Hello Porterville readers, I am writing this as Brian and Donna are driving back from a trip to Minnesota for a gathering of her family in Stillwater. They took the opportunity to swing down to St. Paul to visit the Sampson/Byrne graves at Forest Lawn cemetery and also to visit Hazel Park where Mama and her family lived. I was able to send them images from Dad’s Byrne binders and some other sources.
On reflection, I recalled that I had intended to go back to identify the circumstances of Grandpa Byrne’s death in 1943. I remembered that he had been working with the American Association of Railways and was on the road. I also had a memory that the binders included a letter he had written back to his family. I found the letter without any trouble. With it was a brief funeral notice from the newspaper noting that he had died Saturday morning while being transported to a hospital in Sioux Falls after a heart attack. The letter is two pages and was typewritten on stationery from Hotel Lawler in Mitchell South Dakota. Several things stood out to me. His kind and playful salutation and tone in writing (“Little Girl” must be Mama). His self-deprecating, funny description of his misadventures losing track of things. And also his recording of how cold it was out there in the Dakotas. Last is his frugality in finding and repairing a “galosh”? In winter 1943 the war had been underway slightly over a year. I am guessing rubber was rationed and getting a new pair of galoshes would have been expensive even if available. His signing “Daddy “ and “Good night God bless you” connect him to our own times and habits. GBAKY’s ancestor I suppose.
One further note is that Dad appended a comment in the binder with the letter. Mama had kept this treasured message from her father for years. She wrote “My Dear Husband- I entrust this letter to your care. It is the letter we received from Daddy which he wrote on the 20th. He died on the 23. I think I have one other letter, but so far I cannot put my hands on it. This is for our family archives.” It is in that spirit I add it to Porterville.
The post of Nick Byrne’s last letter to his family evoked much comment from my siblings. While I had made the assumption that his reference to “Little Girl” was a pet name for our mother who was a ‘little girl’, they strongly felt that it was his pet name for Gommy. His salutation included “and children two (too)”. As an aside, reading this letter, I have a sense of where some of our familial tendency to word play comes from. The two children reference would include our mother who would have turned 16 at the end of 1942. But the second child was less clear. Joe was 19 and was registered for the draft in ’42 as residing in Mahtomedi so that is my guess. I was happy to have the lively conversation about this question. In an aside, I discovered that Harriett was born in Walla Walla as I was trying to figure this out. I had not known that.