Free Posterity by Dorie McCullough Lawson Page A

letters).
    Now of course you may not keep Flora anyhow. But if you wish to lose her, continue to be an infrequent correspondent. If however you wish to keep her write her letters—interesting letters, and love letters—at least three times a week. Write no matter how tired you are, no matter how inconvenient it is; write if you're smashed up in a hospital; write when you are doing your most dangerous stunts; write when your work is most irksome and disheartening; write all the time! Write enough letters to allow for half being lost.
    Affectionately A hardened and wary old father
[Theodore Roosevelt]

    â€œWhy do'n't you write to Flora, and her father and
mother, asking if she wo'n't come
abroad and marry you?”

    Oyster Bay, March 17, 1918
    Dearest Quentin,
    In a Rochester paper appeared a note from one Whaley, a superintendent of a post office “somewhere in France,” who writes “Young Quentin Roosevelt is as modest as a school girl, but as game as they make 'em in aviation. Keep tabs on this game young chap.”
    Early in the week we were greatly depressed to learn that gallant young Tommy Hitchcock had been captured by the Germans; it is said that he was not hurt. Then came the excitement about Archie. The first news—whether true or not we do not know—was that he had been given the croix de guerre by a French General “under dramatic circumstances”; then the War Dept notified us that he was slightly wounded; then Ted cabled that he had been hit in the leg, and his arm broken, by shrapnel, but that he was in no danger, and that Eleanor would take care of him. Our pride and our anxiety are equal—as indeed they are about all of you.
    Why do'n't you write to Flora, and to her father and mother, asking if she wo'n't come abroad and marry you? As for your getting killed, or ordinarily crippled afterwards, why she would a thousand times rather have married you than not have married you under those conditions; and as for the extraordinary kinds of crippling, they are rare, and anyway we have to take certain chances in life. You and she have now passed your period of probation; you have been tried; you are absolutely sure of yourselves; and I would most heartily approve of your getting married at the earliest possible moment.
    Mr. Beebe is out here, he has just come from France; on the French front he was allowed to do some flying and bombing—not fighting the German war-planes.
    Your loving father,
Theodore Roosevelt

    On July 14, 1918, Quentin Roosevelt was shot in the head and killed by the Germans at Chemery, France. He was not yet twenty-one years old.
    R ICHARD E . B YRD TO
R ICHARD E . B YRD, J R.
    â€œMy last words to you my boy are to beg you to
concentrate on your life to two things . . .”
    On April 28, 1926, Commander Richard E. Byrd sat down in his cabin to write his six-year-old son. His ship, the S.S.
Chantier
, amidst ice fields and snow squalls, was steaming for Spitzbergen, Norway. In “a rough following sea” they had endured hard work and seasickness for days. The commander was about to attempt the first flight ever over the North Pole. He knew of the dangers of flying over ice, and in high winds, and through polar fog. He knew the greatest dangers were in the unknown, and he knew, too, that he might not survive. Here, in an unsteady hand, across six pages, Commander Byrd writes to his son.

    En route Spitzbergen
April 28, 1926
    My Precious Boy—
    This letter is to be read twice by you on your eighth birthday then again on your fourteenth birthday, your sixteenth and once more every four years after that.
    I want to tell you about your mother I am writing at sea in my cabin. The sea is very rough and icy winds are blowing from the ice fields of the polar sea. We arrive at Kings Bay tomorrow and from there I am to take a hazardous airplane flight over the Polar sea which is a cold and frozen ocean.
    If by hard luck I do not get back this