Art for Art’s Sake Press
Laura Cameron
Author, editor, and accidental archivist of a father’s wartime letters
A daughter, a shoebox
and 424 letters
Laura Cameron did not set out to be an archivist, still less a World War II historian. She was simply clearing her late mother’s house when she found the first of several dusty shoeboxes. The nearly 80-year-old letters inside them belonged to her father, Ronald Francis Dick — “Ronie” to his family — who served as a Corporal in the US Army Air Forces from 1944 to 1946.
Reading them changed the course and rhythm of her days for the next two years. Reading led to weeks of painstaking transcription. Untangling the references to people, places and terms common then but inscrutable now, led to months of research and in turn to countless hours of careful annotation. The result is Your Loving Son, Ronie: Letters from the End of WWII.
“I simply thought how lucky I was to see his cartoons and ‘junk.’ After all, the contents had been virtually untouched for almost 80 years, shuttled between attics and basements and eventually 3,000 miles across country.”
— Laura Cameron, from the PrefaceEditor by trade,
researcher by avocation
Reading the letters, puzzling out the dates and sequence of back-and-forth jottings, Laura found that for every letter that explained some moment in family lore, dozens more posed questions she could not — at first — answer.
An editor by trade and researcher by avocation, she set about tracking down answers to questions like: Who was Mrs. Bleating-Hart, and why should someone “ask Kiernan”? What was the ASTP, and why was her father at Cornell University for only three months? How were the US Army Air Force bases of Kurmitola and Barrackpore related to planes flying over the Hump?
In this labor of love, she gives readers these and hundreds more answers — and brings her father, who would have been 98 years old on the 80th anniversary of the war’s end, back to life.
Ronie’s own hand
Every letter Ronie sent home was a small performance — decorated envelopes, margin cartoons, and occasional full drawings that brought his daily life vividly to life.
Ronie’s self-portrait — the Army-issue cap worn in his own inimitable style
Envelope art: bugler’s practice
Carrier pigeon — one of Ronie’s wry observations on Army life
Other visual memoirs
An Abecedarium of Ornaments unpacks the stories of dozens of colorful Christmas tree ornaments from Laura’s family collection, some dating back to the turn of the last century — still available directly from the author.
40 Ways of Looking at Manhattan annotates a collection of black-and-white images of New York City taken by the late photographer Timothy J. Sagosz.
Connect with Laura Cameron
For speaking engagements, book club visits or research inquiries, please contact Laura directly at Laura@artforartssakepress.com.
She also writes regularly about the letters, the history and the research behind the book at The Letter-Opener on Substack.