Wutherwood Press

The ancient historian, Hellanicus, tells us that the first recorded hand written letter—an epistle—was by Persian Queen Atosso, daughter of Syrus, mother of Xerxes around 500 BC. For almost 2,500 years, nothing changed. If one wasn’t engaged in a face-to-face conversation, the best way to communicate was by letter.

Then the computer and the internet changed everything. The languid, carefully-composed letter—an epistle to be read and reread for enjoyment—disappeared, replaced by emails, text messages, and all sorts of social media. Thoughtful, personal prose vanished, replaced by all kinds of emojis and practical acronyms—internet slang like OMG or LOL.

Letters to Veronica, 1941-1944, is more closely related to the ancient, letter-writing past, than to the present. It offers the reader more than 200 letters and telegrams that John Joseph “Jack” Scannell, my father, sent to Veronica Rose Theresa Hannigan—the woman he would marry and the woman who would become my mother—during those four years. They begin when Jack and Vera began dating, and then they move through my dad’s years in the military—through his days in Basic Training for the Army Air Corps in Alabama, then through the various stages of pilot training, and all the way through his deployment as a B-24 bomber pilot at an American base in Tibenham, England. The last letter is actually the telegram Dad sent Mom, telling her he was stateside in August 1944. They married later that month.

These are letters written by my father to the woman he loved, to the woman he missed, to the woman he hoped he could come home to even as World War II raged in Europe. Mom kept every one of Dad’s letters. Unfortunately, because Dad constantly moved from one duty station to another, we have none of the letters Mom wrote to him. But one half of a love story is better than none. My simple presence on this planet is testimony enough.

My father, John Joseph “Jack” Scannell, died on March 13, 1999, five days after his 83 rd birthday. He was buried on March 17 th —St. Patrick’s Day. Few days could be more appropriate for laying my father—an Irishman through and through—to rest.

His autobiography, which was written after he retired and “through the influence of an allergy,” only covers the first thirty years of his life: 1916 to 1946. I came into possession of his partly typed, mostly handwritten, manuscript a few years after his death. After reading Dad’s account, I decided it was something my family would truly enjoy, so I transcribed and edited the manuscript that had lived only in a few three-ring binders.

As Dad’s editor, I’m responsible for creating chapters, so that the reader could easily grasp the natural “chapters” that occurred in my father’s life. In addition, I included photographs—by turn, delightful, heartwarming, and informative—and footnoted obscure references that not even I understood until I looked them up.

I also named the book: A Life in Formation, because Dad was a WWII B-24 bomber pilot. Whenever he flew over Occupied Europe on one of his thirty-five bombing mission, he flew “in formation.” So, the book’s title—about his formative years as well as serving in the military—is a pun, something my father would have loved.

I could lament that Dad’s autobiography missed his last 53 years, but I suspect that the life he knew as a boy growing up in Hoboken, NJ, or the life he lived as a young man—rudely interrupted by World War II—was the story Dad wanted to tell. And that’s the story he tells in his autobiography. I was tempted to expand his autobiography—after all, I was around for 52 of those unrecorded years. Ultimately, I decided that it would be best for Dad to tell his own story.

When I was an English teacher, I used to tell my students that, “Everyone has a story to tell.” It’s true, and this is my father’s story.