Letter to Terrie, 31 October 1968 — 'I didn't care much for the Vanilla Fudge'

What the letter is

31 October 1968. The earliest dated letter Charlie wrote to Terrie that this archive carries — opening the corpus a year and a half before the March 1970 Vietnam tour shipping date and twenty-two months before he would be commanding an M-60 machine gun in the I Corps bush. Charlie is a senior at Marietta College majoring in economics; Terrie is a sophomore at the University of Maryland, in the dorm at College Park. The letter is short, light, full of small college-life detail, and dated to Halloween of his senior year.

Transcription

Oct 31, 1968

Dear Terry,

By now you know I’m a poor correspondent. As I was leaving the airport I saw Nancy Garratson. She had missed her plane (the same one) and had to stand there 5 minutes with the ramp down. They wouldn’t let her on. We just barely made it!

I didn’t care much for the Vanilla Fudge. They were too loud with no real melody that was familiar. This was the general consensus too.

Jay Ray doesn’t want to go home Thanksgiving and I wanted to go over with him. He wants to go over the weekend before. Do you think you could line him up with someone? Don’t make anything definite!

[… continuation through additional pages not yet sampled …]

What the letter records

Halloween 1968 — the earliest dated letter in the corpus. The Vietnam letters parent doc had carried the late-1969 Christmas leave letter (Charlie at NCO training, 711 days left) as the earliest dated letter on the site. This October 1968 letter pushes the corpus opening back by fourteen months — into the period before Charlie was in the army at all, before his draft physical and the Vietnam orders, when he was a senior at Marietta College with an active social life and a normal college-correspondence relationship with a girlfriend at the University of Maryland.

The Vanilla Fudge concert. “I didn’t care much for the Vanilla Fudge. They were too loud with no real melody that was familiar. This was the general consensus too.” Vanilla Fudge was the late-1960s American psychedelic-rock band whose cover of You Keep Me Hangin’ On had peaked at #6 on the Billboard chart in summer 1968 and whose touring through the autumn was hitting Midwestern colleges. Charlie’s read — “too loud with no real melody that was familiar” — is the assessment of a 21-year-old midwestern economics major whose musical taste ran toward Top-40 melody rather than the heavy-feedback psychedelic register the band was pushing. The detail is small but it locates Charlie in the cultural fall-1968 with precision — the same season as the King and Kennedy assassinations earlier in the year, the Chicago Democratic Convention violence, the build-up to the Nixon-Humphrey election.

Jay Ray and the Thanksgiving plan. “Jay Ray doesn’t want to go home Thanksgiving and I wanted to go over with him. He wants to go over the weekend before. Do you think you could line him up with someone? Don’t make anything definite!” Jay Ray is one of Charlie’s Marietta College friends, whose home situation made Thanksgiving in Ohio less appealing than a road trip to the Maryland coast. Charlie wants to come with him — presumably to see Terrie — and is asking Terrie to find a girl at Maryland willing to spend the weekend before Thanksgiving with Jay Ray. “Don’t make anything definite!” — the small careful note of a college-age boyfriend protecting his friend from social commitment without consent. The Thanksgiving 1968 weekend, on this evidence, was being arranged at the same registrar’s-office-and-roommate level that runs through the rest of the courtship correspondence.

The Nancy Garratson airport miss. “As I was leaving the airport I saw Nancy Garratson. She had missed her plane (the same one) and had to stand there 5 minutes with the ramp down. They wouldn’t let her on. We just barely made it!” Nancy Garratson was apparently a Marietta-area acquaintance who happened to be on the same flight, missed her boarding window by a few minutes, and got stranded watching the plane pull away from the gate. Charlie made the same flight by what he reports as a similar margin. The detail is one of those small piece-of-life observations the courtship letters preserve.

“Dear Terry.” Charlie’s spelling of her name in 1968 was “Terry” — the more common American spelling. The “Terrie” spelling that runs through the Vietnam letters was a later convention. Whether Terrie wrote her name “Terrie” and Charlie didn’t yet know, or whether “Terrie” was her own later adjustment, is a small open question. The opening “Dear Terry” is the period spelling.

The closing register. The letter signs “Love, Charles” — the same adult-correspondence signature that runs through the Vietnam letters. Even at 21, in Halloween 1968, Charlie’s signed register was the formal one. The childhood nickname “Chuckie” survives in other letters of this era to family but in his correspondence with Terrie the signature was always “Charles.”

Where this sits in the corpus

The opening of the corpus, by date:

The October 1968 letter shifts the corpus open from “December 1969 NCO training” to “Halloween 1968 Marietta College senior” — thirteen months earlier in Charlie’s life. The pre-army Charlie now has a voice in the archive.

Other pre-Vietnam letters surfaced in the same batch (queued)

The same grandmaE1.pdf batch surfaced several other pre-Vietnam letters which await full ingestion:

• April 1969 Florida spring break letter — Charlie “burnt to a crisp” on the beach with cops everywhere, plus the line about a Cleveland interview with the Federal Reserve and a Philadelphia interview with Sears (his senior-year job-application track before the draft).
• May 26 1969 letter — First day of Marietta College finals; he is home painting; finals start Saturday.
• Summer 1968 letter — “I’m trying to go see my Uncle Len in Washington DC, actually Silver Spring, Maryland, before school.” The same Len from the 1922 cross-country car trip letter, now in his sixties at his Silver Spring home where he would die in 1976.
• Undated birthday letter to Terrie — “I won’t really love you until you finish school. I told you I would look you up in three years and then if you can support me in the style I’m accustomed then maybe we can get serious and talk business.” The early-courtship Charlie teasing Terrie about her finishing college first. Signed “Charles.”
• “Chuckie” letter to Terrie — ending with the line “I don’t care if your sister names hampsters after us so long as you don’t call one Chuckie.” Sandy Wildermuth, Terrie’s sister, was naming pet hamsters after Charlie and Terrie. The only letter in the corpus where Charlie signs as “Chuckie.”

These belong to the same pre-Vietnam phase the 31 October 1968 letter opens, and will be ingested individually as the rest of the grandmaE1.pdf is mined.

Source: grandmaE1.pdf page 495 (gitignored locally; transcribed content surfaced here).