March 17, 1958
Hello Mom & Dad
I forgot to tell you we have three rolls of film to be developed 1 roll of still and 2 rolls of movie take about two week[s] before we can get them up to you. Getting quite a collection now. I feel fine today. I haven’t anything to say today tell you something tomorrow. Love your son. O. Jr. xxx! (U.C.G.O.T.P.)
U.C.G.O.T.P. [You Can Give One To Pop]
The First of a Series
In 1954, my father Orlando moved his young family from Rochester, New York to Newport News, Virginia, to take a job as a draftsman at Newport News Shipbuilding. He and my mother Janet brought along my older siblings, Michael and Mary Lou, and two years after arriving in Virginia, my twin brother Tim and I were born.
During his lunch breaks at the shipyard, Dad would dash off postcards to his parents back in Rochester — quick updates written in a few minutes before returning to his drafting table where he designed boilers, exhaust systems, and gate valves for aircraft carriers and atomic submarines. These cards weren’t meant to be great literature. They were just a young father’s way of staying connected across the miles, letting his parents know the family was doing fine, the babies were healthy (mostly), and life in Virginia was good.
What I love about these postcards is their honesty. Dad didn’t save up only the highlights — he wrote about the mundane stuff too: sick kids, bad weather, grass seed washed away by rain, twins fighting over a toy car, a little boy who wouldn’t go near Santa Claus. He wrote about Mike’s school troubles and his football triumphs, about haircuts that left everyone crying, about loads of laundry ending up in the trash can.
Reading them now, more than sixty years later, they’re a time capsule of ordinary American family life in the late 1950s. Two-cent postcards, written at lunch, mailed from Newport News to Rochester. Brief notes that added up to something bigger: a father’s love, a family’s story, a connection across distance that neither time nor miles could break.
