SAN DIEGO COUNTY, Calif. — The daughters of a 94-year-old Logan Heights woman are still trying to dry out their mother’s most precious possessions after her home flooded in January.
In the boxes of keepsakes, are love letters that Idella White painstakingly saved since 1948. Carolynn Carr laid out the wet, damp, smudged letters to try and dry them, saying: "These are my mother’s memories. See, this one is destroyed.”
Joseph Tickles Junior wrote the letters to Carr’s mother Idella White more than 70 years ago. Tickles and White were boyfriend and girlfriend in Louisiana in 1948. Then Tickles joined the military. One of his letters reads, “I was very, very glad to hear from you. I've had a smile on my face all afternoon.”
CBS 8 sat down with White at her daughter’s home Wednesday afternoon and asked her why she saved those letters from an old boyfriend all these years.
“I saved them because I was in love, I guess. I was not going to throw them away just because of childish love. He said every time he'd write. I've got every one of them and that's why I started saving his. I said well, if he's going to save mine I'll save his,” White said
And so she did, starting in 1948. She moved to San Diego in 1952 and his letters followed her. In one of them he describes the last time he saw her. It would be the last time they ever saw each other.
“He wrote that he got on the train and he looked out the window and I was still standing there at the platform and he says- the train pulled off and the tears start rolling. He started crying," said White.
Tickles moved to Washington, D.C. He got married there and White got married to a man in the Navy in San Diego. She says he sent her letters after he was married, as a friend. But then all communication stopped. A few years ago she asked her nephew to look up whatever happened to Joseph Tickles Jr. online. That’s when she found out he had passed away.
She created memory books with old pictures and his letters. She calls Tickles her dream boy. Now all she has are her damp, smudged letters with careful cursive handwriting.
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