Cpl Roman F. Klick 36620923
Co "A", 353rd Engr Regt
A.P.O. #502, c/o Postmaster
San Francisco, California
August 16, 1943

Dear Aunty Clara:

Boy o boy, the entertainment last night was terrific. Six solid hours from 6:30 to 12:30. The colonel spoke, the band played, special acts were put on and then there were the two shows. The colonel was in very good humor and in his recounting of the first year of the 353rd Engrs existence he said many things which handed the men a good laugh. The band, of course, was good as always. The entertainment was varied. Two of the Red Cross nurses who came over to this island on the same boat which brought us over had been invited to attend the birthday party and one played a violin solo and sang a duet with an orchestra member. The other sang two songs and played a part in a skit taken from the play "Brother Rat." Two other short parts of the play "Brother Rat"; one was a humorist's narration and the other was a tap dance by two twins. Then there was the Celestial Choir composed of Negro singers. They were brought back for encore after encore. And finally there were the movies.

I did not care for the picture "Somewhere I'll Find You" so very much and "Palm Beach Story" was rather humorous but somewhat mediocre until the climactic end. I do not know if you saw the picture or not but Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea are husband and wife with she being bent on a divorce. They wind up in Palm Beach with rich Rudy Vallee making love to C.C. while Mary Astor, Vallee's sister, makes love to J.M. The toss-up is that in the end the married couple decide to stay married and it seems to leave the brother and sister out in the cold until it is revealed that both Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert have twins and the closing scene shows the two of them and each of their twins with Vallee and Astor at a wedding.

Anyway it was a swell evening of entertainment although I do not think we could take it every night. Right now the band is practicing in the big tent and it sounds just like the Music Appreciation Hours by Walter Damrosch which all us grammar school children had to listen to once a week in the big double room at Wilson School. They are playing Peer Gynt's "Hall of The Mountain King" and it is a very mysterious tune with its repetitious movement.

The schedule for operating the movies for this week is this: Tonight Lt. Yantis will take the show up to the other outfit but tomorrow night I will show it here and the night after I will be the one to take it up to the other place. Then Friday night I will take it up once again. In other words three nights it will be my job and either three or four nights will be taken care of by Lt. Yantis.

Immediately after typing this letter I am going to start typing up the insurance information. In fact I am going to type it on two V-mail forms at once so that one we can keep at home for future reference and the other one can be sent back to me to keep as a handy reference file for my company records. I imagine that the photographed copies will be a rather unique method of saving the insurance data.

Gee wiz, Aunty Clara, I can think of so many things to keep me busy both at work and in my leisure hours but I never seem to be able to carry out all my plans. It always has been that way throughout my life. I wonder if it must continue to be so forever. Perhaps I had better look at it philosophically and say that because I plan to do more things than I possible can do does not mean I have failed but simply means that by hitching my wagon to a star I have accomplished more than had I hitched it to something very close and near so that the end achievement was not nearly so much as the former.

The Bulldozer baseball team, with Jack Molyneaux still playing the outfield position, won their eighteenth consecutive game yesterday. It seems that they are unbeatable and since getting in the Island league they have been really trouncing their opponents. Yesterday's score was something like 14-2.

There is nothing special for me to do this evening so I hope that finally I will be able to get some letters out which I talk so much about writing but never get around to doing.

So-long,
/s/ Roman
Roman