Letter to Terrie, 13 December 1968

What the letter is

13 December 1968. Charlie Eesley, twenty-one years old, in his senior year at Marietta College on an economics track, sits down to write Terrie Lee Wildermuth — the woman who will become his wife and Chuck’s mother — about a Mark Twain book the bookstore didn’t have, about kitchen duty, about Marshal Moist getting engaged to his pinmate, about last night’s formal being a flop, and about the news he’s most glad to hear: she’s been accepted into the University of Maryland.

It is the chronological start of the surviving Charlie-and-Terrie correspondence in this archive. A year and some months later he will ship to Vietnam and start writing the Letters from Vietnam sequence from Saigon. The voice that will write those is already on the page here: dry, observational, deferential to her news, attentive to the small absurdities (the engagement gossip, the formal that flopped), one step less serious about himself than he is about her.

Transcription

12/13/68

Dear Terry,

They will be late for your birthday and so will your present. I was going to give you Twain’s book “Letters from the Earth” but the book store didn’t have it. You might get it later.

What can I say that might interest you? The kitchen is dirty again. Marshal Moist got engaged to his pinmate. (how does that grab you?) He gets a lot of grief for it. We had a formal last night and it was sort of a flop.

I’m glad to hear you were accepted into Maryland.

[continues on page 2:]

…your birthday. It is the 13th, isn’t it? I don’t even know what you like. I could give you a subscription to what I gave you for Christmas so it would come every month or so. I don’t know whether they handle subscriptions, though. How about a pair of pyjamas?

I assume you still have your job. Did you get your sick pay? Let me know when you get accepted to U. of Maryland.

My beloved roommate Jay Kay came in last night. The New Year did not do anything for him. He is as obnoxious as…

[further pages not yet placed in archive]

Things worth noting

• He addresses her as “Terry,” not “Terrie” — an early-correspondence informality that won’t stick. By the Vietnam letters he writes “Terrie.”
• The Twain book he meant to send — Letters from the Earth — is Twain’s posthumously published collection of skeptical theological essays (Satan writes letters from earth to other angels in heaven about the strange habits of humans). It is the book Charlie thought twenty-one-year-old Terrie would find interesting on her birthday. The choice is its own small portrait of who he thought she was.
• Terrie was accepted into the University of Maryland in December 1968 — presumably for the spring or fall 1969 semester. Her undergraduate years are documented elsewhere in this archive only sparsely; this is the earliest dated record of her academic plans surviving in the correspondence.
• The kitchen, the formal, Marshal Moist and his pinmate — this is fraternity life or dormitory life, the small social weather of an undergraduate Christmas-vacation lull. A year later he will be writing about something very different.

Provenance

Held in the family archive (Chuck Eesley) alongside the larger Vietnam letter collection but catalogued separately as pre-tour correspondence. The original scan file is named charlie-to-terrie-1968-12-13-pre-vietnam.jpeg.