These two notes provide a post script to Ced’s Amazing Adventure.
Dear Cedric,
You don’t know how disappointed we were at not seeing you when you were in this part of the country this summer. I received your card and had planned on going down to Uncle Frank’s to see you when, according to our local physician’s diagnosis, Dale was overcome by the heat and the doctor refused to give his consent to Dale’s leaving. When we did get away you had left for the farm again and we couldn’t take time to go up there. We were terribly sorry not to have seen you and hope you, and the others of the family, will come this way again soon. (Dale’s trouble turned out to be atropine poisoning so wasn’t as serious as it might have been.)
Love,
Helen (Gillespie)
October eight
This note was mailed in Little Falls, Minnesota. I’m not sure how Helen Gillespie is related to Franklin Peabody and when I get some extra time I will try to figure that out. She may have been his younger sister, Helen Sophia, but I need to do some more digging to confirm that.
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2011 Park Ave., Topeka, Kansas, March 18/35
Dear Cedric:-
I am gathering up, and sending out to my various kindred, a number of trinkets that might interest them. My years must be growing steadily shorter, – and I wish to place my treasures with those that will appreciate and value them.
To YOU, therefore, I am sending an unusually good photo – portrait of your grandfather (Kemper Foster Peabody, Arla Peabody’s father), taken when he was young. It looks exactly as HE did, those days.
I have never been more busy, in all the 79 years of my life, than I am, just now. Several hours at the typewriter, daily, and I am compelled to make EVERYTHING BRIEF.
But I send love to you all: with my very best wishes,
Faithfully yours,
PB Peabody
(Putnam Burton Peabody, oldest brother of Kemper Foster Peabody, Arla Peabody Guion’s Father.)
And so we come to the end of Ced’s Coming of Age Adventure in September, 1934. Ced’s next adventure begins in 1940 when he and his older brother Dan, back from Venezuela for a year, leave Trumbull to travel to Anchorage, Alaska, where they hope to find jobs.
Tomorrow, I will begin posting letters written in 1942. Dan is already in the Army and Lad is expecting to be inducted in the next few months.
Judy Guion
I laughed at seeing the addition on the postcard… I found so many like that among my grandparents . No paper was wasted. So much more could always be written in using a typewriter!
Jeanne – Absolutely. I have found shopping lists or To-Do lists on envelopes and Grandpa wrote in very small script, so as to take up as little room as possible and leave room for other things. That generation did not waste anything.. A lesson that has been lost in the mists of time. Thank you for your comment. I’m glad it brought you laughter.
They were the true green generation. Use and reuse until it wasn’t able to be used any longer
:)