By Victor Greto
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. – When Jimmie Wilson awoke in a hospital bed from a 2-month-long coma, the first and last thing he did was move his arm to beckon his wife Marjorie to come closer.
“He whispered to me, ‘I love you,’” Marjorie says of that day more than three years ago when her husband of 60 years died.
It was only one of thousands of times Jimmie had whispered those words to her.
Now, love sounds like the whisper of dark, fading pages shifting in mottled, wrinkled hands.
Wilmington native Marjorie Nock Wilson’s 85-year-old fingers have sifted many times through the hundreds of pages that comprise her and her husband’s Second World War correspondence over the past six decades.
It took her several years – before and after her husband Jimmie’s death in February 2003 – to painstakingly transcribe them into a computer
Altogether, the uncensored letters and notes and telegrams pile up barely two inches thick, but Marjorie’s and Jimmie’s love – tentative at first, ambiguous and flirting, crowded with longing and a need to be loved in a world at total war – still bloom even in faded pen and typewriter ink.
Marjorie’s 400-page collection of their correspondence, Dear Jimmie, Dearest Marge: Love and War” (Llumina Press, $20.95), reflects both the tenor of everyday life during the wartime America of the early 1940s and the evolution of their passion.
The passion was all his, at first.
The letters show Marjorie, still a spry woman whose speaking voice has been slowed by dysphonia, a condition in her larynx that makes her sound hoarse, to be a sometimes oblivious, always intelligent and fun-loving 20-year-old, who loved to drink, shop and buy Big Band records.
She also was a recent University of Delaware graduate who majored in French and Spanish, and was appointed an interpreter and translator in the U.S. Bureau of Censorship in Miami after the war began in December 1941.
Her relationship with Jimmie, whom she met through Jimmie’s sister in Wilmington, begins only in friendship.
“He was a playboy before he went into the Army,” Marjorie says of Jimmie, also a Wilmington native, who left the University of Delaware after only a year and was drafted in early 1941. “He wasn’t a very good student.”
But, like Marjorie, the letters show him to be a good writer, whose sole purpose toward the end of that year was to marry Marjorie, who was in love with another young man at the time.
“She had two other serious loves before him,” says Marjorie’s and Jimmie’s youngest daughter, Midge, now a sociology professor at DePaul University in Chicago. “So I think she was a little wounded at the time and tender-hearted and didn’t want to get involved too soon after getting her heart broken.”
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The charm of the couple’s letters lie in their childlike simplicity and seriousness, their focus on everyday things, and their growing understanding of the complexity of the war and their feelings for each other.
“I just read [American foreign correspondent William Shirer’s] ‘Berlin Diary,’” Marjorie wrote to Jimmie in July 1941 in one of their first letters. “Believe it or not, I finally found out what has been going on for the last four years.”
Two weeks later, Jimmie responds in a postscript that he also plans to “look up ‘Berlin Diary’ so I, too, will know what happened in the last four years.”
Letters of these kind are fodder for historians.
“They’re a snapshot into the personality of America at that time,” says John Hurt, 68, a professor of history at the University of Delaware, of the correspondence of many during the war. “They’re insights into the character of people who served mostly without complaining, in a war for stakes they did not completely understand.”
Marjorie’s world as a $90-a-month patent file clerk at DuPont’s Experimental Station shortly after she graduated college, playing golf, watching movies and trying to get the perfect suntan at Rehoboth Beach, contrasts sharply with Jimmie’s initial experience as an M.P., and then as he trained as a fighter pilot.
“I spent my last penny in Rehoboth and I haven’t even been able to buy a coke all this week,” Marjorie complains in August 1941.
“I was posted in the slums and a had a very busy night keeping the rest of the world sober,” Jimmie wrote from Fort Devens, Mass., that same month.
Marjorie also was unafraid to detail her escapades with other boys.
“Some boy who lives behind us just got a brand new ’42 Plymouth and his trying awfully hard to get some mileage on it,” she wrote to Jimmie in October 1941, “so Barb and I obligingly went riding with him and another boy. He only got as far as Elkton (he had hoped to get 100 miles on it last night) and we finally ended up in Newark, drinking beer at the Deer Park. What a way to go riding!”
At 20, Marjorie enjoyed drinking highballs and beer, and both her and Jimmie’s letters reveal a generation that indulged in liquor frequently.
The letters also reflect their prejudices, both innocent and cutting.
After visiting Marjorie in Richmond for an October weekend, Jimmie wrote to tell her that he created a disturbance when, “I, like a dumb bell, [sat] in the back of the bus with the colored people. The bus driver had to come back and get me to move. So, of course, when I get up my hat falls off and I have to go chasing it down the aisle.”
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It isn’t hard to see the Marjorie of 1941 in the Marjorie of 2006.
Her face, drawn and tight with mottled paper-thin pale skin etched with wrinkles, looks as eager, even anxious, for the next question or experience.
Her CD collection contains classical music and Big Band sounds, just like the records she bought during the war.
“I just went out with whoever asked me,” Marjorie she says of her time in Wilmington and Miami just before and during the war.
With distance, and as in her early letters to Jimmie, there is barely a hint of sentimentality in her voice.
She enjoyed Jimmie’s letters, she says of their initial correspondence, “I answered them, although in my mind signing them ‘yours’ to me meant yours truly or yours sincerely – nothing more personal than that.”
She shows a picture of her boyfriend at the time, George. He’s slouching against a wall and holding a pipe. “He broke my heart,” she says, when he went away.
Even as Jimmie became more important to her as time passed, the time period dictated other expectations.
Out of the Depression and into the war, “People expected to be separated for years,” Marjorie says. “You took it for granted. And we were so united then.”
People don’t realize how patriotic the generation of the 1940s was, says Hurt.
“The attack on Pearl Harbor said we had to settle up with the Japanese as much as possible,” he says. “There were fistfights at the recruiting office. Some committed suicide if they were rejected.”
Pearl Harbor also changed everything for both Marjorie and Jimmie.
She moved to an air-condition-less Miami to become a censor – reading international mail – and he enrolled to become a pilot in the Army Air Corps.
As importantly, the war accelerated Jimmie’s passion, and he persisted in banging away at Marjorie’s indifference.
Happy training to be a pilot, Jimmie seemed to feel more comfortable expressing his feelings. “If I could see you often I think I would reach a height of contentment that I have never reached in my life,” he wrote from Maxwell Field, Ala., in April 1942. “The moon was beautiful and I thought of you all night long.”
That very same week Marjorie related how she “carried on an innocent but enjoyable flirtation” with a soldier she met on the train to Miami, and how “he took me back to the club car and bought me a couple of drinks that almost had me reeling.”
But tugging lightly at the end of that letter is a longing Marjorie began to feel for Jimmie. “Please write me soon and often – I’m so lonesome.”
If Marjorie’s flirtations bothered Jimmie, he never showed it in his letters.
“You always think of your parents as old,” says Marjorie’s and Jimmie’s son, Jeff, 59. “It was a different view of my folks, more so my dad than my mom. I’d never thought of him as a romantic guy in any way.”
Their oldest daughter, Betsy, 60, says she knew nothing of her father’s adventures during the war, or the letters.
“I didn’t know she was resistant to his advances,” she says, “how reluctant she was and how persistent he was.”
Nor did she know much about the more than 50 missions he eventually flew in Europe, and the places he visited, including Italy, India and Egypt. “But no one then talked about it much,” she says. “They did their duty and it was over.”
Hurt says that stoicism about the war was a trait of many of the war’s veterans. “A lot of vets in the country believed that if you talked about yourself too much, it sounded funny, because a lot of people went through the same thing.”
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Jimmie tried to respond in kind to Marjorie’s flirtation with others, but inevitably ended up thinking of her.
In June 1942, he told her about a Saturday night date, “and she was almost as good looking as you,” he wrote. “She was a good dancer and, all in all, very good company. But it ended up that the more I danced with her, the more I missed you.”
Their daughter Midge said her father always “played it cool, but it was pretty tough for him. I admired this about him,” she says of Jimmie. “He said, This is who I am and I am going after her and getting her.”
Marjorie saw him in Alabama for a couple of days that month, which intensified his desire.
As he continued pilot instruction in Bennetsville, S.C., and passed all the tests, he became even more brave with her.
In November, he hinted at marriage.
The following month, he wrote, “I love you more each second of every minute of every day of every month of every year forever and ever,” he wrote that December.
Three days before Christmas, Jimmie sent Marjorie an engagement ring. She received it in the middle of the night. She did not say yes.
“Even before the letters, we’ve all known the family mythology,” says Midge, “that my father sent her the ring to ask her to marry him. She opened the box and fell back to sleep. She wasn’t jumping up and down with excitement.”
It didn’t help that the ring didn’t fit her finger. And in a letter Marjorie received the day after he sent the ring, he admitted her reluctance.
“I realize that I am not the prince charming who comes riding out of a cloud of silver to suddenly sweep you off your feet,” he wrote on Dec. 31, 1942. “I find, and think you find, that I am a sort of steady clumsy sort of lover that you have to make allowances for from time to time.”
“I agonized over it,” Marjorie says 65 years later. But after Jimmie became a Second Lieutenant in Columbus, Miss., he went to see her in Miami on Jan. 21, 1943, and stayed a week.
That did it. Jimmie looked snappy in his uniform, he spent money, took her to nightclubs, rented a car. “He pressed his suit,” Marjorie says. “I realized I did love him. I was so lonesome after he left.”
She’s not misremembering. During that visit, she stopped having her cake and eating it, too.
When he returned to a base in South Carolina, she wrote him in February: “Damn it – it was very easy before you came, I had the satisfaction of knowing that I was loved completely and without compromise, yet none of the suffering that goes with longing for someone – because I didn’t long for you then as I do now. It seems as though half of me went with you.”
As they hurtled toward marriage, Marjorie ended a letter less than a week later with an astonishing admission: “Even my own ambition, which was a determining factor before, is beginning to look mighty pale.”
The married March 1, 1943, in the army chapel at Greenville, S.C., air base.
“What Marge has done, she’s done for future generations,” says Andrew Carroll, who has edited two volumes of war correspondence, “War Letters” and “Behind the Lines.”
“When they come across a trunkful of letters, people get intimidated, but when someone goes through the painstaking effort of compiling the letters, it helps the younger generation to understand the sacrifice of those who come before them,” Carroll says. “It’s not just Marge’s family who will benefit, but others.”
In 1998, Carroll founded the Legacy Project, which urges people their wartime letters and e-mail.
“What makes these letters so powerful, are the supposedly mundane things that bring these individuals back to life,” he says, “a nugget of what it’s like to live back then. That can be as compelling as landing at D-Day. These are our country’s great undiscovered literature, and they’re in people’s attics or basements. They’re the first draft of our national autobiography.”