He wrote to Washington for an official statement that atabrine did not affect virility. It was signed by a Jew, an Irishman, a Protestant, and a doctor from a little town in Missouri. Eight hundred copies were made, and each man on the rock got one. But the young doctor"s second idea was even better. He got a clever photographer who could copy pictures from magazines. Then he found two photographs of prominent movie stars who were attracting great publicity as bedroom athletes. He had the photographer make a poster seven feet by ten feet. The two movie stars were leering at one another. Below in big letters was their confession: WE JUST LOVE ATABRINE! Men came from all over the island to see the sign. It did a lot of good.
Joe had fought it out on the rock for sixteen months when two important events occurred in his life. He got a new skipper, and a liberty ship carrying some SeaBees stopped at the island for engine repairs. Joe"s old skipper was sent home under some kind of a cloud. Either he went to pieces mentally or he got into trouble over the accounts of the officers" club. Joe never got the right of it.
The new skipper was a Navy type. He was a commander fifty-two years old. He would never go higher. He was a hard-drinking man who could not be relied upon. Yet he was an excellent fellow, and no one would prefer charges against him. So he dragged on and on, from one unimportant job to another. Many loved him but few respected him. Ambitious young men sought to leave his command at any opportunity, but they b.u.t.tered him up while he was their superior. Some of them even bit their lips in silence when he made pa.s.ses at their lovely wives. Before he was on the rock a week even Joe knew that he had been sent there as some kind of punishment. Something he had done in the States. Joe never got the right of it.
The Skipper, as he was known, started innovations at once. By G.o.d, he was the boss and things were going to be different. If he had to come to this G.o.d-forsaken island, he"d show them a thing or two. His first order was that each man must sleep under mosquito nets at all times. He almost had a mutiny on his hands, and the ringleader was Joe.
The huts in which enlisted men slept were foul things. Quonsets for eight men housed twenty-four. Men slept in double deckers, and even though there was a breeze at night, it could not penetrate the crowded quonsets. On some nights Joe lay in bed and sweated all night long. When the order came for mosquito netting, therefore, he rebelled. He tried it for two nights and found that he had what a doctor would have termed claustrophobia. He struggled with the net and almost strangled. In the hot, sweaty night he swore he"d not use a net again. He tore it off.
Next day he was before the new skipper. "I"m going to make an example of you," that red-faced man said.
When the words were spoken, Joe visibly trembled. For sixteen months he had kept out of trouble, and now he was in, up to his ears. "Get me out of this! Get me out of this!" he prayed. "I don"t want no trouble!"
"What the h.e.l.l do you think you"re doing?" the Skipper shouted. "You think you can get away with murder around here?" He looked up at the frightened seaman. Joe licked his lips. The Skipper was about to throw the book at Joe when he remembered why it was he had been sent to the rock. "Got to start over!" he muttered to himself. "This time I"m starting over!" he promised under his breath.
"Young man," he said aloud, "don"t you like the Navy?"
"Oh, sir!" Joe replied in the seaman"s stock reply to the Skipper"s stock question, "I love the Navy!"
"You"d better show it!" the Skipper said gruffly. "If I catch you in trouble again, I"ll bounce you right out of the Navy." Then he added the crusher: "And you"ll find yourself in the Army!"
Joe came to attention and left. After that he slept under a mosquito netting. It was strange, but out there in the middle of the Pacific, with an island almost to himself, Joe was cramped and stifled. He would wake up at night gasping for breath. He finally solved the problem by compounding his earlier felony. He stole a dynamotor and rigged up an electric fan. "If they ask me about it," he muttered to himself, "I"ll say I got it from one of them wrecked planes." He scuffed the dynamotor up a bit to make it look like salvage. The fan was a wonder and helped him to breathe. Once he stuck his hand in it, and several times mosquito netting got caught in the blades. But it was worth it!
The SeaBees landed late one evening. Joe was on the rude dock when they came ash.o.r.e. He was surprised to see how happy they were to be on land again, even a place like the rock. He guessed that everybody in the Navy wanted to be where he wasn"t. He often thought of that night in later years. It was the time he met Luther Billis!
Joe had never seen anybody quite like Luther Billis. The SeaBee was big, fat, and brown. He wore a gold ring in his left ear and several bracelets. He was beautifully tattooed. Billis was accompanied by a young Jewish boy who trailed along behind him. He accosted Joe in a bright, breezy manner. "Hiya, Joe! Whaddaya know?"
"h.e.l.lo!" Joe replied.
"Got a ship"s store here?" Billis asked.
"Over there!" Joe pointed.
"Well, come along, Joe, and I"ll set you up! Won a lot of money on this trip. Teaching the boys a few facts of life!" He whisked out a bundle of banknotes. "Come along, Hyman!" he shouted peremptorily at the Jewish boy.
When Billis had treated half a dozen men whom he had never seen before, he pointed admiringly at his Jewish friend. "I want to tell you," he said. "There"s a genius. A college professor!" Billis smiled proudly and his friend grinned. "Professor Hyman Weinstein, but it could just as well be Einstein!" He laughed uproariously at his joke. "The Professor can speak five languages. Toss them a little Yiddish, Hyman." Weinstein, who found in Billis both a champion and a wonderful friend, spoke a few words of the Old Testament in Yiddish.
"He ain"t kidding, either!" a boy on the sidelines whispered. "The Psalms."
"German, Hyman!" Billis ordered like a ringmaster displaying the tricks of a prize lion. The Professor rattled off some German words.
"Wouldn"t that kill Hitler!" Billis shouted. "Professor, give them some Latin." Hyman obliged with some legal phrases, and Billis thereupon asked for French. When his friend had spoken several phrases in French, Billis demanded quiet. "This one will kill you, guys. Give them some Russian, Hyman."
As Hyman rattled off a long series of Russian words, Billis started singing "Yo, heave ho!" to the tune of the Volga Boatmen. His listeners started to laugh. "Knock it off! Knock it off!" he shouted. "Them Bolsheviks ain"t doin" so bad! Hitler ain"t laughin"!" He threw his big hand around Hyman"s shoulder and pulled the little Jew to the bench on which he and Joe were sitting.
The next three hours were the most wonderful Joe had spent on the rock. He didn"t know that sailors could be such fine people. Billis wasn"t afraid of anything, had been everywhere. And Weinstein could speak five languages. They talked about everything. Billis thought there was a G.o.d and that after the war there would be a big boom in aviation. Weinstein thought France would be a great country again. "What do you think, Joe?" Billis inquired. Joe was flabbergasted that a stranger would want to know what he thought. But, encouraged by their inquiry, he blurted out his philosophy.
"I think it"s dumb to be on this rock when you guys are going out to do some fightin". All I do is sit here day after day. Three times a week planes come in, and I gas them up. The rest of the time I try to keep out of trouble. It"s a h.e.l.l of a way to spend the war. I feel ashamed of myself!"
Billis was appalled at Joe"s statement. "Whatsa matter?" he demanded. "You ain"t thinkin" right at all, Joe! You make me very surprised! I thought you was a much sounder man than that!"
"What did I say wrong?" Joe inquired.
"About you not bein" of any use? If you wasn"t here, who would be?" Billis asked contentiously. "You know d.a.m.n well who would be here. The j.a.ps! And supposin" the j.a.ps was here when we broke down? Where would we go for repairs? We would be in a h.e.l.l of a mess, wouldn"t we?" He appeared to be furious at Joe for turning the island over to the j.a.ps.
"I never thought of it that way," Joe replied.
"We all can"t fight the j.a.ps," Billis added sagely.
"That"s right, Luther," Joe agreed. "Are you and Hyman goin" up to the front?"
They didn"t know where they were going, but they had a lot of heavy machinery. Probably going to some island. Going to invade some island. What you goin" to do when peace comes?" Billis asked. "Back to my shop in Columbus, Ohio. I"m a shoemaker."
"What you goin" to do if we all start wearin" plastic shoes?" Billis demanded. "Won"t have to have them mended?" The thought shocked Joe. He had never thought of such a thing before. He had no answer. People would always have to have their shoes fixed. But Luther Billis" agile mind was on to new problems. "You got a girl?" he asked. "No," Joe replied. "I ain"t."
"You ain"t got a girl?" Billis shouted. "What the h.e.l.l kind of a sailor are you?"
"I never went with girls very much," Joe explained. "I tell you what I do," Billis said with his hand about Joe"s shoulder. "I"m gonna get you a girl. I like you. You"re a real Joe, ain"t he, Hyman?" Hyman agreed.
"Look at the moon over the water!" Weinstein said. Billis turned to study the rare sight of moonlight upon tropic waters with palm trees along the sh.o.r.e and a ship at the dock.
"G.o.d, that"s beautiful!" he said. "You ought to come down here lots, Joe. You ought to look at that. Like Hyman just done."
The three men sat there in silence and watched the moonlight wax and wane along the waves. Never before in sixteen months had Joe seen that strange and lovely thing. He suddenly wanted to go with Billis and the Professor. He wanted to be with men that talked happily and saw new things. He wanted...
But at midnight the boat pulled out. The SeaBees were gone. Joe followed the ship as long as it rode in the moonlight. He had never before felt so strange. Great inchoate thoughts welled up within him. He could not sleep, and so he walked along the edge of the island. The airstrip shone in the moonlight. "It"s beautiful," he said. "And look at the water bouncin" on them cliffs. It"s beautiful."
The world was beautiful that night. It was beautiful as only a tropic night on some distant island can be beautiful. A million men in the South Seas would deny it to one another, would ridicule it in their letters home. But it was beautiful. Perhaps some of the million would deny the beauty because, like Joe, they had never seen it.
Something like this was going through Joe"s mind when he became aware that men were behind him. He started to walk along the edge of the cliff when a light flashed in his eyes. "No you don"t!" a voice shouted. Quickly two men ran up and grabbed him.
"Here"s another of them," the voice with the light cried. Joe was hauled off to a jeep.
"Bunch of d.a.m.ned bootleggers!" a gruff voice said as he was thrust into a small truck. He looked at the other prisoners. He knew none of them.
"He ain"t one of us!" the apparent leader of the gang said. "Keep your mouth shut!" the gruff voice ordered. "But he ain"t one of us!"
"Shut up!"
"On your way, big time!" the leader of the gang grunted in surly tones.
That night Joe slept in the brig. He found himself among a group of six enlisted men who had been running a still in a cave along the cliffs. They had finally been caught. They were making pure alcohol from canned corn and sugar. They had a market for all they could make. Each man had been clearing two hundred dollars a month.
Joe studied them. They were guys just like him. He wondered why they got mixed up in such a racket. He wondered if Luther Billis was like them. Luther had lots of money. But somehow he felt that Luther was different. These men were in trouble.
"I"m gonna spill the whole story!" a little machinist"s mate said. He had built the still. "If they try to pin a rap on me, I"ll spill the whole story!"
"You do," the leader whispered hoa.r.s.ely, "and I"ll kill you. That"s a promise!"
But next morning the little machinist"s mate did spill the whole story. Joe was shocked. The revelation came shortly after the Skipper had ordered Joe to stand aside. Obviously Joe wasn"t implicated. So there he stood, by the window, while the machinist"s mate told how a lieutenant had sold them canned corn by the case and sugar by the barrel. He had taken one-fourth of the profits. Made four hundred bucks a month.
That was one time the Skipper didn"t bellow. "Get him right away," he said in a very low voice. No one spoke until the lieutenant appeared. He was a young man. He took one look at the six culprits, grew faint, and sat down. "Have you anything to say?" the Skipper asked.
"No, sir!" the lieutenant replied.
"You are confined to your quarters!" the Skipper said briefly. "Take the rest of these men to the brig." Joe felt all funny inside. He knew his turn was next.
"Well," the skipper said. "So it"s you again! Always in trouble!"
"Oh, no, sir!"
"How did you happen to be down at the cliffs? One of their watchers?"
"Oh, no, sir! I never had anything to do with these men. Never." What were you doing at the cliff?"
Joe swallowed hard. At first the words wouldn"t come. "I was watching the ship go, sir!"
In a flash, the Skipper saw himself, once on Haiti. A ship was leaving the bay. He was an ensign then, and sure that he would be an admiral one day. He could understand why young men look at ships. "You better stay out of trouble, young feller," he said. That was all.
It would not be fair to say that Joe had forgotten Billis. But he had ceased thinking constantly about the strange fellow when a letter came to the rock. It was for Joe and came from Miss Essie Schultz, Perkasie, Pennsylvania. Joe read the letter avidly: Dear Joe, Please excuse me for writing when we haven"t been introduced, but my good friend Mr. Luther Billis told me that you didn"t have any girl to write to. I write letters to seventeen sailors and one soldier. I think you boys are the bravest men in America. I would never be brave enough to fight against the j.a.ps. I am glad we have boys like you to fight for us. I wish I had a good looking photograph to send you, but you know how it is these days. One or two prints is all you can get. So I am sending you this one. The one in the middle is me. Skinny, eh? I work in a pants factory. At present we are making sailors pants, so if yours don"t fit, blame me. (Ha!) I like to dance and like Benny Goodman and Louie Prima the best. I listen to the radio a good deal and read some books every year. Mr. Billis said you were a very swell guy and that I would like you. I believe I would. Won"t you please write and tell me all about yourself? I promise, to answer right away.