A shoebox of wartime memories

Published 5:00 pm Friday, June 4, 2004

Karen Sladek shares her father’s correspondence from World War II.

Dusty letters in a cardboard box made history come alive for Karen Sladek.

The first-time author’s tribute to her father is “Lucky Stars and Gold Bars,” a history based on Lyle Sladek’s letters home during World War II.

“I’d never dreamed of writing a book,” Sladek said. “I didn’t know I had a book in me.”

But she found herself as an author after she moved to the island from Kirkland in 1996 and quit her job as administrator of the University of Washington’s Center for AIDS and STDs a year later.

“I had spent far too much time commuting,” she said. “Now I had some time on my hands, so I had to decide what I wanted to pursue.”

The answer came when she went home to Thousand Oaks, Calif., to help her parents work out an estate plan. Sorting through their possessions from the past 60 years, she discovered a cardboard box on a closet shelf. She was stunned to find letters her father had written during World War II – 400 correspondences posted from five continents by the young Army Air Corps Lieutenant.

“I had no idea that this trove of letters existed,” Sladek said. “I started to ask my father about these letters I had found, and he suggested that I read them.”

Her first response, she admits, was an interior grumble: “Who’s got the time?” She was, she recalls, hurrying to get the estate plan finished and get back to work.

But when she began to read the missives, she found the time well-spent. In fact Sladek, who had always hated reading history because “it didn’t attach emotion to facts” was soon captivated – both by the personal story of her father whose early adulthood she had never thought to imagine, and the larger story of a war she had believed had no relationship to her own life.

“I found myself in dad’s chair, reading by his reading light, and I never stopped,” she said. “I called my husband and said, ‘I’ll be home a week late.’”

Sladek decided to publish the letters in book form. She would collaborate with her father to reconstruct the story, and publish the book herself to be able to shape the material as she pleased.

The most important consideration, she says, was to offer her father’s story to a wider readership.

“I decided I had a responsibility to make this history available to the public, using my father’s letters, and the family story as a vehicle to personalize the war and how it really was for Americans at that time,” she said.

The book, like the letters, focuses on the life of the noncombatant soldier. Lyle Sladek – serving as a cryptographic security and intelligence officer in the China-Burma-India, European and Mediterranean theaters – who writes to his family on the South Dakota farm where he was raised.

Having earned the gold bars of a second lieutenant, he moves without mishap through the war zones, blessed by the “lucky stars” of the book’s title. An intelligent man, with powers of observation heightened by training, he writes not only about his immediate circumstances, but about the broader implications of the conflict – the dissolution of the British Empire in India, and the growing supremacy of Mao Tse Tung over the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-Shek.

The dual perspective of the letters may hook even readers of history who prefer the distance of third-person narrative to the close lens of biography.

Despite his depth of his understanding, one is also reminded that those living the experience had no idea how the tale would end; soon after June 6, 1944, D-day, Sladek penned his belief that Hitler would soon surrender in the wake of the Allied invasion.

Much more to the point than the occasional misinterpretation of events is the you-are-there immediacy of letters like a missive dated Aug. 3, 1945, when Lyle was helping fly supplies to Chiang Kai-Shek’s troops over “the Hump” – through the 26,000-foot Himalayas, in a C-46 plane that could only clear 20,000 feet:

“While riding the controls through storms, I wondered how it would feel to bail out into the dark of the night into the wilds of the world’s roughest terrain. Lots have done it – lots don’t get a chance to jump. But the life line to China must and will stay open in all weather day and night…It has rained hourly for the past week so it has been some relief from heat. But you have to dry feet and powder well to prevent fungus growth. And envelopes must be strung on thread like beads cause (sic) they seal if they touch anything. Great country. Really feeling on top of the world though.”

A plethora of photos support the story, and Karen Sladek provides historical context for the letters, but the perspective is her father’s.

“This book would never have been the same if I had not found the letters while my father is still alive,” she said. “It is written entirely from his point of view, the point of view of someone who really was there.”

Karen Sladek’s book is available online at www.luckystarsandgoldbars.com.