‘My Dear Irma’––

Letters Depict Life On The Home Front During WWI

By Dottie Evans

Apple picking and shelling peas — Sprinkling laundry — Friday night “Willing Worker” meetings — Coal shortages — Liberty Bonds — Skimming the milk — Cutting ice — Model T cars — Knitting sweaters for soldiers — Flying machines.

To Charles and Lillian Nichols, who lived in Monroe when World War I was breaking out, these everyday words were as familiar as a loaf of homemade, unsliced bread.

They sounded more like ancient history, however, to Trumbull resident Judi Rovinelli when in 1989, she and her brother-in-law came across a packet of 113 letters written to the Nicholses’ daughter while she was away at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass.

“We bought the box of letters for $35 — mainly because my brother-in-law was interested in the stamps,” Ms Rovinelli said, adding it took five years before she got around to actually reading the letters. They were all addressed to Miss Irma E. Nichols and most were mailed from Stepney Depot. Many originated in Bridgeport, in Providence, R.I., or were sent through the US Army Postal Service.

“There was a lot of history in there…I wanted to do the right thing because this was someone else’s life,” said Ms Rovinelli during an interview at The Bee office earlier this year.

“Irma’s mother wrote once or twice a week … She was witty and she really gives the scoop about what was going on in the [Connecticut] towns in those days. It appears their neighborhood was Newtown, Stepney and Long Hill, and they had friends and family in Bridgeport,” Ms Rovinelli noted.

Though Irma’s own voice is not heard since all the letters were written to her, they present the image of a serious, studious young woman of modest means whose family is living through uncertain times. Since Irma faithfully kept her letters they must have been important to her, though how they ended up in a Bridgeport junk shop was anybody’s guess.

“I decided Irma was a special person … before her time in going away to college.”

Determined to learn more about the Nichols family, Ms Rovinelli visited local cemeteries and consulted members of Monroe Historical Society. She also wrote Mount Holyoke College to ask about the Class of 1921.

Irma Nichols was born in Easton on Judd Road, on October 26, 1899, and her father, Charles F. Nichols, was a community leader and a member of the local fire brigade. From 1939 to 1940, he was elected Democratic State Representative. He died in 1951.

From the college, Ms Rovinelli received copies of Irma’s obituary and a photocopy of her senior yearbook page where the following words were written under Irma’s picture: “She goes out of chapel last, because she is so very tall; She goes down to breakfast last, because she isn’t fast at all.”

Irma had majored in economics and sociology with a minor in mathematics, but the letters showed she had difficulty with her English classes. “You know that has always been your weak point. Persevere, be determined to conquer,” wrote her mother in November of 1917.

This seemed particularly ironic since the two longtime jobs Miss Nichols held were both in the publishing field. The first was at the weekly newspaper Bridgeport Life, and the second was at The Newtown Bee, where she was office manager for 20 years until her death in 1971.

“I was told she was a quiet, sweet person, and she was very good with numbers,” said Ms Rovinelli after talking to Ed Coffey, a longtime Monroe resident who remembered her dedication in founding Monroe Historical Society in 1959.

Brother Perkins Enlists

In 1917 when Irma Nichols went off to Mount Holyoke, her older brother Elbert Perkins Nichols was in his second year at Brown University. He subsequently enlisted in the Army and after basic training in Orlando, Fla., he was sent to Bordeaux, France, in 1918. He managed to write Irma a few letters during his tour of duty, though the censors did not allow him to give many details.

Meanwhile back home in Monroe, Charles and Lillian Nichols were affected by shortages caused by the wartime economy. Fortunate to own enough land to keep chickens and pigs, they managed to feed themselves while earning spending money out of their own vegetable garden and apple orchard. But luxuries were few and any extra cash had to go for college tuitions and maintaining the farm.

It seemed their car, a three-cylinder Ford Model T, was always breaking down. Until repairs were made, Charles and Lillian were unable to visit Irma or Perkins in faraway South Hadley and Providence. Like most of their contemporaries, the young people traveled by train when going to and from college.

Communication by letter and by laundry was the norm. Irma and Perkins sent laundry boxes home each week and their mother washed and ironed their clothes, then mailed the laundry back. She often enclosed notes, food, gifts, and even flowers tucked lovingly into the corners.

While Perkins was overseas fighting in France and Irma was a college junior, their mother died suddenly on March 18, 1919, when the dreaded epidemic later known as the Spanish Influenza swept through the state. Charles Nichols wrote Perkins a letter on March 26 telling him about the tragedy, a copy of which was sent to The Bee by Perkins’ grandson, Alan Nichols, who lives today in New Hampshire.

The letter makes clear that Irma had come home from college to help care for her mother during that terrible time. Ms Rovinelli could only imagine what affect Lillian’s death had on all of them.

“I think the mom’s death would have had a big impact. It is ironic that she spent so much time worrying about her children — in particular Perkins in the war — and then she was the one who got sick and passed on,” reflected Ms Rovinelli.

After this, the letters to Irma from home are fewer and farther between.

“Her Dad writes but his letters are shorter, and they do not have the editorial funny comments that her Mom often used. A lot is lost when she is gone,” Ms Rovinelli noted.

Charles Nichols eventually remarried a woman named Mabel Morgan, and after graduation from college Irma lived with them in their Monroe home. Working in Bridgeport and then in Newtown, she was active throughout her life in the Stepney Baptist Church.

 

Fatal Crossing Of Route 25

Many years after both her parents were gone and while she was still living with her stepmother in Monroe, Irma Nichols was killed on an icy winter night in January 1971. She was struck down while crossing Route 25 in front of her home. Her obituary describes the incident vividly:

Tuesday evening, January 26, she had attended the annual meeting of the Stepney Baptist Church, returning home about 10 pm. She stopped at the mailbox at the bottom of the driveway on Route 25 but found it frozen shut. She went into the house and returned with an implement to open the box. For some reason she crossed Route 25, perhaps to follow blowing papers for the weather was very bad and a northbound car struck Miss Nichols. She was taken to St Vincent’s Hospital in Bridgeport where she died of multiple injuries.

Shocked at this sudden loss of a valued, longtime employee, The Newtown Bee’s editor wrote a tribute to Irma Nichols that described her as a “true friend –– a person of deep loyalties, strict principles…and an abiding faith in religion.”

Bee Publisher R. Scudder Smith, who was working then as reporter while his father Paul Smith was publisher, recalled recently what it was like for office workers who had to clean out her desk.

“She always saved things and was extremely neat and organized,” Mr Smith said recently. “They found these tiny, little pencils with the lead worn down to nubs, held together by rubber bands.”

Among the ironies surrounding Irma’s death was the fact that it happened as a result of her efforts to retrieve her mail under extremely adverse conditions. Letters, it seems, were always of the greatest importance.

Knowing this, one wonders how that packet ended up at Mel’s Classic Collectibles junk shop in Bridgeport. Stranger still is the shop’s location –– only two blocks from St Vincent’s Hospital, where she died.