Sunday, August 26, 2012

August 27, 1944


8/27/44

Dear Family,

            First off the bat I’m thanking you for the two bucks. Then I’ll explain how come You havn’t heard from me sooner.

            I am back at the main camp now to stay I think. This is Sunday and I came in last night. We finally got the wash house comleyed. It didn’t take so long to actually build the thing. But it took a lot of time to get the thing finished up. Like doors and windows and spteps and benches and shelves. We put a lousey cement floor in on top of a wood floor. One and one half inches thick. I guess it will work tho. I had never had much to do with cement before. I did remember some about making the hoghouse floor. But they wanted to use a lot of gravel and it didn’t trowel very good and I had never done any troweling before so it isn’t the smoothest floor in the west. It is as good as any other floor in camp tho and a lot better than the old one out there was.

            Well this is the story on answering your letter late. I got your letter on the supply truckout there at supper on thur. evening and there was a speaker with them that was going to speak that night and they had some lousey educational movies. So thurs. evening was filled jam full. And there wasn’t any chance to get a letter mailed till Monday. So I never wrote it. I thought that since it wouldn’t go out till Monday I’d just as well wait and make it more up to date.

            I don’t of much to tell this time. I had a pretty nice time out at the Big Creek side camp. It was something of a vacation. I had been putting in quite of bit of time in the shop here in Elkton. I think I will try and find some good guy to give my job to and get out of the woodshop some time this fall. I don’t suppose that I’ll ever find work that I will like as well as the work I have been doing in the shop but the shop demands more of my spare time than I like to spend all of my CPS life. I don’t have to put so much tme in if I don’t want to but if I do the kind of jobs or running it I have to be around quite a bit when the fellows are working in there as they don’t all know their way around and they will mess things up too. I think I have been doing some good there but I’m sort of tired of it and I’m sure that I could benefit by a change.

            In regard to my Co-op paper that I sent to you. I don’t expect to be thinking the same when we get started. In fact I’ll be disappointed If I don’t have some more and better ideas on what I want out of life and how to get it. We are doing a lot of planning mostly because we don’t have much else we can do right now to prepare for our post-war life. I think that we will be able to keep our thinking together better and to find more of the bugs in our ideas if we keep evaluating our selves and our desires. I don’t know whether the others expect to or not but I intend to go over the things I want to do and accomplish from time to time, possibly every six months and sort of compare and see if I have added anything or lost anything.

            I used to be a little warey of radicals but I have noticed that any more a fellow has to be awfully radical to seem radical to me. I guess it is because I am sort of in the radical class myself. There is still a question in my mind as to who is a radical that will do the world some good and which ones are just screwballs. The thing that I wonder is if we don’t treat as screwballs some of the fellows that will do the world some good. Then too, if we could slow up some of the screwballs and they would get on the right track maybe they would turn out to be good radical. Christ was a radical wasn’t he and they killed him.

            The other night they had a discussion out a Big Creek on why Wallace lost out in being Vice Presidential candidate. I don’t remember all that was said but it was really good. A lot of the fellows had been reading up on it in the papers and magazines. As I understand it. The convention was pretty much in favor of Wallace but FDR failed to give him the support he should have. I think that he did say that if he were to vote he would vote for Wallace. But as I understand it some of the boys that plan things were told by FDR that Wallace wasn’t the man because he wasn’t enough of a politician. The Southern states didn’t want him and the big City bosses were against him. So he was licked. I wouldn’t be supprised if he would do a lot more good now that he is out the mess. I don’t suppose I like everything Wallace will do I seem to have the idea that he is more interested in the capatolist angle than I think is good but I’m pretty much the other way.

            Say Mom, Am I to get the impression that the recovery of your eyes is going pretty slow? I had hoped they would be working as good as usual some of these days. There is a guy helping me in the woodshop that has something wrong with one of his eyes and he can hardly see at all. I don’t know exactly what it is but the Dr. he went to see in Eugene told him not to worry about it that it would probably get better afterwhile. His other eye is good and it don’t bother him if he doesn’t strain it. He can’t read either. The woodshop don’t seem to bother him and he likes it and is good at it. He would much rather be doing that than sitting around.

            I got a letter from Evelyn when I got in last night. If you see her tell I was glad to hear from her and will answer soon.

                                                            Yours
                                                                        Bernard

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