Widow Finds Precious Past in Regained Letters

Each night, LaVerne Jenkins’ late husband’s words call her into the past, when she was a young newlywed maintaining life with a military man by mail.

The 90-year-old widow reaches into a dog-eared box for the love letters she and Kayler Jenkins exchanged daily during World War II. She pulls out memories of their time apart.

“Darling, to tell you I love you and miss you would only be an understatement,” she reads.

“Not only can I hear his voice,” she says, “I can relive every minute of it.”

The white gift box of letters near the fireplace seems as much a fixture in Jenkins’ living room as her family photos and antiques. But the box is a new arrival, which just finished a mysterious 60-year journey home.

Even stranger, perhaps, is that until its return, Jenkins never even knew it was gone.

Jenkins’ love story began in Ohio on a blind date with a Harvard law student home for break in 1936. Six years later, just after the U.S. was drawn into World War II, they were married.

But this latest chapter unfolded in an antique shop in Harrogate, Tenn., a few weeks back.

Gail Williamson was driving past the little shop on the Tennessee-Kentucky-Virginia border when she saw a man sprawled on the front lawn. She swung her car into a U-turn and went inside to get help. It turned out the man was a regular on the lawn and was just napping. “Well, I’m here, I may as well look around,” thought Williamson, a retiree from nearby Tazewell, Tenn.

The letters, hundreds of them, were selling for $14 a bundle. They made her think of her own family’s heirlooms. “The thought of them slipping out of [my] family hands is more than I can bear,” she says.

Although she didn’t buy the letters, she jotted down some names and addresses from them. She would try to find the owners herself.

“It was just the sweetness and the tenderness. You could just feel the love this young couple had for each other,” she says.

When she got home, her husband got on the computer and quickly found a listing for T. Kayler Jenkins in Buffalo. LaVerne Jenkins has kept the phone listed in his name, though he died of cancer in 1973.

Williamson called the number.

“This isn’t LaVerne, is it?”

“Yes.”

“Oh my God, I have your love letters!”

“What are you talking about?”

For all Jenkins knew, all her letters -- from her husband, her parents and anyone else -- were stored safely in her attic. In fact, she had burned a box of her and Kayler’s letters in the fireplace last winter. They weren’t something she wanted just anyone reading. (They’d warmed her once when Kayler sent them and again that day.)

But this box had somehow gotten separated from the others. Jenkins figures it was during a move in the 1940s, when the couple put some belongings in storage and sent for them later.

“I thought they delivered everything,” she says. “I hadn’t missed anything.”

The storage building was recently converted to loft housing and its contents sold off, Jenkins says. She believes an antiques dealer bought the letters and sold them to Anna Willis, whose shop, Past Time Antiques, Williamson happened upon.

When Williamson told Willis the story, Willis mailed the letters to Jenkins’ perfectly kept home on a quiet cul-de-sac in suburban Buffalo. The letters had been stored in a box she’d bought at an antique show about five years ago but had only recently opened.

When the letters arrived, “It was like Christmas,” Jenkins says.

“I talked to [Kayler] that night and said, ‘Guess what I got today, a whole box of your letters.’

“I don’t know if he heard me, but he should have. I shouted it,” she says with a laugh.

Jenkins has been reading a few of the letters, each four to six pages long, every night. Any more leave her awash in emotion.

“The first two nights, I read about 25. I couldn’t sleep,” she says.

The letters mostly talk about day-to-day life during wartime, of movies seen and books read. He, an attorney, wrote of his work in the Army’s classification unit, assigning new enlistees; she, of her work teaching. He wrote of the possibility of “going across” but was never sent overseas, remaining stateside after training in Kearns, Utah, while his wife stayed in Buffalo, substitute teaching and working at Curtiss-Wright, the maker of warplanes.

They wrote of canoe trips taken and bridge games missed. The den where Jenkins, energetic and fit, still regularly hosts bridge parties boasts a shelf full of trophies she and Kayler won playing cards, along with her own prizes for bowling and golf.

The couple wrote daily from the time he was drafted in January 1943 for more than two years, breaking only when they were together during furloughs. Jenkins once tried teaching her husband shorthand so they could correspond more privately. He never did get the hang of it.

While LaVerne Jenkins was saving her husband’s letters, he was saving hers. When their separation ended, they stored them together.

“My dearest darling,” begin letters from Kayler to LaVerne. Each is numbered. The 200th notes the milestone is a reminder “of another day and night that I would have rather spent with you.”

She reads from one of hers to him, mailed with a 3-cent stamp: “Take good care of yourself, darling, so you won’t get sick this winter.” But if he did, she wrote, “I’m coming out to hold your hand so the nurse doesn’t have the pleasure.”

Since the unexpected return of her treasured memories, Jenkins has promised a niece who is interested in family history that these letters won’t meet the same fiery fate as the box last winter.