Editor's notes
Thank you for your patience. After a month on the road, multiple kid graduations and a wonderful wedding (featuring a Briggs great, great grandson) and about a month of getting the project back on track, I've got about 50 letters in the bank and have selected around 10 of them for upcoming podcasts. I've transcribed all the letters through 1921. In the next few months we'll explore John, continuing to be "lonesome" on the road and failing to make the sales marks he's hit in previous years. He'll try to get Sue to the Convention in Newark. Marion will decide whether to return to South Jersey to teach, which she hates (not teaching--South Jersey) and Betty will continue her studies at Syracuse.
Marion will get into a pretty big argument with her mother over her audacious behavior on Sundays and give her mother a lecture on the changing times.
I'll be relaunching the series on Tuesday, June 27th. I hope, once again, you will take a few minutes day to go back in time to the lives of this middle class family in the 1920s.
If you're new to this project, please consider going to our site and catching up with a few letters from the 1900-1910 era. The letters only take 3-5 minutes to read and you'll find the characters more fully develop if you read the letters chronologically.
John has excellent handwriting. However, in some instances, I cant decipher it. If I can't, I simply mark the spot with "xxx"s to signify thank the word isn't decipherable.
Check out our article in the New York Times!
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