Saginaw man’s war letters home become heart of a new book
By Mark Haney
The Catholic Weekly
SAGINAW — From November 1942 through December 1945, Aarol W. “Bud” Irish penned an estimated 1,000 letters to family, the families of men who fell at his side in the European Theater of World War II and to his fiancé, Elaine Marie Corbat, who eventually became his wife.
That’s just a little shy of a letter a day.
While the Hemlock native, unlike other veterans, did not shy away from talking about his war experiences on his return, the letters remained a secret until his death in 2006. That is when his daughter, Teresa — the third of 10 children the Irishes raised in Saginaw — found them in an old trunk.
She was so inspired that the letters formed the basis for a book. “A Thousand Letters Home,” that she and her siblings had published through their own firm, ATLH Publications.
Ironically, Irish said, her father spent the war and the remainder of his life after the conflict trying to make up for what he had not become.
“From the time he came back from the war right up to his last rites,” she said, “he was hoping God would forgive him for not being a chaplain and be pleased with how he lived his life.”
That is why her father, who served in the 102nd Division cavalry reconnaissance, wrote letters to the family of soldiers who died. That is why he returned home and married his fiancé at St. Patrick Church in Ryan. That’s why he worked in insurance and became involved in St. Stephen Parish (they donated two of the church’s stained-glass windows) and the Serra Club. That’s why he and his wife set up a charitable trust through the Saginaw Foundation. That is why he sat on the board of directors of Boysville for many years and why, one night, he and his wife flagged down a bus from Boysville in order to buy each boy McDonald’s.
Teresa Irish speaks to a gathering at Saginaw’s Castle Museum about the book “A Thousand Letters Home,” based on the letters her father wrote during World War II. Aarol “Bud” Irish was a longtime member of St. Stephen Parish. Mark Haney/Catholic Weekly
“My dad had a wonderful saying,” Irish said. “He said that every time he put a slice of bread in the toaster that God gave him back a loaf.
“My dad had survivor’s purpose. He felt so blessed by what he was given in life that he felt he owed it the guys who died for him to come and make something of his life.”
Still, he was haunted by what he’d experienced in the war. Christmas Eve and April 9 each year were emotional days, she said, because of events that happened during the war.
“He wasn’t like the veterans who will never say anything about it (the war). He was very emotional about it,” she said. “There were particular events, but on Christmas Eve and April 9 each year, those were big times. One was when his best friend became a paraplegic from a bombing that night and the other was the day when his friends died (in an ambush). We all knew about it, but never to this degree. It is sort of shame on us as kids, you think you’ve heard it when you start to hear it again, you think, ‘yeah, yeah, I know.’ That is probably the biggest regret I have about it. I have learned an awfully huge lesson (through his letters). I had no idea what he had gone through.”
She learned about it shortly after his death when, while the rest of the family was at the cottage for the Memorial Day weekend, she stayed in the family home and opened that trunk.
“I just needed a place to grieve,” she said. “I just wanted a place where I could feel him. So while they were up north, I went for some quiet time at my parents’ house and asked my mom if I could open his trunk, having absolutely no expectation of what was in it. I started at 11:30 p.m. on Friday and I never went to bed. I was pretty much hit with sensory overload by what I was seeing here. There they were, all bundled, with ribbons tied around each stack.”
It took her over a year to read them all.
“As I read them,” she said, “I did not know what I was going to do, exactly, but minimally I had siblings who had to read these, but how to you share them all when they are written on such fragile paper? So as I went through and read, I would identify ones I felt were really compelling or unique and I would start marking them. I put a little sticker in the corner of each with a ‘yes,’ ‘no’ or ‘ask Mom.’ I had a whole long list of questions for my mom: What’s this about? What was that about? Who was this? That was one of the really beautiful unintended consequences of this is the journey, we got to take with my mom.”
She sent the best letters off to her sisters — Connie in Michigan and Linda in Oregon — for them to be typed. They’d send the typed versions back and then she would spend weekends and evenings putting them all in chronological order.
“I took the book ‘The 102nd in Germany’ and took certain historical pieces from that and put it throughout the book to give context to his letters,” she said, “because many times he would write that he can’t ell you right now because they had a rule where they had to wait for 30 days after any engagement or death so that families had time to be informed and so you didn’t give out any information too early for the enemy. So several times he would come back and say, ‘I can tell you now.’”
While her mother and her father’s sister had kept and bundled his letters home, he had kept the 400 letters her mother sent him. To make the book more complete, however, Irish spent much of her free time during travels the past five years — the 49-year-old is vice president of a Northville-based home health care and hospice firm — connecting with relatives of those men who died to see if they still had her father’s letters. Many of them still did.
There was one small stumbling block, however: her mother. She originally promised her mother she would not read her letters to him until she was dead. But her mother, now 89 and still living in Saginaw, relented and let her not only read them but also use her letters, only after she learned the relatives of the other soldiers had let their letters be used.
“I was really shocked,” she said, “to discover that her letters were sadder than my dad’s.”
Irish traveled everywhere with copies of the letters, working on the book. And so it was, on one flight, that she encountered some fatigue-dressed soldiers, on their way to the Middle East. One of them, a Lt. Col. Bradley Foster, was headed for six months in Kuwait and Qatar, sat across the aisle from her on the plane.
“We talked about the book,” she said, “and I showed him some of the letters and that is the man I married (on Oct. 8). He helped me bring this book to fruition. Neither of us is a writer (she wrote the final six chapters of the book, which deal with the fallen comrades he mentioned and his life after the war) but we just buckled down. Back in March when I was having stress, running in to people who would ask about the book, he said ‘we met because of this and it used to make you so happy. Let’s finish it.’ So we surprised everyone at our wedding with the unveiling.”
In the process of compiling the letters and creating the book, Irish said she has been blessed.
Elaine and Aarol “Bud” Irish during a March 1944 furlough.
“I have always felt my dad’s presence throughout this process,” she said. “It has just fallen into place. I cannot begin to tell you about all of the people I have encountered because of it. How many people get to have their dad back again? And now I have all of these people getting to know him too through the words he wrote. And I get to know him as a young man, through their courtship. Suddenly at the end of this, I had a hole in my heart for two of them — I lost my young dad and my older dad.
“I know my dad talked about the war with many people. He talked about it to us — we heard about it so much from the time we were little that I don’t know if we engaged too much — but I have also heard from other people, including a brother-in-law who had very detailed conversations with my dad. I am quite baffled. My dad’s mind was quite bright, right to the end. My mom said he visited these letters the summer before he died. He didn’t tell us and he didn’t destroy them and he didn’t leave a note. I would like to know what he thought would happen.
“I’d like to think my dad would be proud of this.”
She has, she said, one regret in all of this.
“Boy, if anything today, I’d just like to be able to put this book in his hands and thank him,” she said. “But I can’t so I am really pleased that people talk about this book. Some of the book sales have gone to people who are buying two books — giving one to their dad for Christmas and they’re reading one in hopes it will prompt their dad to tell his story.”
To get a copy of “A Thousand Letters Home” visit www.athousandlettershome.com.