Cpl Roman F. Klick 36620923
Co "A", 353rd Engr Regt
A.P.O. #502, c/o Postmaster
San Francisco, California
28 October 1943
Dear Aunty Clara,
Thursday
It was a big day as far as the mail went today. Four letters, a magazine and a newspaper. Three of the letters were from you dated, one the 17th and two the 18th. The fourth letter was an air mail from Dolores written on the 19th. She starts off with "Hi Lana" to me and then encloses clipping after clipping of Lana Turner.
The magazine was the usual monthly Reader's Digest which must just about be nearing the end of its run. To take up where the Reader's Digest leaves off has come the Chicago Daily News sent to me, as you say, by Uncle Jack. For a while I thought maybe you were mistaken about Uncle Jack having said he was sending the News but in one of the letters today you said it once again and then the first copy, September 30th, came in the afternoon delivery.
I'm going to have to do a lot of powerful letter writing within the next day or so to answer everybody. I'm writing this letter at quarter to six after supper and I am still undecided whether or not I should go to the show tonight which includes the band, Company F's vaudeville entertainment plus the movie "Men are Not Gods".
There seems to be one of those usual shakeups in progress again and from what I hear tell I think I will be living under another tent roof before long. If that is true, it will be the first time since being in the Army that some combination of Burkard, Edie, Mersing and myself has been non-existent. The change is rumored to leave them together yet but surmising doesn't do any good because before the moving has finished taking place things may have an entirely different set up.
I've eaten up all the hard candy and cookies that came with Social Treat package which Mrs Boyer sent to me. All that remains is to dive into the fruit cake and eat up the jelly. I hardly think that jelly will taste so good with fruit cake because that stuff is rich enough by itself. If the PX could get in some of those vanilla wafers they would go good with the jelly.
By the way, let's hope you aren't being swayed by the miracles the spiritualists experts can pull off. It actually hurts me to think that Uncle Jack has fallen for the stuff. He was the brainiest fellow the Klick family ever produced and then goes for that stuff. If those same stunts were done under the heading of magic without pretense at the divine one could admire the cleverness o the performers but when they sling in a lot of this fear psychology and capitalize on the worries of the people it is something else again.
Uncle Jack said that one letter I wrote him after Clarence had died sounded rather mixed up and rather esoteric and thought that perhaps I was bordering on spiritualism and said I might enjoy hearing one of them. I was afraid at the time that perhaps he was swinging a little that way. Sure, we agreed that the spirit of a dead person becomes one part with all of nature and that since everything in the universe is God, then the individual himself is part of God. But as for a spirit to retain any identity after death is not to my way of thinking. When you're dead, you're dead and even you don't know it let alone being so active as to start setting up communication with those foolish living creatures.
I'd like to take Uncle Jack to task on this matter but, frankly, I haven't the slightest idea how he would take it. Would he think me intolerant and become peeved? Or would he enter into a good old fighting correspondence with an argument first pro and then con? I think I'll broach the subject to him in the letter I hope to write tonight.
However, for pure entertainment value it probably has its strong points and, as far as I'm concerned, it is a date for after the wars are over.
So-long,
/s/ Roman
Roman