Bagging It

As the Liberty ship Caleb Strong steamed from Newport News, Va., to Algeria in the spring of 1944, the G.I.s aboard did what soldiers going to war always do: they wrote a lot of letters home. Some of them never got there: to be exact, 235 letters to 117 addresses in 34 states from 93 servicemen. For reasons that may never be known, this batch of V-mail wound up in an attic in Raleigh, N.C., in the house of an aunt of a serviceman. Mixed in with some old socks in an Army duffel bag, they were discovered in June by Michael Minguez, an exterminator, and turned over to Raleigh Postmaster Ross Garulski. Last week during a ceremony at the Washington headquarters of the Postal Service, Postmaster General Albert Casey, himself a World War II veteran, was host to four of the surviving letter writers who had been located. "A most unusual affair," observed Casey, as he returned letters to the four senders.

It was rather like opening a time capsule. Raul Alvarez had written a love letter to his wartime sweetheart, Terry Espinosa of Los Angeles, that she never received. Last week she was there to read it aloud. "My dearest sweet," it began, telling of how he used to "think of you and picture ourselves together again . . . I love you with all my heart and no one will & ever come between us." No one did. Married in 1950, they reared five children. Robert Kirsch, now 66, of North Huntingdon, Pa., was a radioman en route to his B-17 squadron in Foggia, Italy. He wrote seven of the undelivered letters, two of which were to his parents, who are living in Florida. As he picked up his missives last week, he observed dryly, "If I had known that this was going to happen, I would have written more letters."

Postal officials, with the help of the Veterans Administration, will make an attempt to find all the letter writers. Because they were servicemen, they will be easier to find than the addressees. So far, 26 letters have been returned to eight veterans. Another has been forwarded to a deceased veteran's son, who was easily located: he is John Bowles, a postmaster in the state of Washington.