The Story Behind Dear Mister Ward Part 1
Where I discover the catharsis of "mournganizing"
This is the first of a series of posts explaining how Dear Mister Ward came to be. Some of you will already be familiar with this story but I hope you’ll enjoy reading it anyway. It’s also a great way to introduce people to the project so please share them.
When my dad passed away in 2018 I was tasked with digging through the boxes in my parents’ storage unit. I was looking for photos to use in the memorial, documents from his time in Vietnam for a claim with the VA, and other things we needed to settle his affairs.
The boxes had been sitting in storage, mostly untouched since my parents sold their house in Amherst, Massachusetts and moved to a condo. Although really, aside from my occasional snooping as a kid, most of them hadn’t been touched since the last time we all moved from the other side of Amherst in 1992.
There was almost no sense of order to the boxes. They were filled with family heirlooms, journals, political pamphlets from the 60s, newspapers announcing the end of World Wars I and II, and family photos dating back to the Civil War. While others were filled with generic detritus of my parents 40+ years of marriage like instruction manuals for the appliances from their first apartment together.
One thing that stood out was a letter on frail onion skin paper from a woman in Minnesota who was very excited to be getting married. It included a shopping list of what she thought she needed to start her life with her new husband who was a silver fox farmer on Prince Edward Island. She also asked for advice about what other items she might need. Because she didn’t “know much about housekeeping.” It was written with the breathless exuberance of a young woman embarking on an exciting adventure. Although the letter is addressed to Montgomery Ward the informal tone almost makes it feel like a letter to a friend or family member.
I didn’t recognize the name and other than my grandma’s fox stole that creeped me out as a kid…
…I knew of no connection to fox farming or PEI.
When I showed it to my mom she told me it was one of a collection of letters that my grandma had saved when she worked at Montgomery Ward in the 1930s. The rest of them were probably somewhere in the boxes.
I had never heard of the letters and while I thought it was cool, it wasn’t exactly a priority at the time. I had spent the last couple years helping my mom care for my dad after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. And when he passed away that energy went into helping her adjust to life without him.
Following my mom’s death a year later all those boxes ended up in my garage. I started going through them bit by bit in a process I came to call “mournganizing.” Tossing out old tax returns and meaningless detritus was therapeutic. As was the putting away of more personal items to look through later.
Eventually, among the generations worth of treasures and trash I found the binder which had the rest of the letters in it.
I now had some free time to dig into the letters. I posted a few to facebook and my friends got a kick out of them. More than one suggested that I should publish them. Publishing a book had never even crossed my mind so I brushed off the idea at first. How would I even do that?
It was all too much to really contemplate taking on at that point. After all there were so many more boxes to go through.
Digging through the boxes was a slow process. I often came back to the letters in the binder when I needed a break from the more emotionally charged items.
I spent the summer and fall of 2019 separating trash from treasure and transferring things from old Wordperfect boxes and bags from long closed grocery stores into more durable containers. I then planned to go through everything in batches throughout the cold winter. But little did I know that the cold winter would turn into the Covid spring. It wasn’t until then that I fully understood what I had in the letters.
Next, in Part 2: The Letters become more than jokes
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