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History is more than just what’s recorded in books.
For more than a century, registered nurse Aaron Avery’s family were the custodians of a dusty box of letters, postcards, and photographs dating back to when telephones, the Model T, and instant coffee were hot new items.
These small snapshots of life were almost lost to a landfill, Avery said, when he decided at the last minute to become their new guardian and take the time to sort through his ancestor’s daily events and travels.
Now the Enumclaw resident is ready to share some of these stories with the world, starting with his uncle Seaman First Class Charles Raymond “Ray” Fenton, sailor on the USS Fargo from 1946 through 1948 — right on time for Veteran’s Day.
The project is aptly called “The Fargo Files.”
“… [I]t’s a deployment story, told entirely through what Ray wrote home. He enlists in May 1946, goes through boot camp in San Diego, and joins the light cruiser USS Fargo (CL-106) for her Mediterranean deployment… while back home in Hoquiam his family writes back, sends packages that take weeks to catch up with the ship, and follows along,” Avery said in an email interview, the ship visited Italy, Greece, France, Malta, and more on her travels.
Avery describes his uncle as a “homesick and funny” 18-year-old “trying to sound grown up.”
“To the world: history usually keeps the admirals. Letters like these are what the postwar Navy actually looked like from the deck — a kid from Hoquiam watching America take up its new place in the world in 1946,” he continued.
Some of these hand-written letters, in cursive with the blue-and-gold USS Fargo letterhead, touch on the wonders of the world and on domestic events, like the holidays.
“Gee it sure doesn’t seem like Xmas is only 10 days away. It sure won’t be much of a Xmas being over here, but maybe next Xmas I will be home,” Ray wrote home from Naples, Italy, on Dec. 15, 1956. He mentions that he hasn’t sent home a money order “because [I] haven’t got it insured yet” and that he received his holiday gifts. “I won’t open them til Xmas, but I sure would like to know what you sent.”
While in Rome a few months later, “… [W]e couldn’t go to Vatican City because it is only open to tours on Monday and Sat. But I did go to St. Peters Church in the Vatican,” Ray wrote. “… The inside of the church was really beautiful. I won’t even try to tell you about it now because it would be too hard to write how beautiful it is, so I will wait till I get home and tell you all about it and show you pictures of it.”
All of these letters are being released serially, starting on Nov. 11, on The Fargo Files website (thefargofiles.com).
To fund this project, Avery is also selling a collection of vintage items that belonged to his family.
“The collection is chiefly postage stamps — a large collection organized by country and year, from 19th-century issues forward, including U.S. airmail material — plus historical paper and ephemera,” he said.
As of Nov. 4, the site listings included a “Bergedorf 4 Shilling” stamp from 1861 (“Potentially the most important single stamp in the collection”) and a Nov. 7, 1918 edition of the Yerba Buena Gazette incorrectly declaring “GERMANY SURRENDERS!!” four days early.
After publishing Ray’s letters, Avery will start on a second archive of WWII-era correspondence from Ray’s brother Bud, letters from a 1927 family road trip, and the story of his family in the Humptulips and Grays Harbor timber country in the 1880s–1920s.
“Releasing them in order, free, one piece at a time, turns a family’s box into something a whole community can follow — and I hope it makes other families think twice before a box like this gets thrown away,” Avery said. “… Boxes like this one are disappearing every year when families clean out houses. Every one that survives is a primary source nobody has to interpret secondhand.
