My dad's mother, Betha Day Robinson Morris, was born October 23, 1903. In October of 1964 my thirty-nine-year-old father wrote a birthday letter to his mother who lived in Richards, Texas (eighty miles north of where he lived in Richmond, Texas). I call this one of my daddy's deep in the heart moments - I can picture my grandmother's tears when she read this from her youngest of three grown children. She was the one who treasured the words he wrote; I found this letter after her death in 1983.
My personal favorite line in this letter is "You know when you have people who believe in you, you hate to let them down."
Daddy and Mama were thrilled about getting their first home together in 1964. They had eloped in 1945 when he returned from England at the end of WWII; I was born in 1946 ten months later. We lived in Richards with my maternal grandmother in her home that was less than a minute walk from my dad's parents until I was thirteen years old. When my parents and I moved away from Richards, we lived in rental houses in Brazoria, Texas for five years. They moved to another rental house in Richmond when I left for college; Daddy and Mama got jobs in the school district there.
The American dream was alive and well in the fall of 1964.
Daddy and my grandmother at the back steps of her home circa 1943
Does anyone have a favorite line in the letter?
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Slava Ukraini. For the children.
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