World War II: George Staebler Wrote 500 Love Letters to His Wife, Stellajoe

(Note: This story was originally published in July 2016)

It was a love story: 500 letters from my father, George Staebler, to my mother, Stellajoe Staebler, during World War II. They have been saved for nearly 75 years, along with 99 from her. What became of the rest of her letters is mystery.

I discovered the ribbon-tied bundles in a musty Army footlocker in a shed after my father died. I brought them into the house and put them in a plastic container where they sat on a storage shelf until I moved back across the country to Centralia to care for my aging mother.

I pulled them out last fall and began devouring the brave words, the longing, the loneliness, and the insight into the personalities and relationship of my parents before I knew them.

I located the referenced photographs: their prewar courtship in the Great Smoky Mountains, the year at NYU where my father trained as an Army meteorologist, their brief honeymoon just six weeks before he left the country, my mother’s life with her in-laws on the Michigan family farm and later with her family in Florida over the two years he was overseas.

There was the appropriated French chateau where my father was stationed with the 21st Weather Squadron, the camp dog Chick and their move together to the Pacific Northwest following his return.

My mother celebrated her 100th birthday in June; my father has been gone 21 years. As I read the letters, I ask her the questions I can’t ask him.

She doesn’t remember, or maybe never knew. “We didn’t talk about it,” she tells me, “we wanted to put it behind us.” I don’t know what disappoints me more: that I didn’t ask earlier, or that she didn’t.

As I read I can’t help comparing the times in which my mother lives now and those long years in the ’40s. A letter from Europe and its return response took weeks. Twenty-one years ago my father just missed the internet. And who imagined FaceTime then? War news came over a crackly radio or the Stars and Stripes newspaper, not on headlines to a pocket phone. My four grandsons helped celebrate their great-grandmother’s birthday. I wonder what changes they will see over their decades.

My mother’s party was a grand celebration of a courageous woman. As a high school student she spoke out against segregation in her home state of Tennessee.

In her 20s, my timid, quiet mother traveled alone by train across the country to Spokane in pursuit of a wartime civilian army job, to Texas to get married, then back east while she waited for her husband to come home.

She led a generation of Girl Scouts in her 40s and 50s, engaged in global peace activism and saved the trees near her Seminary Hill home in her 60s, provided support for Tinnitus sufferers in her 70s, marched on Washington for gun control in her 80s, and spoke out for marriage equality in her 90s. And she learned to live without the partner who wrote her 500 letters.

Now there are over 100 cards and letters from well-wishers, many thanking her for her influence in their lives. Lost vision prevents her from reading them herself, but I am sure she will respond to each one. “Put that one in the ‘answer first’ pile,” she tells me; “I want to be sure I get to it before I’m gone.”

I don’t think she’s going anywhere anytime soon. After all, she took her first motorcycle ride on her century birthday. You’re never too old to try something new. I wonder what she’ll take on next.

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Gretchen Staebler is a Centralia native who returned to the Northwest in 2012 to live with her now 100-year-old mother. She blogs weekly about the experience at www.DaughterOnDuty.wordpress.com.