The East Hartford Gazette

BOMBER PILOT WRITES
January 11, 1945.

Dear Mr. Stevens:

It has been a long time since I was delivering Sunday editions of the Hartford Courant to your doorstep on Greene Terrace.

That's a strange thought, but I couldn't help thinking back to those days as I noticed your name on the editorial corner of the Gazette, which I have been receiving in bales lately, now that my mail is catching up to me after several transfers.

Each time that I stop to think back to those days, I find it hard to realize how much has happened since then, but I suppose most people are having the same difficulty. Fellows that I knew in school are now scattered all over the world, scattered over the world more than any generation in history, and taking it all quite matter-of-factly. Guys that threw rocks in the Connecticut River are throwing grenades at Japs and Germans and kids that played with model airplanes are, almost overnight, flying the toughest planes in the world. Others that possibly built and sailed crude rafts in the flooded meadows each spring may now be in the largest and most powerful navy the world has ever known.

All taking it quite matter-of-factly. Quite a record for a generation that was, supposedly, soft and pampered.

Although they are writing the pages that may be the most flaming in history, they aren't overly impressed, which seems to me to be a pretty good thing.

Possibly the dash and glamor of war is dying out, and the 'blood, sweat and tears' are coming to the fore. These people want to build a peaceful world; and, I believe, because they have been scattered throughout the world, they will be better-equipped to understand the problems of the world more acutely than any generation the United States has so far produced. Each of them is, in one way or another, forming his postwar policy now; and woe be to the governmental instrument that attempts to sell a bill of goods, or a Brooklyn bridge.

The idea that I'm trying to get across is that I believe that we are approaching an era of true understanding 'government by the people', in which governmental representatives will be guided much more by the wills of the people that he represents than by the crushing power of power politics. I may easily be wrong, for at this point I'm rambling on about something that is quite over my head.

I imagine that you have seen many sharp changes in the lives and moods of the people of East Hartford in the past few years, being the publisher of the local newspaper, so probably would know more about the things I've said than I do. You're doing a swell job on the paper, and with each issue it becomes more of a newspaper than a weekly gossip sheet.

Hope to be able to drop in to see you personally before too many more years pass, and until then, thanks for sending me a piece of my home town each week.

Sincerely,
FRANK W. BRUCKER.
Captain, Air Corps.

Note: Capt. Brucker is serving as a bomber pilot in the European theatre.