Letters from the Heart
- andreasachs1
- Sep 4
- 4 min read
By Larry Bogrow / Chicago
What would you do if one day, out of the blue, you received an online message from a total stranger saying, “I have some information you might be interested in.” The person left their email address, name and phone number. In these uncertain days of scams, most people would likely ignore or delete such messages, but my brother Earl didn’t. Curiosity got the better of him.
As a practicing dentist based in suburban Detroit, Earl received this mysterious message on his dental website. And at the same time, my sister Karen received a similar message on her Facebook feed. The common link was our surname, Bogrow. Earl decided to call the mystery person, thinking “what do I have to lose?”
A woman named Gina Soleau answered the phone. She explained to Earl that she had recently purchased a home on Gladstone Street in Detroit and found some items in her attic that had our last name. She invited Earl to her home if he was interested, yet she never described the items to him.
That’s when Earl first mentioned this to me for some brotherly advice. I knew that my dad and grandparents used to live on Gladstone, but that was before my parents got married in the late 1940s. I also knew that Gladstone was an inner-city location in a neighborhood much like Chicago’s south and west sides. Was it a trick? Was it safe or risky?
Earl made the decision to visit the old Gladstone house and brought along his daughter’s 6‘5” boyfriend Alex Gross as support. Gina led them up to the third-floor attic on a hot summer day amid dust and spider webs. That’s when they found bags of letters, written to and from my father, Harold Bogrow, between 1941 and 1945. My grandparents had saved the letters, storing them in their attic.
There weren’t just a few letters; there were well over a hundred, written to family members by my dad as well as many letters on military stationary from friends of his. During these years, my dad was only 19 years old, soon to enter the army himself through the end of World War II in 1945 when he would turn 23.
Imagine reading these letters that were aging for more than 80 years in that dusty attic on Gladstone. Written during the war from the perspective of a young man barely twenty years old, this was truly a treasure trove.
I won’t trouble you with the content of the letters, except to say they were well-written in legible cursive. Interesting how the tone changed on letters to the family versus letters to and from his friends in the military. I observed the term "swell" used on multiple occasions. Apparently "awesome" wasn’t part of the vernacular in the early 1940s. There were many “pal” references and he was called “Bugs” by many of his friends.”
There’s a portion from one specific letter my dad mailed to his parents on Army Air Forces stationary on D-Day, dated June 6, 1944. that I’d like to share: “I guess you heard about the invasion this morning. Everybody has been waiting for this day and now it is here. It won’t be very long now before Germany is out and the war with Japan won’t last much longer. I still hear from all the fellows and they are doing all right." [Full letter at right]
My dad never told me much about his time in the Army based in Alexandria, La., or war stories abroad, so these letters were not only a look at history, but allowed me the opportunity to learn much more about him. What an incredible opportunity it has been to get to know my dad in his early 20s, his close-knit family and friends.
Harold Bogrow passed away over 30 years ago at the age of 72, survived by my mother Ann and the three of us kids. While he is missed, his legacy is enhanced by way of more than a hundred letters to and from him written 80 years ago. What a blessing!
The moral of this story? Don’t always delete strange messages. If my brother Earl had ignored that message, this reunion with our dad would have never happened. And let’s thank Gina, who made all of this possible in the first place. Hidden treasures, indeed!
Former Detroiter Larry Bogrow is a retired marketing and advertising executive. He and his wife Sue, who is orginally from Windsor, Ontario, have been married for 51 years and reside in Chicago‘s northwest suburbs (Mundelein, to be exact) in a Del Webb active adult community. Larry has been an avid pickleball enthusiast for over 15 years and does much volunteering in his community, including writing articles in its quarterly newsletters. He’s also a self-proclaimed Seinfeld trivia buff.
Enjoyed reading your story, Larry.