Letter from Dee (Emma Dee Walker Corbell) to her parents, page 1 — 'Puck asks for one of Gam's drinks'

Scanned page 12 of Book 3 — Scan of original. Open full size →

[Blue fountain-pen cursive on a single sheet of ruled letter paper. Date line top-right; salutation flush left; the writer’s hand is fluent and even.]

Tuesday —

My Folks —

I’m so smart to remember to buy writing paper — smug about the whole thing — 'til I go to write a letter and find ruled paper! But as it is all in the family and only a line anyway, here goes.

We’re rocking along — not much change. The only thing that worries me is the thing Puck asks for constantly is “one of Gam’s drinks”. ~~Days~~ I worked and none suited. So after due deliberation and back tracking, I now pour ginger ale in a bowl,

AI Notes

Opening sheet of a multi-page adult letter in blue fountain-pen cursive on ruled letter paper, dated only 'Tuesday — '. Signed ‘Dee’ on the concluding sheet (cf. scans 013/014). The writer is Emma Dee Walker Corbell (‘Dee’ in earlier album captions), the compiler’s middle daughter and wife of Dr. Robert Lawrence Corbell Jr. of Portsmouth, Va. She addresses ‘My Folks’ — i.e., her parents Amy FitzSimons Walker and James Pickens Walker Sr. — and reports on the deathbed care of her young son Pickens Walker ‘Puck’ Corbell (b. 13 Nov 1944, d. 2 Dec 1953), who lies dying of cancer following the Apr. 27 1953 leg amputation described in Margaret Baumeister’s contemporaneous letter on book-002 pp219-222. ‘Gam’ is the family nickname for Amy FitzSimons herself — and what Puck calls his grandmother. ‘Tressie’ is a sister or close relation of the writer, teased later (on p016) as the original source of Puck’s taste for flat ginger ale. The likely date is autumn 1953 (Tuesday), in the final weeks before Puck’s death on Wed. Dec 2 1953. Continuation pages are scans 014 (final) and 016 (middle), with p013 a side-by-side spread reproducing both. ‘Days’ is the writer’s own struck-through false-start before ‘I worked and none suited’.

Continues on scan 016 (middle page) with the cocktail recipe and the family doctor’s verdict that ‘Puck is going purely on will power,’ and concludes on scan 014. ‘Tom Dast’ (read ‘Dast’ with low-to-moderate confidence — the capital is ambiguous, possibly ‘Bast’ or ‘Bost’) is the family physician.

This letter is the opening sheet of a deathbed cluster. Pickens Walker “Puck” Corbell (b. 13 Nov 1944, d. 2 Dec 1953, age 9) was Dee’s younger son; bone cancer had cost him a leg in April 1953, and the family had been told the lungs would follow in roughly nine months. The writer’s tone — humour about a child’s mock-cocktail, the bright “we’re rocking along” — is the family-letter register her parents would expect of her under any other circumstances. The middle (p016) and closing (p014) sheets of this same letter both date to the final weeks of his life.