Child's letter: 'Dear Big Puck' — honor roll and a dollar

A single sheet of lined notebook paper with a printed cat illustration at the upper right corner — a striped tabby with red hair-ribbons (bows) at the ears, seated on its haunches beside three scattered envelopes, looking at the viewer. The letter is written in pencil in a large, careful child’s printing hand with each word run together (no spaces between words within a phrase). The page is otherwise blank below the closing. The writer is Pickens Walker “Puck” Corbell (b. 13 Nov 1944, d. 2 Dec 1953) writing to his maternal grandfather James Pickens Walker Sr. (“Big Puck,” 1883–1960). The writer signs simply “Puck” — the grandson was named for his grandfather, who used the same nickname; the letter distinguishes them as “Big Puck” (grandfather) and the unmarked signature “Puck” (grandson). The child’s printing, characteristic compression of words (no spaces), and “doller” for “dollar” are consistent with an early-elementary-school hand, dating the letter to ca. 1951–1953 (ages 6–8, after Puck Corbell would have entered first or second grade and qualified for an honor roll, before his death in December 1953). The cat illustration is a piece of stationery printed for children. The letter survives because Amy (the compiler, Big Puck’s wife) kept it after her husband received it.

A note in a child’s careful pencil printing, the words within each phrase run together without spaces (“DidyoustoptoThink”, “honorroll,andallIam”, “Thinkingofisadoller”, “fromyourgrandson”), to grandfather James Pickens Walker Sr. (“Big Puck”) from grandson Pickens Walker “Puck” Corbell. The young Puck Corbell — son of Emma Dee Walker Corbell and Dr. Robert L. Corbell Jr. — was diagnosed with cancer in the spring of 1953 and died at Portsmouth on 2 December 1953 at the age of nine (see pp216, 223–226, 227 for the contemporary correspondence around his illness, surgery and death). This honor-roll letter, with its cheerful request for a dollar reward, must therefore predate his terminal illness — most plausibly written 1951 or 1952 when he was in first or second grade. “Doller” is his own spelling, preserved.