Cache of letters finds an audience new -- and old

When the soldier poured out his deepest feelings in dozens of letters, he had a single objective: to charm the girl he left behind during the Korean War.

More than half a century later, Cpl. Jack Fitzpatrick also won over a shopper who spotted a stack of his old correspondence in an antiques store. In an era of cellphones, e-mail and instant messaging, his leisurely prose -- and the way he envisioned his and his girl’s future together -- was captivating.

“I’ll help you with the dishes and then we can go in the other room and put on some records. If we turn out the lights, people will think we have gone out for the evening. If you’d like, we could push the furniture back a little and dance. Seems I can’t sit still when music is played and you are near.”

The letters made minor celebrities of Fitzpatrick and his wife, Annamae, when they were read on a Chicago radio station recently. For the couple, now 77, the attention has provided an opportunity to think about commitment, the value of documenting one’s life experiences and, of course, memories.

“Things were different,” said the former Annamae Cushnick, the object of the soldier’s affections. “Men held doors open and treated you like a lady. They didn’t swear. I don’t miss the old days, but I sure did enjoy them.”

The letters are to be returned to the couple. Annamae Fitzpatrick, initially a bit miffed that such intimate feelings became public, says she is mainly thrilled the papers have been located.

She remembers how she ran to the mailbox for those heart-thumping words, which arrived almost every day between 1950 and 1952, bearing postmarks from exotic locales.

“No one writes anymore,” she said. “Even the grandkids send thank-you notes by e-mail.”

The couple met at a dance, when Jack Fitzpatrick spotted a young woman with a nice smile and pretty hair. She loved his thoughtfulness and his smooth dancing.

They planned to marry when he returned from the war.

“The first thing I think of is just getting home to you and right after that my mind skips a couple months and it is the 11th of October 1952. Why, I already know what is going to happen. I have seen it a thousand times in my dreams. You and your bridesmaids will be hurrying and straightening out your hair, fixing your gown and everyone will be nervous. I’ll be in the sacristy of St. Sabina’s hoping that you will hurry.”

The ceremony came off without a hitch, and the newlyweds started out in a small apartment with rented furniture. They moved to a house in the early 1970s, and their family grew to three children and nine grandchildren, ages 28 to 11.

It’s not clear how exactly the stash of letters got to the antiques store, but Annamae Fitzpatrick said the couple had to downsize when they moved into a condominium in 2004. Recently she has been living in a nursing home because of some health problems.

“It broke my heart, but I had to make a choice ... there was just no room,” she said, noting that they went from seven closets, a basement and a garage to just two closets.

Their daughter, Sharon Fitzpatrick Bryar, thinks she might inadvertently have carted the letters off to a neighborhood thrift store. “Apparently, we didn’t clean out the drawers as well as we thought,” Bryar said. “Gosh, I sure hope there were no stocks and bonds left anywhere.”

The correspondence surfaced at Antique Market III in St. Charles, Ill., where Ellen Brouwer had purchased a box of letters from another vendor. Julie Fedora was visiting the store to browse with her husband, who is into baseball memorabilia, and found herself enthralled.

“Everything was so personal and descriptive, how they imagined their children and grandchildren. They were just basic, everyday things like going to the movies and driving down Lake Shore Drive, where they would park at the planetarium and look at the stars,” said Fedora, 38.

She decided the letters needed to be returned to their rightful owners. After all, Fedora said, she’d saved all the letters her husband had sent home in the early ‘90s during the Persian Gulf War.

Fedora purchased a couple of the letters and sent them to Kathy O’Malley at WGN radio, who shared a few passages on the air, thinking someone might know Fitzpatrick’s children or grandchildren.

But it was the author himself who heard his long-forgotten words as he was finishing an errand at Kmart.

“I got into the car and heard my name,” Fitzpatrick said. “Then I heard them say ‘Annamae Cushnick’ and I thought, ‘What the hell is going on? How do they know me?’ It was really something.”

Fitzpatrick, a retired salesman, called in -- delighting listeners who had been lighting up the phones with teary calls.

When Brouwer heard that the author had been located, she handed over the letters -- more than 150 in all -- to Fedora, gratis.

“I just loved the history,” Brouwer said. “They were so sweet and from such a different era that I wanted to pass them on to others to enjoy.”

“He was just so completely in love with her and this is such a lost form of expression,” Fedora said.

Indeed, a 2004 study by the U.S. Postal Service found that personal mail had decreased by about one-third during the preceding 25 years. Whereas Fitzpatrick typed out his thoughts on a Smith Corona, today’s soldiers often rely on electronic alternatives.

The letters are even more valuable to the couple because, Fitzpatrick said, once he returned he never wrote another letter.

“Even though my dad was crazy about my mom, I never thought he was a real romantic guy,” their daughter said. “But I guess he was different on paper.”

“I try to think of other things to tell you about besides our future ... but that is all I ever think of,” Fitzpatrick wrote before Christmas in 1951. “Would you step under the mistletoe with me? For how long? Not long ... just three or four hundred years.”