Antique hunters Megan Wolke and Lindsey Grant aren’t particularly collectors of World War II memorabilia. But they are, it appears, hopeless romantics, which was enough to land them in the middle of a true story made for Veterans Day.
The pair stumbled across a stack of 21 letters between young lovers in 1944, and so Wolke and Grant shelled out $88 to take them home, Inside Edition reported.
The letters were unbearably sweet. “Lots of I love yous,” Wolke and Grant explained. The solicitations included “honey” and “my sweet darling.” Huge portions of some pages were covered in Xs to represent “a million kisses.” Other envelopes were sealed with a kiss. It was back-and-forth correspondence between a young woman stateside named Ilaine and a sailor in the Pacific named Elias.
It wasn’t all Xs and Os, though. “He was scared,” Wolke and Grant said. Ilaine signed some of the letters, “Your wife, hopefully soon.”
Wolke and Grant loved reading the letters, which spelled a beautiful wartime love story. But they had to learn how it ended. The two traced Ilaine back to New Jersey, and there they found the answer in the flesh: the four Baby Boom-aged adults who were the children of Ilaine and Elias. The lovers wed after the war ended and settled down in the Garden State.
Elias, the old soldier, faded away in 1993, and his sweet darling Elaine joined him in 2015 at age 89.
