First off I’d just like to take this opportunity wish all the men and women (past and present) of our great Nation’s Armed Services a wonderful Veterans Day. Now, I’d like you all to meet Bill Moore, a World War II veteran who 70-years-ago while fighting in Europe wrote a love letter to the woman that would later be his wife. 90-year-old Bill would go on to have three children with that woman, and their marriage would last 63 wonderful years. Sadly, Bill’s wife passed away back in 2010.
The letter did make it to Bill’s future wife, and she saved all the love letters Bill wrote her. But as The Denver Channel reports somehow a few of the letters got lost/went missing, and one of them ended up tucked inside the sleeve of a record at a thrift shop.
Well, someone found that letter and attempted to track down the author (Bill), and it turned out that Bill didn’t live too far away. The letter made it back to the family and Bill then read over the words he’d written his darling-wife-to-be seventy years ago…and this is where the onions really, REALLY kick in. Old men crying is hard for me to watch, and this is a Category-5 Dust Storm if I’ve ever seen on. Bill’s crying, I’m crying, you’re crying…it’s all good though.
A Westminster woman recently discovered the letter, dated 1945, tucked inside an old record she bought at a thrift store. The writer could have been anywhere in the world, but it turns out, he wasn’t far away at all.
“I was really surprised,” said 90-year-old veteran Bill Moore from his assisted care facility in Aurora. “I had no way of knowing it would show up in the way it did, and it would actually reach me.”
He cried as he read the words he wrote so long ago to the woman, Bernadean Gibson, who became his wife of 63 years.
“My darling, lovable, alluring, Bernadean,” the letter begins. “I ran out of space, but I could have written a lot more adjectives describing you. You are so lovely, darling, that I often wonder how it is possible that you are mine. I’m really the luckiest guy in the world, you know. And you are the reason, Bernadean. Even your name sounds lovely to me.”
Moore told 7NEWS reporter Lindsay Watts how writing letters connected him to his sweetheart when he was half a world away fighting in Patton’s Third Army.
Bill Moore, World War II veteran, beloved father of 3, adoring husband, wonderful American.
[happyplace via the denver channel]