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County man finds history in farmhouse as clean-up unearths World War II-era letters

Don Swank is surrounded by letters written by World War II soldiers to his dad, Gerald Swank. All of the correspondence is being preserved on a statewide website and many of the original letters have been returned to the writers’ families.  Swank is still trying to locate families of several of the letter writers.
Don Swank is surrounded by letters written by World War II soldiers to his dad, Gerald Swank. All of the correspondence is being preserved on a statewide website and many of the original letters have been returned to the writers’ families. Swank is still trying to locate families of several of the letter writers. Photo by Cindy Klepper.

Originally published April 20, 2015.

Don Swank never knew his dad to be much of a letter writer.

That illusion ended when Swank, clearing out the old farmhouse after his parents’ deaths, ran across a box brimming with dog-eared envelopes.

Each envelope contained a handwritten letter his dad, Gerald Swank, had received from a buddy who had gone off to serve in World War II.

“He wrote a lot of letters to them and they wrote back,” Swank says. “And he saved all of them.”

Swank thinks the families of those men might like to have the letters, and he’s found — sometimes serendipitously — relatives of all but four of the men.

He still has stacks of letters written to his father by four of his buddies — Arlo Schilling, Eugene Kitt, John Young and Maurice Wagner. All are identified in the letters as “private” or “cadet,” so Swank assumes they were all in the service.

Gerald Swank had stayed at home, exempt from the service because he was farming. He’d gone to work on the family farm in Clear Creek Township immediately after graduating from Clear Creek High School in 1941.

And he started writing.

Don Swank, who moved back to the farmhouse after his mom’s death in the spring of 2014, found the box of letters (and many other things, including the letters Swank had written his parents while he was in college) as he was clearing out an upstairs bedroom his parents had used for storage.

“They grew up in the Depression,” he says. “They never threw anything away.”

The World War II-era letters, though, were a surprise.

“I had never seen them,” Swank says. “They were stored in a box.”

Swank has read through some of the letters and says most of the topics are mundane.

“They talk about everyday activities,” he says. “What’s going on at home, sports, crops. A lot of them were farm kids.”

Occasionally, though, Swank found letters addressed to a soldier’s wife or parents. Those letters bore a special note to the recipient: “If you get this, I’m either dead or captured.”

Swank learned some things about his dad that he had never known.

“I found out his nickname was ‘Rip’ from when he played basketball,” he says. “He was fast; he ripped down the court.”

He also discovered that his dad had been quite the ladies’ man, with many of the letters asking Swank which girl he was dating.

“Apparently he had quite an active social life,” Don Swank says of his dad.

Gerald and Willodean Swank were married in 1948, after the war had ended. His days of moving from one girl to another ended; he  stuck with Willodean until his death in 2009.

Swank brought the letters to the Indiana Room at the Huntington City-Township Public Library several months ago. Indiana Room director Joan Keefer told him they ought to be preserved, especially for future researchers.

“They’re not as valuable now as they’re going to be 20 years from now,” Keefer says.

Library staffer Amber Hudson is slowly scanning each letter, saving it in a digital format and adding it to the Indiana Memory Digital Collection. The website is a statewide online depository of historic photographs and documents.

The website, and its trove of documents and pictures, can be accessed at digital.library.in.gov; in the “Search Indiana Memory” box, type in Huntington City-Township Public Library. That will bring up a page listing all documents posted by the local library.

Visitors can browse the entire collection or use the “Search Indiana Memory” box again to type in “Gerald Swank” and find the wartime letters to Swank that have been scanned in to date.

A digital image of each letter can be pulled up; for those who have trouble reading the old-fashioned handwriting, Hudson has painstakingly transcribed each letter, even preserving the original misspellings.

One of the letters is from Paul Frick, who sent it to Swank on Feb. 11, 1943, from Keesler Field in Mississippi:

“Dear Gerald,

“There are a bunch of sick fellows around here now. We really had a work out. We’re training for Marines instead of A.A.C. The training we’re getting is absoutly H. and that is no kidding.   

“Yesterday drilled from 8:00 to 12:15 not one stop. Calistes swinging on ropes, hand over had on hadders and ropes, crawling under brush and barbed wires. Really tough.  

“On top of all that just listen to a sample of this vacinations for smallpox, triple typhoid, yellow fever and 2 shots in about 5 minutes both arms and 4 more shots to take yet. Oh yes a tetanus vaccine too, that one makes every man sick. yesterday when we came out of the hospital fellows stood there to catch the fellows when they fell. We turned blue and white sweat and went through one heck of a fever last nite.

“Then today we had to get up at 3:15 this morning to go on K.P. duty. Well so much for that our arms are sore yet and pretty stiff.

“Well Gerald take care of the women around there will you?  

“Be Good Old Pal

“An old friend,  

“Paul

“How’s everyone getting along? What is Grandpap’s address at College? I don’t know if and I’d like to write to him.  Tell him “Hello” from me will you?”

Frick was declared missing in action on June 1, 1945, after his Mustang P-51 fighter plane disappeared; a year later, he was declared dead.

Frick and Swank graduated together from Clear Creek in a class that had just 16 students, Don Swank says. Frick was class president and Swank was vice president.

“He was dad’s best friend growing up,” Don Swank says. “They played sports together.”

The group of friends continued to write Swank throughout the war.

“He was kind of the glue, I think, that held a lot of them together,” his son says.

“Dad was always one of those who always had a big sense of community and friendship.”

Swank says the families of Schilling, Kitt, Young and Wagner might appreciate reading the letters those men wrote to a friend back home.

“They might enjoy having letters about what their relatives were doing during the war,” he says. “Dad was 86 when he passed, so a lot of that generation is gone now.

“I’d just like to get them back to family.”

Relatives of the four families can contact the Huntington library’s Indiana Room for information about the letters.