Highlights from a trove of more than 200 love letters that tell the story of a couple's courtship and marriage during World War II are now on display digitally through the Nashville Public Library, offering an intimate picture of love during wartime. The letters by William Raymond Whittaker and Jane Dean Whittaker were found in a Nashville home that had belonged to Jane and her siblings. They were donated in 2016 to the Metro Nashville Archives, per the AP. Whittaker, who went by Ray, was from New Rochelle, New York. He moved to the Tennessee capital to attend the historically Black Meharry Medical College, according to library archivist, Kelley Sirko. That's where he met and dated Jane Dean, another student at the college.
The pair lost touch when Whittaker left Nashville. In the summer of 1942, he was drafted into the Army. Stationed at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, he decided to reestablish contact with Dean, who was then working as a medical lab tech at Vanderbilt University. The library doesn't have Whittaker's first letter to Dean, but it does have her reply. She greets him somewhat formally, as "Dear Wm R." "It sure was a pleasant and sad surprise to hear from you," she writes on July 30, 1942. "Pleasant because you will always hold a place in my heart and its nice to know you think of me once in a while. Sad because you are in the armed forces—maybe I shouldn't say that but war is so uncertain, however I'm proud to know that you are doing your bit for your country."
Just two months after the first letters, the romance heated up. Whittaker had been assigned to Fort McClellan in Alabama, where he would help organize the reactivated—and segregated—92nd Infantry Division. In an undated letter from September 1942, he tells Dean, "I have something very important to tell you when I do see you." He added: "I might even ask you to marry me. One never knows." They did soon agree to wed, marrying on Nov. 7 of that year in Birmingham. In a letter from Nov. 9, she addresses Whittaker as "my darling husband."
"You can't help but smile when you read through these letters," Sirko said. "This was just such an intimate look at two regular people during a really complicated time in our history." Sirko said Nashville archivists haven't been able to locate any living relatives of the Whittakers, so most of what they know about them is from the letters. The couple didn't have any children, according to an obituary for Ray Whittaker, who died in Nashville in 1989. The donation also included a few photos and Ray Whittaker's patch from the historically Black fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha. More here.
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