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A Courtship in Letters Edited by Nancy G. Anderson Kay White once wrote Ted Schad, "I wouldn't consider letting anyone read my mail. Why, if I ever thought for a minute you ever showed my letters to anyone-I'd never write you another line. Maybe it's just an idea of mine-but somehow I've always felt that mail was the one thing more private than the things department stores label Intimate Wear." But the letters were too alive to stay in a drawer or trunk (there were many). So now, fifty years after Kay wrote them, we have this brilliant, funny, and wise record in letters of a friendship that turned romance and ended in marriage. The principals had not met when the letters began, so the story has the suspense of a novel. When will they meet? Will they like each other as much in person as on paper? Kay put off sending Ted her picture. When he sent his to her, she wrote, "I hate it that you look so good." But there's more. Kay is an original. She's also a brain and a first-rate writer. Here we have her incisive, quirky, but eminently sound view of the world, 1938-43. She sees the South, the Depression, war, race relations, the whole culture against what could have been the limiting background of a girls' school in a small town. She was a student at Judson College when Ted first wrote her. He read her biography in "Who's Who in American Colleges and Universities" and saw that she collected maps as he did. During the time of the letters, she was graduated summa cum laude from Judson and became the college librarian with summers at LSU for a library science degree. So she also writes from Louisiana and Mississippi, her home. Thanks first to Kay, then to Nancy Anderson of Auburn University at Montgomery, who did a beautiful job of editing the letters, there's not a dull sentence in They Call Me Kay. It's no wonder that Ted fell in love with her. So will anyone who reads her letters. And if you went to Judson during the time she covers, you may be in it! Mary Ward Brown |
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