October 14, 1943

10/14/43

Dear folks,
Its hard to realize that it is the middle of October out here. Back there you are getting all hepped up cornpicking now and here they are picking nuts. There have been several of the camp boys out working on farms picking “Filbert” nuts. This is on project time and the Gov’t gets the money. The boys say that nut picking is pretty slow work. These are cultivated nuts not wild ones.
Thanks for the Buck, Dad. I always appreciate one of those things.
I don’t know about that shoe stamp, does that mean that we have only one pair of shoes for the whole year? Or are they going to give us another stamp too and not have a deadline about buying them? However I don’t think that I’ll need another pair of shoes. I have plenty of work shoes now and so I’ll just let you keep the stamp and whoever needs it first can use it.
I’m working in the wood-shop now and likeing it. I do little things like building some drawers for the kitchen and an ironing board for the laundry. There are lots of thing to do. They are figuring on about 150 bu. of potatoes out of the garden and I have to fix some sort of a ventelated bin for them. We have six hogs that are about ready to butcher and I’m afraid that I’ll get mixed up in that as someone found out that I might know how. It seems nobody ever helped butcher before.
The deer hunting season is on now and one of the fellows shot one. We havn’t had any yet, it seems that they have to let it age a few days to get the best flavor. It was a 5 year old buck and they had about 150# of dressed meat. That guys was really proud. He killed it with a 22 rifle and was about 2 miles from one of the spike camps and had to have some of the other fellows help him carry it in.
Its good to know that you are going to get the beans combined before Christmas isn’t it. I hope you have good weather and get the corn out in good time. The boys must have a little hole in it already don’t they?
I finally made up my mind and canceled my Coast and Geodetic application. So I recon that I’ll be around here for a while.
I’m sending you a copy of the Reporter, it has some good statistics about the Cos that are working in Mental Hospitals.
We had a speaker last night that was a CO from England. It was very interesting. He told us about what they were doing with them over there. It seems that they have, roughly, about three classes of cos. Noncombatant, which serve with the army like ours do. Then those with conditioned consciences, they let them do one of several conditions that the Tribunal says they may and they usually are something connected with farming or some war job and they can have all the money they make. Then there are those with complete exemption that in many cases have organized to help with the evacuation in air raids and things like that. I think their setup is more reasonable than ours. The country gets more work out of them and they get less publicity.
Guess I’ll quit
Yours,
Bernard
[Enclosed: The Reporter, October 1, 1943. Volume II, No. 7]