A postcard sent by one of my mother’s friends to my father postmarked May 19, 1944, is today’s #stampoftheday. I found it among the cancelled envelopes in my dad’s collection – many of them the envelopes from letters he sent to my mom and his parents when he was in training and then in Europe in 1944 and 1945.

“Dear Ben,” the friend wrote. “Am now calmly bumping along in a bus, with someone sitting beside me, whom I think might make a difference in your future wife (oops! meant life). We are on our way down town to help sell poppies for American Legion. I give up – can’t write any more. Best Marly (?). P.S. She looks swell. [the return address is for M. Eichenwald, who, like my mother lived on Montgomery Avenue in the Bronx.

The card was sent to my father at Camp Breckenridge in Morganfield, Kentucky (a moretrhan 20,000 acre facility where about 30,000 soldiers got training in use of small arms, mortars, hand grenades etc.). My father, who had been based in New York City where he, along with many other soldiers, was attending college, had been sent there in March 1944, about three months after he met my mom and they started dating. Their romance continued via mail for several months (until, as I wrote in an earlier post) they got married in August 1944, not knowing that he was about to be shipped overseas.

This postcard is from the National Jewish Welfare Board (JWB) club which was located at 1 East 65th Street across from Central Park in Temple Emanu-El. Founded in 1917 to support Jewish soldiers during World War I, JWB along with five other organizations, (the YMCA, YWCA, the the Traveler’s Aid Association and the Salvation Army) joined forces in 1941 to create the United Service Organizations (USO) to address on-leave morale and recreational needs for members of the Armed Forces. My mother, and presumably her friend, volunteered at the canteen at Temple Emanu-el which, over the course of the war, reportedly served more than 1.3 million servicemen and women.

Stay safe and be well!