Article: The Observer Group
by Dora Walters, Senior Editor
It has been an incredible experience.”
That is how Dr. Celia Edmundson describes her four years editing “Letters to Lee, from Pearl Harbor to the War’s Final Mission,” a compilation of letters written by her father, Lt. Gen. James V. Edmundson, to her mother, Lee.
The idea for the book was formed in 2003, two years after her father’s death. Edmundson had started going through some items that had been stored, and at the bottom of a trunk she discovered a couple hundred letters.
They were letters exchanged by her parents, Jim and Lee, during World War II. The ink on the tissue-thin Airmail paper was faded, but still legible. The postmarks were mostly APOs (Army Post Office), but the dates were clear — censors had neatly snipped out any references to locales and plans.
Overwhelmed by her find, Edmundson sorted the letters by date using four shoeboxes as her filing cabinets.
Then, she began to read.
“I was like a fly on the wall,” Edmundson said. “At times, I felt I was there with them.”
Gen. Edmundson was a 25-year-old second lieutenant stationed at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked Dec. 7, 1941. At home in his pajamas reading the Sunday paper, he tossed on clothes and ran to his plane still wearing his bedroom slippers. For the next four days, he was in the thick of the action — still wearing his bedroom slippers.
During the attack, Lee, with several other service wives, was huddled under a dining room table at their home.
In the days following, service wives were evacuated. Lee left for her parent’s home in California.
And that’s when the letter exchange between the couple began — first Hawaii, then the South Pacific and the China-Burma-India theater. They wrote frequently. The letters were filled with love and the quiet determination to see the war through together, although apart.
But Edmundson said she had no thoughts of a book while she read the letters.
“They were wonderful firsthand accounts of action in the days of war and their personal concerns for each other,” she said.
After Lee Edmundson died in 1999, Gen. Edmundson began to write daily vignettes. They were detailed accounts of events and experiences, and both he and his daughter would discuss them each night at dinner.
Edmundson said that as she continued to read the letters, she was struck by how the letters and vignettes were interwoven. In addition, Gen. Edmundson’s mother had kept a scrapbook of all the newspaper articles about his war action.
“I just felt I had to preserve this wonderful love story and these bits of history,” Edmundson said.
Four years ago Edmundson decided she would try to assemble the letters, vignettes and articles chronologically and create a book.
“Even if nothing came out of it, I set a goal to do it,” she said.
Perhaps it was a childhood lesson from her father that led her to tackle this task.
He always stressed: “Be prepared. Then you can go forward in confidence.”
“I knew it wouldn’t be easy, because he always set high standards and he always expected me to keep them,” Edmundson said.
As she began the tedious task of typing the hand-written letters, she said she felt like she was going back in time.
“It was a different world, and often I would find myself almost there with them,” Edmundson said. “I could recognize them easily as my mom and dad as I read the letters. There were a lot of funny incidents, too. There weren’t any real surprises.”
Edmundson said she also developed a deeper appreciation for her father through the letters.
“I knew he was modest, but I saw so many examples of it in his accounts of combat action. He would always give the credit ‘to his crew,’” she said. “I always knew he was a caring man, but I don’t think I realized how deeply he cared about his family, his country and the people he met.”
Throughout his letters and the vignettes, his love of flying was also evident.
“It was where he was the happiest,” Edmundson said.
Edmundson, a professor of organizational leadership, spent all her free time on the project.
She said one of the hardest decisions was how to end the book — but she eventually found the answer in the last letter Gen. Edmundson wrote to his wife, dated Oct. 15, 1945.
The last paragraph read: “Well, my darling, I’ll stop now. I hope this is the last letter I ever have to write to you. I hope I never get so far away from you again that I can’t whisper ‘I love you.’”
A year ago, the book was completed, and Edmundson concentrated on securing a publisher. Choosing not to use an agent, she decided the book, with its historical firsthand accounts, would be best suited for a university press. She was right.
“It’s hard to express my feelings when I received an e-mail acceptance from Fordham University Press,” Edmundson said. “To say I was elated is an understatement.”
http://www.yourobserver.com/news/longboat-key/Key-Life/111120092972/Letters-to-Lee