Lost letters tell of young love

LaVonne Hitchcock, a seeker of second-hand treasures, was mildly curious about a plastic bag that was full of old airmail envelopes and probably was destined for the recycling bin.

"I grabbed them, didn't really pay much attention," Hitchcock recalled of the purchase she made in February at one of Goodwill Industries' daily end-of-the-line sales at its donated-goods depot on Santa Rosa's Yolanda Avenue.

Everything piled onto the tables had failed to sell at Goodwill stores, so anything left behind by the crowd of flea-market vendors, junk aficionados, bargain shoppers, collectibles dealers and Craigslist re-sellers would be trucked off for recycling.

Hitchcock, 45, of Petaluma buys and sells second-hand finds as a hobby. She figured the bag of envelopes - there looked to be about 100 - would cost her maybe a buck, so she snatched it up, placed it in her box of purchases and paid $5 for all of it.

At home later she opened the bag and read a couple of the letters inside the airmail envelopes.

"I had chills up and down my spine," she recalled.

She quickly realized she'd come upon a cache of love letters written by a young sailor to an even younger girl he'd met before he shipped off to Pearl Harbor shortly before America joined World War II.

He was Marx "Marky" Weil, a recruit of Jewish ancestry from Georgia. She was Joyce "Joy" Taff, an Episcopalian high school student in Alameda. She turned 15 and he 20 in 1941, the year they met while he was stationed at the Alameda Naval Air Station.

Nearly all of the letters were penned - beautifully - by him and addressed to her. Each was numbered on the front of the envelope. Hitchcock was sure that the loose lengths of twine she found in the bag had been used to bunch the letters according to year, from 1941 well into 1944.

She read just enough of the letters, fewer than 10, to see that Marx had fallen in love with Joy, wooed her, returned to California to marry her and then addressed her as his wife after he returned to war.

Some of Marx's letters had words blacked out or cut out by military censors. The few that Hitchcock read suggested that the stack of one-way correspondence charted the merging of two lives from shortly after the initial meeting to the early days of marriage.

"I got completely sucked into the story and wondering how the letters wound up at Goodwill," Hitchcock said.

She strongly suspected the Weils or their family did not intend for the letters to be sold for a buck at the last Goodwill sale before the recycling bin.

Although a novice at Internet research, Hitchcock went online to see what she could learn about Marx and Joyce Weil. She discovered that Joyce died in Sonoma in fall 2010 at age 84 and that Marx was 90 when he passed away in Sonoma in mid-2011.

On a genealogy website, Hitchcock found that the Weils had two daughters, one of whom lives in the Sonoma Valley. She phoned Linda Cederborg early in March and asked if she was the daughter of Joyce and Marx Weil.

Cederborg's husband, Stephen, heard his wife ask a stranger on the phone, "Why do you ask?" Then he watched her face light up.

Hitchcock told Linda Cederborg that she'd found her father's love letters to her mother and asked if she would like them back. Cederborg could not get to Hitchcock's home in Petaluma fast enough.

Hitchcock invited her in and handed her the letters. Hitchcock would take no money for them, but she accepted a gift card to the new Acre Coffee in Petaluma and a box of dark chocolate salted caramels - her favorite.

Back at home near Sonoma, Cederborg looked through the old envelopes she had seen a few times but had never opened. She said she hadn't felt entitled to them while her parents were alive.

After her father's death last summer, it wasn't long before the letters were lost, presumably forever. Cederborg said she and her sister decided to have an estate sale at their parents' house in the Lovall Valley area of Sonoma.

Their dad's wartime love letters to their mom were in a small Navy trunk and were not supposed to be part of the sale. But the trunk was sold by mistake.

The sting of losing the letters had largely healed when, the better part of a year later, Hitchcock phoned to say she had them.

Cederborg said her mother also wrote a great many letters to her father, but he had no way to save them while serving as a naval aviator in the war. She believes the last time her mother would have looked at the letters was when she and Marx retired to Sonoma from Cupertino in 1987 and put the trunk in the garage of their new home.

As a young woman, Cederborg said, her mom had numbered every one of the letters with a numeral on the front of the envelope.