Found letters part sweet story, part mystery

Published 11:05 pm Sunday, March 15, 2009

It’s a lovely mystery. Too bad we know so little about Evelyn Belknap.

Letters from her chums, Lucille and Florence, were sent to Evelyn in the mid 1930s. Susan Brandvold Dawson found the notes near a garbage can on Evergreen Way and would like to return them to the Belknap family.

It would be a shame if no one cared about this slice of history, Dawson said.

From the yellowed papers, mailed with three cents of postage, we know a bit about Lucille C. Bristol, who lived at 26 Isham St., in Burlington, Vt., and Florence, who lived at 16 Freehold St. in Derby, England.

“Thank you very much for your expressions of sympathy in the death of our King,” Florence wrote to Evelyn on Feb. 18, 1936. “We are confident that we shall have an equally good ruler in his son, our new King, Edward VIII.”

Florence mailed a delicate, handmade holiday card, tied with a beige ribbon, saying, “To wish you a Happy Christmas and a New Year filled with health, happiness and golden hours.”

Florence also wrote before Christmas in 1935.

“The shops are simply lovely, and there’s a nip in the air that makes our faces glow, but our fingers cold,” Florence wrote. “I am afraid I have not much news to tell you now but I will write again, as I shall not catch the post if I don’t hurry.”

Dawson, the woman who found the letters, is an avid dog walker. The Cascade High School graduate retired from the state Employment Security Department, but she was asked to go back to work in Everett at this time of high unemployment.

She enjoys spending time with her Everett neighbor, her mother, Carolyn Brandvold. They shop and do lunch. Dawson’s dogs are Hunter and Heidi, both Shetland sheep dogs. The dogs and Dawson go out and about every day for long, long strolls.

One morning the trio was walking near the former Longs Drugs on Evergreen Way. They found a shoe box with the lid half off near a garbage receptacle. The letters were inside.

“I thought it was touching,” she said. “I think they were from college girls.”

There are clues about the Belknap family in the letters. Lucille was surprised that Evelyn didn’t have a telephone.

“Just about everyone has one here, but one of my girlfriends hasn’t one and we think it’s an awful inconvenience,” Lucille wrote, saying she was Evelyn’s Vermont pen-pal in 1933.

In 1935, Lucille said she had been swimming quite a bit and the weather had been sweltering.

“We have a canoe this year and there’s a swell lake a little ways away where we go in it,” Lucille wrote. “Until lately it has been real secluded and no one there and we have taken off our bathing suits and had a regular nudist colony.”

That was the summer before Lucille headed off to college.

“It seems queer I’ll be up where my mother and sisters are, and with three of us in college, I can see where we’ll all be living on bread and water,” Lucille said. “I am going to the movies, ‘Broadway Gondolier.’ ”

That movie came out in 1935 with Dick Powell and Joan Blondell.

Lucille mentions a cute dress that Evelyn made. Apparently Evelyn sent a picture to Vermont.

She also saw Shirley Temple in “Curly Top.”

Dawson said nothing would make her happier than to find the Belknap family. They should get the privilege of opening the letter that is still sealed.

The shoe box also includes two 1936 high school newspapers, called the “Golden I” from Ilwaco.

The senior dance was at the grange hall.

Toad Johnson was on the basketball team.

If you can help find the Belknaps, call me at 425-339-3451.