By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
The correspondence begins simply enough: “Your lovely box of candy arrived today and every piece I have tasted, I have found excellent – both stuffing and outside.”
The letter was written by Earl “Bill” Kennedy from Findlay and postmarked on Nov. 18, 1920 to a woman he’d met recently Marie McCarthy, who later got the pet name “Mickey.”
A hundred years later the Hancock Historical Museum is celebrating the romance of this couple with the exhibit “Love Letters: A Jazz Age Romance.”
The museum’s curator and archivist Joy Bennett spoke about the exhibit this week during a virtual presentation hosted by the Wood County District Public Library.
The exhibit is available to view in person and virtually. Visitors can read transcriptions of the letters, look at the originals, and listen to them being read.
The letters do more than give people a view of the lives and love of this particular couple, but also a peek of what upper middle class life was like in Findlay during the period.
Earl writes of life at the country club with dinners and rounds of golf, as well as dancing at the local amusement park and going to one of Findlay’s five movie houses.
Some letters also refer to news of the day – a hit-and-run accident that killed a girl and the robbery of a jewelry store.
The museum only has one side of the correspondence, Marie’s letters have disappeared. It does include several letters written by Earl’s mother, herself a doctor, at a time when he was suffering from septicemia, an infection of the bloodstream, and he was unable write himself. Bennett noted that his handwriting, always difficult to read, more illegible afterward. Some from when he was still recovering were typewritten.
Another missing piece is how the couple met. While Kennedy was a long-time resident of Findlay where his father operated Kennedy Printing (still doing business as Millstream-Kennedy Incorporated), McCarthy lived in Cleveland where she worked as a chemist for the railroad. She was 24, and he was almost exactly 10 years older. He still lived with his parents.
We do know that on their first date they went to a football game in Cleveland and then dancing.
McCarthy grew up in Ithaca, New York, and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in agriculture from Cornell.
She was a professional woman, and over the course of the five years of correspondence moved to New York City.
The couple was already engaged at that point. They were engaged in January 1922.
Kennedy relates in a letter just days later what happened when he broke the news to his mother. “She told me to remember that you were giving up everything for me and that as you grew older you would need me more than you do now and that I must keep on loving and caring for you forever. And I will little girl. I’ll love you, love you always.”
The couple didn’t marry until April 1925. Their son and only child, Thomas, was born in 1929. Marie died four years later of pneumonia. Earl remarried in 1937 and died in 1949 from complications of surgery.
These letters keep their love alive for readers living a century later.
Letters, Bennett said, a more tangible than phone calls or text messages. “You can save letters as mementos and memorials.”
“Letter writing requires a lot more thought,” she said.
She likened it to the diary her grandfather kept while serving in in Civilian Conservation Corps during the Depression. That was “like writing letters to himself,” Bennett said.
“It is a way to connect with him after he was gone. I feel letters are very similar.”
