thedrifter
05-31-09, 08:57 AM
WWII vet's letters to Donna Reed a fond memory
Sunday, May 31, 2009
By Torsten Ove, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
In the 1945 World War II movie "They Were Expendable," fake tough guy John Wayne declines to dance with Donna Reed.
But the war's real tough guys -- soldiers, sailors and airmen -- were only too pleased to dance with the wholesome Hollywood starlet.
One of them was Ed Skvarna, 84, formerly of Clairton, who in 1943 gathered up the nerve to ask her to cut the rug at a USO canteen in Kansas. After that, he shipped off to China as a B-29 crew member and wrote her letters from the Mariana Islands and India. Once, she even wrote back.
His V-mails were among 341 sent to Ms. Reed, an Iowa farm-girl-turned-movie-star regarded as "America's Sweetheart," from lonely servicemen in every theater of the war.
But unlike many other pinup girls from that era whose mail was handled by studio publicists, she hung onto them.
Last year, her daughter, Mary Owen, discovered the letters tucked into a shoebox in an old trunk in the garage of Ms. Reed's home in Beverly Hills, where she lived until her death from cancer in 1986 at age 64.
The collection was the focus of a Memorial Day story published in The New York Times that featured Mr. Skvarna, now of Covina, Calif., who said he was thrilled to learn that Ms. Reed kept his letters.
"It tells you something about the caliber of person she was," he told The Times.
Last week, he said he met Ms. Reed only once, at that dance in Wichita, where he was training to be a B-29 mechanic. But he said she was special to him because she was young, like him, and from a small town -- Denison, Iowa -- like him.
"She was nice and she wasn't too far from my age," he said. "It just delighted me because I was dancing with a celebrity."
Ms. Reed became a symbol of the all-American girl for many guys overseas, who admired her as much for her down-to-earth charm as for her beauty.
She later became famous as Mary Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life," released in 1946, and as Donna Stone in "The Donna Reed Show," which debuted on television in 1958. But it was her role as a prostitute in "From Here to Eternity" in 1953 that won her an Academy Award, but she had a motherly quality that many young men found especially appealing.
She was also a patriot. In 1943, she was traveling the USO circuit in support of the war effort.
Mr. Skvarna, just out of Clairton High School, had enlisted in the Army Air Force. It was the thing to do: two of his brothers also served.
John Skvarna, 86, who lives near Harrisburg, was in the U.S. Army and once acted as a guide for Gen. Dwight Eisenhower after the war. Another brother, the late Leo, served with the Marines. The oldest brother, Paul, 94 and living in California, was spared the war.
After training in Kansas, Ed was sent to Asia as a B-29 gunner on reconnaissance flights into Japan. He couldn't be a pilot because he was colorblind, but he said the defect had an unexpected benefit: he could see through camouflage.
That came in handy on one flight when he said he recognized camouflaged Japanese warships in a harbor below that no one else on board saw. The captain didn't believe him -- "Ed, there's nothing down there," he said -- until the ships opened fire on their plane.
"We got the hell out of there," he recalled.
On many missions, he said, their plane came back with bullet holes.
During his various tours, he wrote letters home and to Ms. Reed, addressing her as "Dear Donna." While in the Marianas in May 1945, he thanked her for sending a letter that he had received while stationed in India the previous month. It took weeks or sometimes months for letters to arrive.
"Boy!" he wrote, "did I jump with joy."
He said conditions in the Pacific were much better than in India or China because of shorter supply lines. He told her about a rajah's palace that he had visited while in India and sent photos of it. "As a very slight favor how about a snapshot of yourself I don't care how small okay!" he wrote in longhand, eschewing punctuation.
"I've cut a picture of you out of the paper's a while back. I think it's a shot of you taken out of the movie 'Dorian Gray.' Well I'll sign off now to get a bit of sleep because tomorrow is a big day so Goodnite and may God 'Bless You' alway's."
He addressed the letter simply: "Miss Donna Reed, Santa Monica, California."
Even without a street address, he said, it reached her.
So did letters from outposts all over the world.
But some of those men who wrote never came back.
One was Lt. Norman P. Klinker, who wrote from North Africa in 1943 saying Ms. Reed's letter to him was the first mail he'd received in two months and complaining about eating the same C rations every day. He said life in the desert combat zone was tough and bloody but without the "grim and worried feeling" common in war movies.
"I hear you have done your part and done got married," he wrote. "Congratulations and good luck! See you in your next 'pic.' "
Lt. Klinker was later killed in action in Italy.
Mr. Skvarna made it home safely. He studied industrial arts at California State Teachers College -- now California University of Pennsylvania -- and in 1950, he and his then-wife, Helen, moved to California. There, Mr. Skvarna spent his career as a teacher and administrator in the El Monte School District and raised three children.
The story of his correspondence and his dance with Ms. Reed was news to the Skvarna brothers.
"I didn't know Ed was a dancer!" John told his son, Shawn Skvarna, production manager for Harrisburg Magazine, which last year did a feature on John's World War II experiences in Europe.
"Well," Shawn told his dad, "when there's a pretty girl and you get an opportunity like that, you figure it out as you go."
That long-ago dance also caught the attention of John Carlson, a writer at the Des Moines Register newspaper in Ms. Reed's home state.
In a column last week about the letters, he said he watched "They Were Expendable" over the Memorial Day weekend and recalled that John Wayne, as a macho PT boat lieutenant in the Philippines, initially refuses to dance with his nurse, played by Ms. Reed.
"Listen, sister, I don't dance and I can't take time to learn," Mr. Wayne said.
Mr. Carlson said the real veterans wouldn't take too kindly to that: "The guys who wrote those letters?" he asked in his column. "They would have given anything for just one dance with Donna Reed."
It's something Mr. Skvarna has remembered for 66 years.
"I just enjoyed dancing with her because she was a celebrity and I'd never been with a celebrity and she was very attractive," he laughed. "I wrote to her and I thought that she might write back -- and she did."
Torsten Ove can be reached at tove@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1510.
First published on May 31, 2009 at 12:00 am
Ellie
Sunday, May 31, 2009
By Torsten Ove, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
In the 1945 World War II movie "They Were Expendable," fake tough guy John Wayne declines to dance with Donna Reed.
But the war's real tough guys -- soldiers, sailors and airmen -- were only too pleased to dance with the wholesome Hollywood starlet.
One of them was Ed Skvarna, 84, formerly of Clairton, who in 1943 gathered up the nerve to ask her to cut the rug at a USO canteen in Kansas. After that, he shipped off to China as a B-29 crew member and wrote her letters from the Mariana Islands and India. Once, she even wrote back.
His V-mails were among 341 sent to Ms. Reed, an Iowa farm-girl-turned-movie-star regarded as "America's Sweetheart," from lonely servicemen in every theater of the war.
But unlike many other pinup girls from that era whose mail was handled by studio publicists, she hung onto them.
Last year, her daughter, Mary Owen, discovered the letters tucked into a shoebox in an old trunk in the garage of Ms. Reed's home in Beverly Hills, where she lived until her death from cancer in 1986 at age 64.
The collection was the focus of a Memorial Day story published in The New York Times that featured Mr. Skvarna, now of Covina, Calif., who said he was thrilled to learn that Ms. Reed kept his letters.
"It tells you something about the caliber of person she was," he told The Times.
Last week, he said he met Ms. Reed only once, at that dance in Wichita, where he was training to be a B-29 mechanic. But he said she was special to him because she was young, like him, and from a small town -- Denison, Iowa -- like him.
"She was nice and she wasn't too far from my age," he said. "It just delighted me because I was dancing with a celebrity."
Ms. Reed became a symbol of the all-American girl for many guys overseas, who admired her as much for her down-to-earth charm as for her beauty.
She later became famous as Mary Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life," released in 1946, and as Donna Stone in "The Donna Reed Show," which debuted on television in 1958. But it was her role as a prostitute in "From Here to Eternity" in 1953 that won her an Academy Award, but she had a motherly quality that many young men found especially appealing.
She was also a patriot. In 1943, she was traveling the USO circuit in support of the war effort.
Mr. Skvarna, just out of Clairton High School, had enlisted in the Army Air Force. It was the thing to do: two of his brothers also served.
John Skvarna, 86, who lives near Harrisburg, was in the U.S. Army and once acted as a guide for Gen. Dwight Eisenhower after the war. Another brother, the late Leo, served with the Marines. The oldest brother, Paul, 94 and living in California, was spared the war.
After training in Kansas, Ed was sent to Asia as a B-29 gunner on reconnaissance flights into Japan. He couldn't be a pilot because he was colorblind, but he said the defect had an unexpected benefit: he could see through camouflage.
That came in handy on one flight when he said he recognized camouflaged Japanese warships in a harbor below that no one else on board saw. The captain didn't believe him -- "Ed, there's nothing down there," he said -- until the ships opened fire on their plane.
"We got the hell out of there," he recalled.
On many missions, he said, their plane came back with bullet holes.
During his various tours, he wrote letters home and to Ms. Reed, addressing her as "Dear Donna." While in the Marianas in May 1945, he thanked her for sending a letter that he had received while stationed in India the previous month. It took weeks or sometimes months for letters to arrive.
"Boy!" he wrote, "did I jump with joy."
He said conditions in the Pacific were much better than in India or China because of shorter supply lines. He told her about a rajah's palace that he had visited while in India and sent photos of it. "As a very slight favor how about a snapshot of yourself I don't care how small okay!" he wrote in longhand, eschewing punctuation.
"I've cut a picture of you out of the paper's a while back. I think it's a shot of you taken out of the movie 'Dorian Gray.' Well I'll sign off now to get a bit of sleep because tomorrow is a big day so Goodnite and may God 'Bless You' alway's."
He addressed the letter simply: "Miss Donna Reed, Santa Monica, California."
Even without a street address, he said, it reached her.
So did letters from outposts all over the world.
But some of those men who wrote never came back.
One was Lt. Norman P. Klinker, who wrote from North Africa in 1943 saying Ms. Reed's letter to him was the first mail he'd received in two months and complaining about eating the same C rations every day. He said life in the desert combat zone was tough and bloody but without the "grim and worried feeling" common in war movies.
"I hear you have done your part and done got married," he wrote. "Congratulations and good luck! See you in your next 'pic.' "
Lt. Klinker was later killed in action in Italy.
Mr. Skvarna made it home safely. He studied industrial arts at California State Teachers College -- now California University of Pennsylvania -- and in 1950, he and his then-wife, Helen, moved to California. There, Mr. Skvarna spent his career as a teacher and administrator in the El Monte School District and raised three children.
The story of his correspondence and his dance with Ms. Reed was news to the Skvarna brothers.
"I didn't know Ed was a dancer!" John told his son, Shawn Skvarna, production manager for Harrisburg Magazine, which last year did a feature on John's World War II experiences in Europe.
"Well," Shawn told his dad, "when there's a pretty girl and you get an opportunity like that, you figure it out as you go."
That long-ago dance also caught the attention of John Carlson, a writer at the Des Moines Register newspaper in Ms. Reed's home state.
In a column last week about the letters, he said he watched "They Were Expendable" over the Memorial Day weekend and recalled that John Wayne, as a macho PT boat lieutenant in the Philippines, initially refuses to dance with his nurse, played by Ms. Reed.
"Listen, sister, I don't dance and I can't take time to learn," Mr. Wayne said.
Mr. Carlson said the real veterans wouldn't take too kindly to that: "The guys who wrote those letters?" he asked in his column. "They would have given anything for just one dance with Donna Reed."
It's something Mr. Skvarna has remembered for 66 years.
"I just enjoyed dancing with her because she was a celebrity and I'd never been with a celebrity and she was very attractive," he laughed. "I wrote to her and I thought that she might write back -- and she did."
Torsten Ove can be reached at tove@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1510.
First published on May 31, 2009 at 12:00 am
Ellie