We often think of historical figures and even our own ancestors as little more than impassive images frozen in long-ago photographs.
But the love letters they leave behind tell us otherwise.
Letters to sweethearts and spouses reveal their writers as real people with human passions, be it the burning ardor of young lovers or the mellow tenderness of the longtime married.
Thanks to some local museums and historical societies that shared love letters in their collections, we can get a glimpse at the tender sides of both famous people and average folks.
Come and take a peek into their private correspondence.
An impassioned pair
From the moment she met him, Bea Shaheen knew Bill McPherson was special.
He was wearing a Kelly green sweater with patches on the elbows when he asked her to dance at a Wednesday night social at Kent State University, where they both were students. He walked her home that night in 1942.
She couldn’t forget him, even when she went to a fraternity dance with another fellow she’d already agreed to go out with. “I couldn’t wait to get home,” she remembered, “because Bill was supposed to call.”
So when Bill McPherson joined the Marines in 1943, the separation wasn’t easy.
“My Darling Bea,” he wrote from what was then called Marine Corps Air Depot Miramar in San Diego, “God honey but when I talked to you last night I guess I must have been in seventh heaven. Bea, it was a thrill that I shall place second to that of seeing you for the first time when I get back. You sounded so sweet to my poor hungry ears that tears came to my eyes and I wasn’t in the least bit ashamed.
“Now I am looking forward more and more to the time when we meet again and I can take you in my arms and tell you in words just how much I really love you.”
His undated letter, which Bea later lent to the McKinley Museum, mentioned the rigors of training and his uncertainty about where he would be stationed. He was looking forward to a long-awaited liberty and even more to a return home the following week.
“Well my darling for tonight I will close and go to sleep dreaming of the one I love so clearly and of the time we shall be together again,” he wrote. “God Bea but I love you so.”
Bill proposed sometime later, when he was on furlough and she was teaching school in Washington, D.C., she recalled. He wanted to get married right away, but she knew her parents would want to attend the wedding. Instead, they waited until 1949, after his graduation from George Washington University Law School.
Bea McPherson, now 94, remembers her husband as a respectful person, a well-liked community member and a man of God. They had three children and lived in Hartville, where he was the village solicitor.
The two were married for 60 years — “a wonderful, wonderful marriage,” she said.
Seiberling’s beloved
Akron knows F.A. Seiberling as the co-founder of Goodyear and the man who built Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens.
Gertrude Penfield Seiberling knew him as Frank, the beau she married in 1887.
It was less than a year before their wedding when F.A., who lived in Akron, wrote to his Willoughby-bred sweetheart while she was traveling with her family out West.
“The new minister preached an excellent sermon on ‘Duty’ an old sermon but always good,” he wrote in a letter dated Dec. 5, 1886, now part of Stan Hywet’s collection. “… I left the church feeling it my duty to love you more than ever if such a thing is possible.
“Well dearest I shall have to succumb to the low temperature of my room and permit this short letter to go out unfinished. Tomorrow noon I expect to have a good long one from you, and I hope to find time to answer it tomorrow evening — If I were only by your side, with the shawl over our feet, how much more comfortable I would be. Good night my Love.
“Yours ever, Frank.”
The next day he followed with another.
“Gertrude, I love you. Does that sound strangely. It looks so to me for I never penned it before. But then come to think the matter over I have heard it uttered so many times that it seems rather natural.
“My dear one your letter came in the evening mail so that after reading it and finishing my other mail it was nearly seven o’clock before I reached home for supper. Mother gave me a pat on the shoulder for staying so long but of course she would have excused me had she known the reason why. Well after supper I took your chain down to the jeweler to have it mended so that next Saturday I may put it on your neck and seal the clasp with a kiss. And now my dearest I am at the office to devote a few hours to writing to you.”
The Seiberlings would establish themselves as two of Akron’s leading citizens. After Gertrude Seiberling died in 1946 and F.A. in 1955, their six children would agree to leave Stan Hywet for the use of the community their parents loved.
A wartime proposal
Lloyd Seifer was 17 and homesick as 1944 dragged into 1945. He was in basic training at Great Lakes Naval Training Center in Illinois that winter, preparing for a stint that would take him to the South Pacific in the brutal final months of World War II.
He longed for his old life in Canton and dreamed of the girl he’d left behind, Rhoda Mae Felgenhauer.
Writing to Rhoda Mae distracted him from the winter gloom and the work detail he dreaded. His letters chronicled the demands of boot camp, the unappealing institutional chow and the sadness of being far from home. But they also exuded the earnest infatuation of a young man in love.
“Good-bye my love. I love you darling,” he finished one of those letters. “With love and kisses to the one I love, Your darling, Lloyd. P.S. I love you more everyday darling xoxoxo.”
In one letter he asked Rhoda Mae for her ring size, promising to do “a little shopping in Chicago” before coming home on leave. It was the ring Lloyd would eventually use to propose.
In another, he wrote of their phone conversation earlier in the day.
“Darling was you surprised when I called tonight honey,” he wrote. “When I start to call you and while I am waiting for the call to go through I can hardly wait to get to hear your voice. Honey I love to hear your voice. I can almost see you when we are talking.
“I love you darling and I love you more every day. I will be glad when the war is over so I can be with my wife forever. I won’t ever have to leave her again never.”
His wish came true. Lloyd and Rhoda Mae married after the war and settled in Jackson Township’s Lake Cable neighborhood.
Rhoda Mae Seifer loaned Lloyd’s letters to the McKinley Presidential Library & Museum in Canton for a 2005 exhibit of wartime correspondence. She often reread them after her husband died in 2003, she told Curator Kim Kenney at the time.
Rhoda Mae Seifer passed away in 2009.
Presidential prose
Long before William McKinley became America’s 25th president, he was a young lawyer with an ill wife and a 3-year-old daughter. Ida McKinley’s chronic battle with epilepsy was a constant source of worry for her husband, and his devotion to her was well known.
“I received your precious letter a moment or two ago and it fell on me like sunlight in a dark day. It is a beautiful rainbow in my sky, giving me courage, hope, love and promise,” he wrote to Ida in May 1875, in a letter that is now in the McKinley Museum’s collection. At the time, the 32-year-old McKinley was in Marion for a court case.
“I am sorry you are staying up so late and I don’t want you to do so for the purpose of writing me. Your health is dearer to me than your letter written at the hazard of the former.”
“… I feel like flying for home in the morning but then I would only get there before I must return. Accept much love for yourself & Katie — Your devoted Husband, Wm McKinley Jr.”
Five years later, he wrote to her from Washington, where he was serving in Congress.
“I received your dear letter this morning & was delighted to hear from you. You don’t say how you are. I went last night to the President’s to dinner. … It was a good dinner & there were many inquiries about you. This is a bright beautiful morning. I wish you were here. God bless & keep you.”
Even after 25 years of marriage, his words were still tender.
“My darling wife, I received your message this morning announcing your safe arrival at Chicago which gave me great comfort,” he wrote in December 1896, a month after he was elected president. “… This day has been very much like all the days since the Election — many-many visitors. I guess they are done for the day. Everything is going on pleasantly here, but you are greatly missed I assure you.”
He signed the letter, “Your faithful Husband And always your loving W. McKinley.”
Ironically, Ida McKinley outlived her husband, but her health eroded after his assassination in 1901. She died in 1907.
A lifetime of love
Betty Jane Jones was only 15 when she met John Christman, seven years her senior. They married a year later, but only after Betty’s brother assured her parents that Christman was a good man from a good family, daughter Dana Christman Mears related.
That John Christman had a good heart is apparent from the letter he wrote her on Dec. 18, 1936. She was in the hospital at the time, recovering after the birth of their second child, Dac. He was back home with daughter Daun at their farm in Plain Township.
“Honey,” he wrote, “I feel so lonesome, so I’m trying to bring you close, by writing. … It seems sort of dreamy to think of you and Dac in the hospital, and the other half of [our] family here.
“By the time you get this letter, I’ll have seen you, but, it will serve its purpose; that of expressing how much of the happiness of life, consists of you, and ours. All of it, honey. Won’t it be joyous on Christmas morning when I can bring Daun in the room to see Mummy & baby brother?”
“I love you,” he wrote in large print at the end of the letter, forming the letters from Xs like cross stitching.
Mears, a volunteer with the North Canton Heritage Society, found the letter among some family photos after her mother’s death in 1992 and her father’s in 2000. She couldn’t imagine her father writing something so intimate, “almost teenagerish,” she said.
But they must have been deeply in love. Her mother, she said, gave up her city life to follow John to the farm, where she raised five children and preserved the food they grew. “We were not a wealthy family at all … but we were just so blessed,” Mears said.
And that devotion lasted their entire lives.
John and Betty Christman’s last years were spent at Canton Christian Home, where the two had an apartment.
There, Mears said, they were known as the lovebirds.
Mary Beth Breckenridge can be reached at 330-996-3756 or mbrecken@thebeaconjournal.com. You can also become a fan on Facebook at www.facebook.com/MBBreckABJ, follow her on Twitter @MBBreckABJ and read her blog at www.ohio.com/blogs/mary-beth.