200 love letters found in a Nashville home tell the story of a couple’s courtship during WWII

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 were found in a Nashville home that had belonged to Jane and her siblings. They were donated in 2016 to the Metro Nashville Archives. 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 the library's metropolitan archivist, Kelley Sirko. That's where he met and dated Jane, another student at the college. The pair lost touch when Ray 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 Jane, who was then working as a medical lab technician at Vanderbilt University. The library doesn't have Ray's first letter to Jane, 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 it's 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." "You can't help but smile when you read through these letters," Sirko said. "You really can't. And this was just such an intimate look at two regular people during a really complicated time in our history." Sirko said Nashville archivists have not been able to locate any living relatives of Ray and Jane, so most of what they know about them is from the letters. The couple did not have any children, according to an obituary for Ray, who died in Nashville in 1989. This article was provided by The Associated Press.