Home | Return to Index

Sgt Roman F. Klick 36620923
HS 1393 Engr APO 709
c/p SF Cal
18 April 1945

Dear Aunty Clara,

Wednesday

I have been in an exceedingly lazy spell of late. More so than usual and it was no real surprise to me that I found it easier to go to the movie this evening than it was to sit down to the hard work of writing Pat's letter. By the way, you can call her Patsy if you want to because that seems to be a general nickname for the name Patricia and it is a variation from Pat. I wonder how she would react if I addressed a letter to her starting off Dear Patsy? She has the right idea when she said in the letter that she answered right away because by letting a letter go to the next day something always comes up to delay it into the future.

But all that is neither here nor there. There was no mail today so there is nothing to answer but I would like to go back to what I started off with and that was the movie we saw this evening. They had a Peter Carey miniature in which he viewed a short he made three years ago - early in 1942 in which he took some of the predictions of Nostradamus and compared them to the present day events of that day. Now, he took the news since then and showed how several of them have some true. For example, right after Pearl Harbor when the Japs sunk our fleet, the short told how a great nation would have its ships drowned but they would rise again. So he brings the story to date with the recent headline of how ships sunk at Pearl Harbor (or badly damaged) were in one of the latest naval battles with the Japs. And so it went which makes it all very uncanny. The thing is though that Nostradamus probably has predicted so much and in such vague terms that it could be applied easily to almost any time in history. The conclusion the little story came to was that Nostradamus predicted that Adolph Hitler would be killed by having his throat cut by either Himmler or Goering.

Now let my mind rove around a bit, I had a few more important things like that to tell you. O yes, here is an incidental. For once I've bruised easily but healed quick. The bump over my eye which scabbed so quickly is now healed -- all in less than a week. That is a far cry from the combat wounds my finger received some months ago when the after effects never did go away. Meaning my finger is still weak and banged up and there remains a raised scar on my wrist where I was cut.

I've been going through the Daily News like wildfire but am hitting all the highlights, reading what is interesting, scanning through what is less interesting and just plainly ignoring what was old and read someplace else like in Time magazine etcetera. (Pause - just now Andy Mathis began monkeying with the lights in preparation to get a little electric stove going and he blew the fuse so I'm going to be in the dark for a bit. If I don't make these edges perfectly or if my words don't make too much sense for a little bit, you can blame it on that.) Now, to go back to the original thread of my story. The Cicero Life proved interesting in one issue where Buddy Vintera was featured as one of the merchants whose picture was to fit in the advertisement of his shop. Did you see it? And then there was one more comment I had to make concerning the Daily News editorial page. It was mainly for Uncle Jack. The news columnist Howard Vincent O'Brien has a unique style of picturing himself lately. Everyday is a different picture and finally the one that attracted my attention mostly was the picture showing the back of his head and shoulders (head mostly bald). That must have startled a lot of people, did you notice it?

The lights are on again and it is fifteen minutes before evening meal time.

The ice cream and coke are still the main menu and still delicious. I've been corrected on calling the combination a Coca Cola milk shake and I realize I was wrong. Milk shakes do not have carbonated water in them but sodas do so it really is a Coca Cola soda and not a milk shake after all.

The main picture of the night was Gloria Jean in "I'll Remember April". It wasn't bad entertainment at all but it was merely that - entertainment - and nothing else for it wasn't a top flight movie. That is the first picture she plays in which she acts grown up instead of just one of the kids in the Peggy Ryan and Donald O'Connor pictures.

I went to get myself weighed today but no luck, the scale was gone. For lunch today I had three slices of cake and ice cream and coke while giving my meat away to Lewis. All Bill Grauel did was shake his head and wonder how I keep my body and soul together with my "big" meals.

The workaday went so-so today. I did accomplish a bit more than the preceding days but even at work I'm not up to my old fervor. I guess I'm really not very well for although the spirits are pretty good. I'm all down and out without much energy to do anything at all. I feel as if I could just sit in a chair or perhaps even lay in bed and do nothing forever and it is an effort to do the slightest things like get up from laying down, walk, type, change clothes, etcetera. Hey, what I need is a period of Temporary Duty in the States for purposes of Rest and Rehabilitation, eh? O yeah, well maybe one of these years.

The boys are going to have a regular party in here this evening and have put out the bread, the ham, the sardines, the beer, the noodle soup and everything and then walked off. Now as I sit here typing this letter, I begin noticing little slight movements out of the corner of my eye. And what do I see? Well, I see a parade of cockroaches crawling out of Bill Grauel's desk, crossing over the top of it and parading right to the fresh bread. I will now take ten to shoo them away. Gosh, they attach themselves right along the brown crust in such a way that is it hard to detect them. The fellows came in now (Moreno and Mathis) and I told them that the next time I won't shoo the cockroaches away if they leave food around and that they will have to be satisfied with the crumbs the roaches leave.

I stopped the Class E allotment today and you should receive it for the last time during the first week of May. After that the Class F will be all that arrives and, of course, that is yours.

So-long,   /s/ Roman   Roman