April 12, 1942
Dear Folks,
It doesn’t cost me anything to write a letter. I feel a lot better already. My vaccination is swollen up but I suppose that will be over in a little while. Some of the fellas vaccinations are like mine and some of them hardly show.
How is pa coming along with the portable welder? Is he really getting a few hours in with it enough to make some money? There is a Lincoln portable welder being used in our camp near our barracks here. There is a lot of excavating, most of the construction work being done here. There are a lot of trucks driving around all the time, bulldozers, some of them have a kind of a bucket that slides up and down a frame. They go down the road scraping the bucket full of dirt, lift it up and dump it right in the box of those trucks. That is really interesting to watch. The truck and the dozer will be moving along and scraping up the lift and loading it at the same time.
There are a lot of great big dump trucks with two axles in the back both having dual wheels with about the size tires we have got on the back of our wrecker. They haul some awful big loads. Must be about an eight yard box on them and they have it heaping way up over the side boards. A lot of the stuff they haul is a kind of fine white rocks. A load that size must weigh about ten tons. Most of the excavating work is for the roads and drill fields. We haven’t got any good drill fields over here yet.
It has been nice weather here today which is very unusual. The barracks we are in now haven’t any hot water and the only heat we have is from an oil stove so it is very inconvenient. The worst thing is that we have to wash and shave in ice cold water. And our clothes don’t dry. They have a dryer room for them but until the steam is furnished it’s no good as a dryer. This is the worst place for lines. We spend most of our time standing in line waiting for chow or whatever it might be.
You were saying that you wrote to Ruth*. I would like to have her address explained a little. I can’t find that street on the map I have got. If I have a leave when I get out of detention, I would like to go and see her. Anyplace to get away from this place. It isn’t so bad but when you’re in detention it seems just like you’re in jail. It isn’t anything like Hermann Ward was saying. Only perhaps in cases of very spoiled or lazy guys is any punishing done and then it is usually some more work added onto what you have already got. More night guard or scrub a bucket.
The guarding we do is nothing but to get used to staying awake etc. I was on what they call the fire guard the other afternoon. I had to walk around the building with another fella and report every half hour. The fella I was walking with is from Company 221, and of course when you haven’t anything to do but to walk around the building you do a lot of talking. This particular fella was from New York state and seemed to be a very fine fellow. He was telling me that a man had a ruptured appendix the other night and he said the sight was pitiful. He went completely out of his head with the pain. He said he laid there on the floor and screamed.
On our way around the building we met a Seaman guard walking his beat. He was a very friendly chap. He seemed to like his job too. He said he never fired a shot yet and as long as he is in the Seaman guard he won’t have to go to sea. I sometimes think if I get gypped out of trade school, I would be wise to take something like that. There is an awful mess of men in a place like this and if you haven’t some strings to pull you can easily be left out. Well I’m not worrying about it. That doesn’t do any good anyway and makes it hard.
so With Love,
Erwin Holmquist
*Family note: Ruth Ingebor Holmquist, Erwin’s aunt, was born in 1898 in Cadillac, Michigan. She spent many years working in Chicago and Denver, Colorado as a domestic. At the time of this letter she was 43 years old and living in Chicago with a Radiologist and his wife employed as a maid. She moved back to Michigan in her later years and even married once in 1967 at the age of 68. Sadly her husband passed away just one year later. Ruth lived on the old family farm until shortly before her death in 1992 at the age of 93.
Ancestors Across the Ages 