"A Million Kisses": Love Letters from a Doughboy in France Part One of Two

"Dearest Baby Wife, Each minute that I have spent with you will be recalled many thousand times to my memory while I am away from you. How I would love to take you in my arms and kiss away your tears and hold my lips to yours in loving affectionate kisses like we always had for each other—going away would seem easier to me—your sweet breath will remain fresh with me then until I come back. A million kisses, your loving husband, Ros"

In 1917, Roscoe Conklin Chittim and Vera Diamond found each other when worlds apart collided in a quiet Dallas neighborhood, and their love for each other poured out in letters written a world away on the battlefields of a terrible war. A sample here of the more than forty love letters that have survived tells the story of their passion for one another, a passion undimmed by distance, time, or the exigencies of war. Most of the surviving letters were written by Roscoe. Vera wrote her husband many letters, but Roscoe was unable to save them while in France, and only a handful that were returned to Dallas are extant. The spelling and grammar of the letters has been preserved as written by the couple.

Roscoe Chittim was born August 4, 1889, in a small hamlet near Springfield, Missouri, the son of a full-blooded Cherokee teenage girl, Edna Hale, and her Anglo common law husband, eighteen-year-old Alf Henry Chittim. A marriage not accepted by their families, Edna and her infant were whisked away by relatives to Indian Territory (Oklahoma) where Roscoe—named by the Cherokee chief for the late New York financier Roscoe Conkling—grew up in the wide open fields of the American frontier alongside friends like Claremore native Will Rogers. Ros, who preferred his Cherokee nickname Who-Ho, was a gifted athlete, a swimmer of local renown, and a popular baseball and football player when those relatively new American sports were spreading west.

As a young man Roscoe worked in the oil fields of Oklahoma until, at age 22, he was recruited to play college football at the Anderson School for Boys (later Middle Tennessee State University) in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. His surviving diary and football playbook illustrate the innocence of those early days. After one illustrious season on the gridiron, the school temporarily closed, after which Roscoe found himself in New York training for the 1912 Stockholm Olympics as a freestyle swimmer. But the practices in the frigid Hudson River that February left him in a sick bed with pneumonia and off the U.S. team. Roscoe accompanied the team to Sweden that summer but only as a spectator. (Fellow American Indian Jim Thorpe did make the team, and history.)

Upon his return to New York City, Roscoe worked briefly for Chase Manhattan Bank late in the summer of 1912, and then as a lifeguard in Atlantic City, but longed for home and family. He made it back as far as St. Louis, where he worked out with the Missouri Athletic Club for a year, and then he traveled to San Antonio, where his mother had moved with her new husband, H. C. Leete. Roscoe worked for a time in the Humble oil fields, and then went to work for his stepfather in the burgeoning auto business. And it was that industry that brought him to the Dallas suburb of Oak Cliff in 1917.

Vera Diamond was the youngest child of a prominent realtor in Oak Cliff, five years younger than Roscoe but smitten with him—as he was with her—at first sight. Vera's life was in sharp contrast to the Missouri-born wanderer. A child of wealth and high society, she attended the prestigious Kidd-Key Conservatory of Music in Denton, traveled extensively with her parents and best friend, Anna Card, and found herself swept off of her feet when the young auto executive, who had moved into an apartment owned by her father, caught her eye. A whirlwind and courtship resulted in their marriage on...