‘A beautiful, sad story.’ Letter written by WWII soldier 73 years ago finds its way home.
Jenny DiCola was looking for some props for her photography business when she found a handwritten letter postmarked 1945 lying in a box in an upstairs corner of a Lexington rummage store.
The letter, dated Jan. 21, 1945, was written by Lt. David McCord and addressed to his “Ma” on Silvacola Farm in Lexington. What DiCola later learned was that McCord was killed in action in Germany weeks later, on March 3, 1945. He was 24.
On Nov. 8, two months after she tracked down and began corresponding with McCord’s family, DiCola was able to deliver the letter to his younger brother in Lexington. Bill McCord, himself a World War II veteran, is 94 years old.
The family does not know how the letter came to be in a box at the Lexington Peddlers Mall, but they are elated to have it.
“It’s a shock to me that it ever survived,” Bill McCord said Saturday. “I just can’t imagine that it ever got to my mother.”
On Friday, DiCola wrote about the letter on her blog, A Curious Lens.
DiCola, who lives in Martinsburg, W.Va., said she was in Lexington with her husband for the horse sales in September when she got bored and decided to go to the Peddlers Mall. She said she found the letter in a pile of papers that “looked like it should be sitting out in the trash.”
A woman who loves a good mystery, DiCola paid $1 for the letter but didn’t read it until she got back to the horse sale, where she sat down and began reading it aloud to her husband.
“I started crying, and he started to cry,” she said in an interview.
David McCord “told of his days in England. He and his friends had picked up ‘the gals’ and taken a bus to see a show. The theatre was so cold he’d ‘like to froze.’ They had the girls home by 10 p.m. because everything was closing up,” DiCola wrote on the blog. “They found a pretty decent place to eat that night. On the menu was steak (which turned out to be hamburger), mashed potatoes and Brussel sprouts. Add soup, coffee, light bread and dessert for $1.20 each. ‘And a cup of coffee here is 2/3 milk and 1/3 of something besides coffee.’
“He assured his mother he was being a good boy and had gotten up in time for church that morning. Because it was so cold, he hadn’t stirred far from the Red Cross building. He wrapped it up by saying he was going to get caught up on his other mail. ‘News from Joe Stalin’s boys still sounds good. I only hope they roll right on into the heart of Germany. Love, David.’”
Dicola said the “perfectly intact” letter and envelope was addressed to Mrs. John W. McCord of Silvacola Farm, Lexington, Kentucky R#5.
She did a Facebook search to try to find members of the McCord family in Lexington and located and messaged Mary Diane McCord Hanna, who turned out to be Bill McCord’s daughter, a niece David McCord never got to meet.
David McCord had been recovering in England from a war injury when he wrote the letter, but DiCola was saddened to learn from Hanna that he was sent back to the front and was killed by a grenade two months before the war ended.
“Now this letter was no longer a piece of paper I stumbled across in a box, in a corner, in a big building full of knick knacks,” she wrote. “It was a story of a soldier who sacrificed his life for his country. It was a story of a mother who would not get another letter from her son, just a box of his belongings delivered from a far off place where he had gone and not returned.
“Although I paid $1 for this letter, it did not belong to me. It became my mission to return this letter to the hands of the true owner, Mr. Bill McCord, Mary Diane’s father,” DiCola wrote.
After corresponding for two months, Hanna invited DiCola to her home on Silvacola Farm on Thursday, to the address to where the letter was sent in 1945. They toured the house where David McCord had lived and then went to visit Bill McCord.
“It’s been very emotional,” Hanna said Saturday. “It was always like the house was a monument to his brother.”
Meeting Bill McCord for the first time, DiCola said Saturday, “I could feel all of his pain. It’s been so long, but I know it was still fresh for him.”
“I handed him a small gift bag with the letter inside,” she wrote on the blog. “Pulling out the letter, his eyes welled up at the sight of his brother’s handwriting. Mary Diane read the letter to him and he sat silently listening to every word, laughing occasionally at his brother’s humor that was familiar to him.”
Bill McCord, who was four years younger than his brother, said he was serving in the Philippines, where he worked as a chief clerk, when he got word that David had died.
He said he usually goes to the Lexington Cemetery, where David is buried, on Memorial Day.
On Saturday night, he said he had just been looking at the letter again, trying unsuccessfully to decipher some blurred writing on the back side of the page.
“I am just tickled to death to have this letter,” he said. “It’s hard for me to believe.”
DiCola said being able to return the letter to the family to whom it was written was the ending to “a beautiful, sad story.”
“It felt like that letter was trying to make its way back home to Mr. McCord,” she said. “It was such a great honor to place it directly into his hands. It felt like divine intervention.”
This story was originally published November 10, 2018 at 10:31 PM.