Book chronicles love story, history during WWII

TEXAS CITY — It’s not every day one finds a love story in a box of junk. But when Rene Palmer Armstrong opened a box her husband had purchased at a Texas City junk store more than 10 years ago, she uncovered 300 love letters between a World War II pilot and a woman he barely knew.

That love story and many excerpts from those letters are told in “Wings and a Ring,” a book Armstrong authored.

James Richard Jones, whom everyone called J.R., met Helen Elnora Bartlett during a blind date Aug. 30, 1941, in Houston.

Jones had been on a blind date the night before with a beautiful gal who drank him under the table.

“He admired her for her enormous beer capacity,” Armstrong said of J.R.’s first blind date. “He figured if he had such an extremely attractive date the night before, he couldn’t possibly do so well the next night. He also had serious misgivings about red heads. They were either real good looking or extremely good god.”

So, he didn’t know what to expect during that first encounter 70 years ago.

“Zowie, out walks Ms. Bartlett and my eyes popped out,” Jones wrote in one of his letters.

Thus began a love tale that was chronicled in the letters stored in a trunk Armstrong’s husband picked up on the cheap from a now defunct junk store in downtown Texas City.

Jones wrote most of those letters while stationed in New Guinea as a member of the 345th Bombardment Group that earned the nickname the Air Apaches.

Armstrong took those letters, did a lot of research and even used declassified defense department records to write her book.

“It’s estimated that 1,100 World War II veterans are dying each day,” Armstrong said. “It gives you a good idea of the treasures we are losing each day.”

The treasures are not the war records or the historical documentation, but the personal correspondence between servicemen on a far off continent and their families and loved ones back home.

“The wartime letters between GIs and families are undoubtedly the most forgotten and undocumented records of the war,” Jim Bina, president of the 345th Bomb Group Association, wrote of Armstrong’s book. “Letters to family, to friends, wives and lovers were the lifeline of these brave souls in a world far away from the (toil) of battle. These valuable artifacts that detail the human side of war are very often shuttled off to the attic.”

Armstrong hopes that not only will her book enthrall readers but also inspire them to seek out their own family’s history of letters that might be tucked away.

After the war, Jones and Bartlett were married even though they had only been together a total of 11 days since J.R. met Elnora on that blind date. They moved to Indiana for a time then back to Houston where Elnora was a teacher and Jones was a senior vice president for Shell Oil, Armstrong said.

Armstrong never met the couple; each had died before the box of letters was found. But thanks to some help from a genealogist, Armstrong was able to find the couple’s daughter, Susie, and tell her of the letters.

The letter collection was mostly letters Jones wrote to Bartlett, but in one he noted how important her correspondence was to him.

“If you only knew how much your letters meant to me,” Jones wrote. “I thought they’d never get here, but I knew it wasn’t your fault. Here, I’ve written five pages, and on all of them, all I want to say is I love you and how I wish time would fly.”

+++

At A Glance

WHAT: “Wings and a Ring: Letters of War and Love from a WWII Pilot”

AUTHOR: Rene Palmer Armstrong, of Texas City

TO ORDER: www.tatepublishing.com

TV: Armstrong and the daughter of the couple featured in her book will be guests on the Veterans Day special of the Deborah Duncan Show at 9 a.m. today on Channel 11, KHOU-TV.