“She never let on to us how much she missed him,” their daughter Corinne McClintick said recently. After he died, when she was 65, she had an active life with family and friends. When Leo developed early onset Alzheimer’s, they settled in a condo in Wilmette, and she efficiently took over managing the finances. They moved around a lot because of Leo’s career with various steel companies. That night, at a safe social distance because of the pandemic, Sullivan helped Wolforth piece together Cathie’s world after the war.Ĭathie and Leo enjoyed a good life, but not without hardship. He spent another few minutes searching the internet, then sent an email.Ĭorinne McClintic, Catherine Moran Lee's daughter, and Julie Sullivan, Corinne's cousin, stand outside the old Moran home at 5506 N. Beloved mother of Robert (Susan) Lee, Corinne (William) McClintic, Richard (Terry), Stephen and the late Patrick Lee. So late one night this August he Googled “Catherine Moran Lee.” And there it was, a 2012 obituary in the Chicago Tribune:Ĭatherine Elizabeth Moran Lee, loving wife of the late Leo P.
#Old airmail envelopes full
On Cathie’s new letterhead, he’d seen her full married name for the first time. It was the letters from Virginia that gave Wolforth an idea.
One week later, Germany would surrender and by September the war was over. She was right, and that letter was the last one in the pile. On Tuesday, May 1, she wrote Leo to say she loved him with all her heart and soul and felt sure he would be coming back soon. It does seem encouraging with all these peace rumors going around. I do believe the war with Germany is in its last stages. Last night Barb and her mother came over and brought their radio. She recounted the fun she was having with the other women in the apartment complex - Gloria, Barb, Anne, Sid - all of them apparently waiting for their husbands, who apparently sometimes visited. Cathie now wrote from an apartment on the naval base in Portsmouth, Va., on new stationery embossed with her full married name, Catherine Moran Lee. There were no letters from March and February of 1945, but they picked up again in April, with a different return address. Curious about the building on Glenwood, he figured out that it had been sold for a gut rehab this July, but not by anyone in the Moran family.Īnd he kept reading Cathie’s letters, occasionally chided by his wife for caring more about the family in the letters than about his own. He spent an hour online researching Leo’s ship, the USS Broome. Still, he continued to follow the love story of Cathie and Leo. The Moran Weekly Bugle, a newspaper drawn by the two younger brothers of Catherine Moran Lee and sent in 1945 correspondences to her husband, Leo Lee, is among the letters recently found and returned. She worries for Leo, that he might fall from the ship’s deck while on night watch, that he might get seasick out on patrol in the Atlantic, that, according to photos he has sent, he has gotten too thin. She worries for her 23-year-old brother Jack, stationed in England, who could be sent there too. Woven into all the talk of silk stockings, lemon creme pie and movies at the Bryn Mawr Theatre, however, is a darker feeling: worry.Ĭathie worries for her friend Betty, who has a baby and whose husband may be sent to fight in the Pacific when the war in Europe ends. … I tried to get stockings downtown the other day and there weren’t any in the store.
In response to Leo’s offer to send stockings, she writes, “Don’t get silk stockings as I don’t consider them any better than the rayons that we get now.” But a few days later:ĭarling, I have changed my mind about the stockings. They include corsages for her and her mother to wear to church (“You are an angel to send them to us”) and a Parker 51 pen and pencil set (“I am thrilled”). In some letters, Cathie thanks Leo for his gifts. Cathie wrote Leo almost every day, sometimes several times a day, letters full of endearments and professions of love, along with compliments (“You are so handsome when you are tan”) accounts of domestic duties (dishwashing, sewing, pie baking) and family news (her little brother Bob was throwing snowballs, her mother was sick).
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