Last week I received some old family items from my sister’s estate. Among the items were about 100 love letters written to my mom by 2 different guys concurrently over the 5 years before she married my dad. From the 3 letters I read it seems that neither of these guys knew about the other, or about my dad’s relationship with mom. (All lived in different towns.)
The 3 letters I read were romantic (not lurid, thank Og!). I’m kind of fascinated by this, since my mom never struck me as the sort to have this sort of entanglement. Still, though, it feels weird to read this stuff. Intrusive, I guess. A brief internet search shows all the parties are dead, and I’m the last of my immediate family, so no living person’s privacy is at stake here. Should I feel weird about reading this stuff? Has anyone else run into the situation?
My mom and dad had a long-distance relationship for several months before they got married. I’ve got the letters they wrote each other during that time. My mom is still alive, but my dad died when I was 2 1/2, so it’s interesting to read something by someone I never really knew.
I feel fortunate to be able to get a feeling for what they were like together, although there is always a little discomfort as well. (They’re very prim and proper letters. I should go dig them up; I haven’t read them in a while.)
Oh, yeah, gardentraveler, you get the prim and proper letters. I have the ones my parents wrote before they were married, between the time my dad proposed and then left town for a new job, and the time they were married. Those are fine, except for the mushy stuff I didn’t really expect. But the ones he wrote when he was working away from home after they were married, or when she was back here visiting her mother? Whooo! Should have warning labels on them, they should. I did not need to know that stuff.
The big surprise about my dad was rumored before he died, but confirmed afterward. He had always told us he was married the first time in November of '28, but he was a little vague about it. Turned out he was married in March or '29. My oldest half-brother was born in September of that year. Dad went so far as to hide his marriage certificate, even from my mom. We found it after he died, buried in with some other stuff. Old stinker.
One of the PostSecrets books has a card from a woman who discovered that her grandmother had been a nude/erotic model when she was young. The woman had always admired her grandma for being ahead of her time, and this just cemented it for her. But she notes that she’s decided to hide this from her mother (grandma’s daughter) and other living relatives, because their reactions would be quite different.
After my dad died (having been predeceased by my mom by several years) my sister and the grandkids found the most amazing collection of porn videos in his house. And Viagra.
:eek:
mls, that happened when my sons cleared out my brother’s place. Hundreds of porn tapes, and letters from women that he must have met from answering ads in the paper. (He didn’t have a computer, thank heaven.) My brother was 60 and had been married four times, but was single when he died.
When my dad died in California, a friend of his sent me a box of papers and photos. I knew he’d been married several times but I didn’t know the dates. Turns out he was married when he met my mom and didn’t get divorced until after my brother was born.
I was also surprised to find that I have two half-brothers. Mom never told me that, but maybe she didn’t know.
My grandparents had an interesting first year of marriage.
See, they’d had a fight and broke their engagement, with her giving him the ring back. She went back to him first, and he wanted to get married right away. As in right now! But she had a job teaching in a one room school and would lose her job if she married.
So Grandpa arranged matters. They took the train from rural Kansas to Liberty, Missouri, which is one county past where Kansas City is. He figured that way the legal notice wouldn’t be likely to appear in a paper anyone they knew would read. After getting the license they took the train back to Kansas City, Missouri and a pastor in a Lutheran church there married them. Grandpa knew the man from when Grandpa was in auto mechanics school in KC.
After spending the weekend in KC they went back to Kansas. She stayed with her folks(Her mom and dad knew about the marriage, the only ones) and he stayed in a boarding house in Topeka. Weekends they’d see each other. Sometimes she went to Topeka and they’d go to a hotel. Grandma says “I still remember the way those desk clerks would look at us!” This was 1926.
It is kind of neat to think about my grandparents being young and romantic, knowing they had to sneak around to get it on.
