Found Letters Spell Out The Message Of Love

In an era where correspondence is mostly instantaneous, handwritten sentiments are few and far between. So when Lee Price and Jamie Pelley found more than 150 love letters written between their parents, Arthur Price and June Anderson, formerly of Southampton and Riverhead respectively, they knew that they were sitting on some very valuable keepsakes.

Written from 1949 to 1951, the letters were full of innocent flirtations written longhand and courting played out by the sentence. The longing expressed paragraph by paragraph by a couple in love, was evident.

So, in an effort to hold on to the time-scarred mementos, Mr. Price and Ms. Pelley began a painstaking process to preserve each and every one of the documents, 50 some-odd years after each letter had been signed, sealed and delivered. Instead of keeping the collection hidden away in boxes, Mr. Price, who is the director of development at the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts in Philadelphia, opted instead to share his parents’ romance with the world by posting the letters online at juneandart.blogspot.com.

Each letter is transcribed verbatim and posted in “real time,” corresponding with original dates, though more than half a century later. The first letter was written by Mr. Price’s mother, June, on Saturday, October 1, 1949, so Mr. Price posted that correspondence the same day 61 years later, on October 1, 2010.

According to Mr. Price, the online posts will continue along the same timeline as the original correspondence. And in the instance of a break in writing—for example, while June was attending the Traphagen School of Fashion in Manhattan her appendix burst and regular correspondence was interrupted—Mr. Price will fill the empty space with in-depth background information on both of his parents and photos and thumbnails of oil paintings or drawings by his father or design sketches by his mother.

Mr. Price recently noted that though some question the ethics behind his project, namely, the issue of privacy, he said that this was not necessarily an issue for either one of his parents. In fact, it was his mother, June Price, née Anderson, who planted the seed for the idea of conservation. In 2004, by June’s request, Lee’s wife Lisa assisted her mother-in-law in gathering up her half of the letters (as

well as a litany of drawings and sketches) she stored in her Spring Hill, Florida home.

Five years later, after Ms. Anderson died, Ms. Pelley took on the responsibility of caring for her aging father, Arthur. He died in November 2009.

The following summer, Mr. Price traveled to his parents’ Florida home to help get things in order. It was on this visit that Mr. Price discovered, beneath his father’s bed, his father’s half of the love letters.

“Myself, my wife and my sister were thrilled to make the discovery ... My wife is a librarian and my line of work focuses on historic preservation, so naturally, we’re both history buffs,” Mr. Price said. “These letters were a great mixture of romance and history and it was quite exciting.”

Indeed, the letters offered more than romance. Like a telescope with sights set backward in time, the exchanges offered a peek into late 1940s Long Island and Manhattan.

Through their letters the couple shared stories of their solo visits to the cinema—where films such as “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” starring John Wayne and “On the Town” with Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra had only just been released. Or, after spending time together, the young lovers’ letters contained fond remembrances of their shared experience of seeing “Kiss Me Kate” in its first run on Broadway.

“I am a big fan of that [era] and New York City was at the heart of it ... There’s an aura to Manhattan at that time that seems particularly romantic during the postwar years, and so many times in their letters, you get a real sense of the time period and how it was to be young then and in love,” said Mr. Price.

The East End also figured prominently in the correspondence. Arthur, who grew up in a home on Cooper Street in Southampton Village and often summered at his family’s modest cottage in the then relatively primitive and underdeveloped Noyack hamlet, wrote frequently about his time here. In addition to sharing the news of his family and happenings at the Southampton homestead or on nearby Coopers Beach, he frequently wrote of nights on the town at the Old Polish Hall (now 230 Elm) or the Southampton movie theater on Hill Street, also still in place but with a few changes to its façade.

For today’s readers, the blog will continue onward until September 1, 2011, ending with a particularly special experience that the couple shared together, Mr. Price promised, adding that he intends to keep the final entry a surprise. And as he has described on his blog, as the letters continued it became obvious that even “within a month, their love [would] noticeably deepen.”

Though Mr. Price and Ms. Pelley have uncovered a treasure trove of information about their family and their hometown of Southampton, several details are still missing from the grand picture, Mr. Price explained. As a result, Mr. Price said he hopes the blog will also serve as a means for longtime East End residents to reach out and supply information or photos from the era.

And after all these years, most importantly, according to Mr. Price, the letters written by his parents were a simple testament to the power of love.

“Jamie and I talk about their romance every now and then. They always remained best friends and it was extraordinarily difficult for my father to lose my mother,” he said. “But all of my memories of them together are happy ones. You could always tell that they were crazy for each other, up until the very end.”