25 Jan January 25, 1945

Letter
from: Mrs. G. Shonkwiler
to: Private George W. Shonkwiler
January 25th, 1945, Thursday, 10:45 a.m.

Hello Honey,
Imagine me writing so early in the morning.

Elinor called last night and said she’d be in today, so I thought I’d
better start this letter before she came.

I forgot to tell you in the last night’s letter that Rumbold’s Real Estate
on 119th Street had been robbed.  They looted 177 safey deposit boxes
of $50,000.  Mary told Edith she had all her cash, bonds and all of her
worldly possessions in her box.  She had written the numbers of her bonds
on a sheet of paper, but had put it in with the bonds in her safety deposit
box. Edith said this

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was the third time she’d lost everything she owned.  Sure is pretty tough
luck.  I’m enclosing a clipping from today’s paper, which tells of the
thieves capture, but I don’t s’pose they’ll recover much of the money and
so on.  Now I’m worried about our own box at Smith’s.  For one thing we
don’t have a record of what’s in our box, do we?  Do we have any bonds
there that I should go down and jot down the numbers?  I think I’ll go see
one of these days.

I told you in last night’s letter I was broke and had only 50 cents.  I went
through all my coat pockets today and found change amounting to $4.50, quite
a haul, wouldn’t you say?

Well, I guess I better get busy and straighten up the house

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before Elinor arrives.  Ronnie has his toys all over the place, living room,
dining room, and kitchen.  He has all four sets of trains (16 cars) all
hooked up and uses every available chair, table, and devenport as tunnels.
Right now he’s using the footstool as a bridge and is running his truck up
and over it.  He’s the busiest little engineer and truck driver you ever
saw and that I am sure of.  Now his trains are going over my footstool.
(Also across my feet.)  He talked me into making a cardboard tunnel for him
one day, but now his scope of tunnels includes all the furniture too.

Well bye now until later.

12:00 midnight.
Elinor arrived about one P.M.

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and we sat around catching up on gossip, and so on until about 5:00, then
we got to thinking about food.  Elinor wanted to eat out, so we ate at
<? Loosen’s> on 103rd and State.  We had steak T-Bone at $1.75 per
plate, plus some extra potatoes and milk for Ronnie. Our dinner consisted
of T-Bones (14oz), french fries, peas, tomatoe and lettuce salad, shrimp
cocktail, coffee and ice cream.  It was very good, too.  Ronnie got a big
thrill out of this stuffed deer head on the wall, kept running up to it
and ran away again, saying it would bite him.  By the way, Elinor, paid
for the dinners, wasn’t that pretty nice?  She wants to go home tomorrow,
but I’m trying to persuade her to stay for the

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week-end.

Elinor and I have been rearranging the living room furniture tonite.  I think
I like it too.  I’ll draw a diagram for you.

    [diagram of living room]

How do you like it?  It seems to make the room look larger, believe it or
not.

The shad rug I got from Chuck and Betty is the one I have in front of the
fireplace.  Judy has already adopted the new rug as her place to sleep --
leave it to Judy to find the softest spot in the room.

Well, it’s pretty late, Darling,

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so think we’d better turn in or we’ll never get up.

I haven’t had any letters later than that Jan. 15th, I received Monday,
so I still don’t know how your X-rays turned out, and I’m so anxious to
hear.

Goodnight Sweetheart, and I suppose it’ll be around Valentine’s day when
you get this, so about all I can say is I’ll miss you terribly and more
than ever on that day.  I just keep thinking how wonderful if you would
be sent home, so we could celebrate together, and pray that if we don’t
that it will be the last time we celebrate apart.

All our love always,
Mom and Ronnie