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

Dear Aunty Clara,

Saturday

I received your letter of October 5th today at lunchtime. I sure hope that you get the letters of the 17th and the 18th soon. It could be that they met up with an accident. After all, even in peace time planes do get lost crossing the Pacific Ocean and in wartime the hazard is doubled. If that is the case, they will print duplicates in the near future and resend the letters again. This will be the test case to find out if V-mail is in reality better than airmail as far as safety of the letter goes.

The movie for this evening is "Footlight Serenade" with John Payne. I offered to take over the movies for tonight and will also run them Sunday and Monday.

Mersing came up to me today with a problem. It seems that two boys in his home town had the same last names, were born on the same day, lived in the same house on the same street and they had the same mother and father. They went to the same school and had the same classes and teachers. When this situation was unearthed, the teachers asked them if they were twins. The boys answered that they weren't yet all the above was true about them. Have you an idea as to the solution of the problem?

The PX had some Whiz candy bars in stock this morning but by the time Larry and I got over there, they were completely sold out. They must have had about two or three boxes of the stuff and no more. Sometimes they save some for the evening customers so it will be worth seeing if they have some later on.

The Collier's magazine ran an article that we have an oil reserve which will last only for twelve more years and no more unless we open up new discoveries of immensely productive oil fields. It seems that almost all the easily detectable oil deposits have been located and are rapidly being drained of their available supply. This means that unless new fields are discovered, we will soon be without oil in this world. That is a bad sign because the expansion of the airlines and the airplane industry will be prevented. In other words that could very well kill the possibility of the helicopter in every rooftop hangar. Years ago, back in high school, I remember reading a book which predicted the end of our oil reserves sometime in the 1970s but I thought surely that would be too far into the future for me to worry about. Now the war had to come along and bring the deadline down to the year 1955.

There are two solutions to this problem if they cannot get anymore of the original oil itself. They can create substitute fuels and lubricants out of vegetation and agricultural products and they can extract the oil from rock formations such as oil shale. This method is highly expensive and would jump the price of a barrel of oil to six times the present level. There also is the possibility that some new type fuel will be found such as the magic uranium extract they were working on towards the beginning of this war.

For the last few nights we have kepi the sides of our tent rolled up and I find it is much easier to wake up from sleep with daylight streaming in than it is to wake up in a dark tent. Another thing which may have something to do with my being able to wake up more easily is that I have been going to bed earlier.

Well, did you try to guess what the answer was to the tricky problem Mersing brought around? I fell for it hook, line and sinker and said "Why, there isn't any other thing they could be but twins." So he calmly says "They weren't twins; they were triplets. The other brother went to a different school." That would be a good one to try on Mrs. Reed, eh? Tell me if you fell for it the way I did and the reaction you got from Mrs. Reed. That reminds me of the way Clarence's story about the package made the rounds.

So-long,
/s/ Roman
Roman