UNITED STATES ARMY

Sanford Gottlieb (1942)

July 18, 1943

Dear Miss Thompson,

Here I am again after my long period of silence. Yesterday I received a copy of the Service Mens News, and it was this that gave me an attack of conscience. I said to myself the other fellows have been writing, and I havent, and that isnt right. So here I am.

It sure is nice to receive that paper, of news of men from school in the service. I have often wondered about the whereabouts of some of my classmates, and this paper cleans it up nicely.

For the past three months I have been here at Drew Field just outside of Tampa, Florida. I finished my course of Radio Repair at Ft. Monmouth, and was sent here to the Headquarters of Signal Aircraft Warning units. I expected to get into one of these units and go into the field doing this kind of work. However as I went through for classification I was placed on special duty as an instructor in a literacy school here on the post. It seems that all of the illiterate men that appear before draft boards throughout the country, the Army takes ten percent of them and distributes them equally throughout the various branches of the service.

Here at this school we teach the men to read and write. They get here an education equivalent to a public school fifth grade education. They stay in school three months.

We have a regular public school set up, all eight grades. They start out with the alphabet and wind up by reading very well silently and orally, and also writing fairly good letters.

I have decided that it is a much simpler task teaching children, than it is these men. Sometimes it becomes a very trying task. At one time I had a full class of Chinese men, for a while there I thought I would really snap under the strain. They are a very difficult people to understand, but I finally got onto them and their ways and everything was all-right. All in all it is a very good job to have in the Army, especially when it is ones own profession. I had no idea that anything like this existed in the Army.

As I sit here writing this I recall the day I went into talk to Dr. Schaefer about my leaving school to join the Army. Among other things he related to me that when he was in the Army during the last war, he was given the task of writing up a course of study of some kind. Well it was quite a coincidence when last week another instructor and myself was detailed to write up a course of study for our literacy school. It was quite an interesting task and I enjoyed it very much.

Well Miss Thompson I guess that is all I have to saw for now, except that I hope I continue to receive that little paper.

Please send my regards to all your colleagues. I hope you and they are just fine.

Sincerely yours

Sanford