Letter from Beatrice to Mike West

Today's post is just a quick update to the one from the weekend - scans of the original letter from Beatrice Givan to Mike West are now available after the break.

Thank you again Mike for saving this letter for so many years, this was truly a wonderful present.

A present from California

Earlier in the week I received a wonderful email from my good friend Mike West who lives with his wife out in Camarillo, California. As I have written in previous posts, Mike (as seen below in all of his hula glory!) was a good friend of Grandpa's from the war.

"Hunting gal bags 52nd deer"

Months after finding an article from the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune featuring a woman dressed in orange camo, sitting atop a deer lawn ornament, I had the pleasure of talking to Mrs. Celette Couette, the widow of Russell "Frenchie" Couette.

The power of search

On Monday, February 21, I heard the familiar "pop" notification sound on my phone, indicating I had a new email message from one of the half dozen accounts I maintain (and yes, they all serve a distinct and useful purpose!). Assuming that it was just another Groupon, some deal from Amazon or Lowe's, or a Facebook status update, I opened my inbox and was surprised to see a message from the Picasa Web Gallery that hosts the photos from Grandpa Givan's treasure chest of World War II mementos.

A present from Mr. Mike West

This afternoon when I arrived home, I was welcomed with a wonderful present in the mail - a package from Mike West, one of the men who served with Grandpa Givan during the war. In the package was a letter, a couple issues of the Leatherneck magazine, the Fighting Fourth newsletter, a copy of a letter from the son of a Japanese soldier on Iwo Jima, and best of all, more photos. Of the half-dozen photos, only one was already a part of my collection, the rest will be scanned and hopefully available tomorrow or Wednesday.  One of the photos, while simply a photocopy of the original made me smile - Mike had written the names of the men on the back (George Minch Jr, Nazareth "Curly" Eannacone and himself), along with the location (Camp Maui, February 25, 1944, after the Marshall Island invasion) and at the bottom, the caption "Phil's camera work".

The Ralstons

On Tuesday night I had the pleasure of speaking with Mrs. Betty Ralston, the wife of Wallace Ralston. I met the Ralstons on March 19, 2000 while I was working on my thesis, and it is a memory I still cherish ten years later.

It was by chance that I managed to even find them.  With nothing but the name "Wallace Ralston" written on the back of a few photos from Camp Maui to go on, I began scouring the Internet to see if anyone matching that name might have been Yahoo'ed (this might seem strange, but Google was just a start-up back then!), spidered, crawled, or indexed amongst the vastness of the world wide web.