Someone found a bunch of love letters from WWII in a donation bin at a thrift shop in Missouri. The store is now trying to figure out what they mean.
That’s when Tina Eifert, who runs the Hannibal Salvation Army Family Store, found the stack of letters that Chester McMeen had written to his wife Alma Bernice Modglin while he was stationed in the Philippines during World War II.
She said there was no way to find out who gave the letters, which were written between September 11, 1944, and November 27, 1945.
“They have a lot of history,” Eifert told WGEM-TV. “I wanted to find out who they belonged to.” Eifert worked with a neighborhood reporter named Megan Duncan to figure out what was going on.
Duncan found out that McMeen and Modglin were back together after the war to raise three kids and run a woodworking business in Carbondale, Illinois.
“[In the letters, Chester] talked about how ‘When I get back together, we’re going to open a business, we’re going to do these things,'” Duncan told me. “And then when you look at their lives, and you look at their obituary and you look at the pictures, all of that came true.”
Duncan said she has been going out of her way to find the couple’s family members and found an address that might belong to their son. She said she wrote a message to the address and is now waiting for a response.