Greg Cassin needs your help.
After sifting through a flea market, Cassin a HIV Awareness advocate and lecturer from San Francisco, found a box full of love letters sent from soldiers in the 1940s.
Some of these letters come from servicemen from Oakland and Cassin is trying to reunite these pieces of history with their contemporary ancestors.
He turned to Craigslist in an attempt to either find the owners of these missives or find a historical society interested in taking on the project.
Many are from serviceman John H. Thomas Jr. who lived at 720 Willow St. in Oakland. Cassin says he’d like to “Find the families to return these treasures of family and relational history.... and if the families are found I'd love to be a part of the return."
What Cassin finds odd about the correspondences is the sheer collection of them that he found. He notes that there are multiple sets of letters and responses from several different people. Some of them are even written in Chinese calligraphy.
These letters gave him a glimpse into loves long past. Via the evolution of their contents he saw how Mertie Greenwood writing to David Oler eventually became Mertie Oler herself. He also adds that one memorable note includes a serviceman spouting love to two women at once.
Joking aside, the love is palpable in these stories and the comfort they brought is keenly felt. One reads:
“My Lovely Darling, .. I doubt if you will ever know how much your letters really do mean to me… I do not think I will ever forget the anxious days I spent during the time between my departure ...and the day I received your last letter.”
These letters may be decades old but their sentiment transcends time.
If you have any information on these stories and their writers or know of an organization willing to take on the project please contact Cassin at greggcassinamm@gmail.com .
Photos courtesy of Greg Cassin