It has now been close to two weeks since I have done any significant writing. Why? Not writer’s block, but three special projects, things I’m doing that are capturing my time and will soon (hopefully) be done, allowing me to go back to putting words on paper.

The first is going through my dad’s Stars and Stripes newspapers from World War 2. I’ve posted before about this collection. Dad, a typesetter before the war, was able to get a transfer from the invasion forces to the G.I. newspaper. In Africa, Italy, and southern France, Dad set type in war areas for more than two years. He sent copies of the papers home and his parents kept them. He took them when he came home and kept them till his death in 1997. He had told me they would be mine.

I kept them for years, hoping to go through them, to learn more about the war and Dad’s part in it. Alas, too many years have passed without doing that. I’ve decided to donate the collection to the University of Rhode Island. They will preserve them, make them available to researchers. I was to do that in August when we were to drive back there but, alas, had to cancel that trip for health reasons. I decided I would inventory the collection (though URI told me I didn’t have to). At least that would give me a better idea of Dad’s movements through the European Theatre of Operations.

Starting with about 30 issues a day, I slowly did more and more. I’m now down to around 100 to 150 newspapers, having inventoried over 900. This has been hard work, but it’s almost done. The good news is I’ve found a fair number of duplicates, maybe 50 to 80 issues that I will be able to keep and distribute some day to Dad’s grandchildren. That is a manageable number to keep. I anticipate finishing this project before the end of September.

The next project is digitizing my letter collection. I’ve been at this for a year, and can see the end of it—sort of. I keep finding more letters to digitize. Two weeks ago I pulled a notebook off a shelf, a notebook I thought included some magazine essays (not mine) I had printed. Not so. They were copies of e-mails from the late 1990s, emails I had printed and saved then deleted the electronic copies. What was I thinking, right?

Now, to reduce possessions, I’m scanning them, saving them in an organized way. The process is slowed because sometimes the scanner doesn’t produce the letters exactly as they are. So I have to check the text to make sure it’s right in my new electronic file. Then, I’m also converting it to better fonts, spacing, and layout on the page, just in case I want to assemble them into books in the future. This project isn’t that close to being done.

I’ll finish with this notebook in about a month or a little longer. Then, I’ll get to start going through copies of handwritten letters. I’m not looking forward to that, and won’t start it right away. Gotta finish and publish at least one book first.

The third project is also related to letters. Lynda and I are proofreading the Kuwait Letters book that I put together over the last two years. I ordered a proof copy of it, and saw a number of places where there were typos. Our son looked at it last month and suggested I add more photos to it. Our grandson Ezra read in it while he was here in July. One letter that his mom had written when she was not quite seven years old, looked wrong. I looked at the original and, sure enough, I had skipped a line when transcribing. How often had that happened?

So Lynda and I are proofreading it. She reads from the original letter, I follow along in the book and mark whatever changes are needed. There are too many changes needed, showing that I’m not the world’s best transcriber. We are a little over halfway through the book, able to do about ten pages in an hour in the evening. Only 14 or 15 more sessions to go.

Once that’s done, I’ll pick more photos, reformat the book, and see what I have. I also added in five lately found letters, including one taking six or seven pages. The current file is 325 pages. More photos will likely expand it to 340. No, we’ve found a couple of letters that need some editing either due to repetition or the nature of the material. Maybe only 337 pages. I see that all coming together around the middle of November.