Good NewsWoman discovers sweetheart’s diary dedicated to her in WWII museum
Laura Mae Davis, 90, recently visited the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana, hoping to see the exhibit commemorating Corporal Thomas "Cotton" Jones, the Marine who had been her high school sweetheart.
What she didn't expect to find was his diary, dedicated to her. Its back cover was covered completely with her photograph.
"It was a shock when I got up to the display and the first thing I see is this diary," she said.
Jones was killed in 1944, at the age of 22, by a Japanese sniper in the South Pacific. Before her died, he outlined his "last life request" in its pages:
In his very first entry, he described his diary as "my life history of my days in the U.S. Marine Corps...And most of all my love for Laura Mae for whom my heart is completely filled. So if you all get a chance please return it to her. I (am) writing this as my last life request."
Davis had given him the diary before he went overseas. She had never read its contents, nor did she know it survived the war.
"I was working in Evansville and my mother called and said they just received a telegram 'Cotton' had been killed in action. And, yeah, that was bad," she told CNN.
Shortly after the war, Davis married a man in the Army Corps and raised a family.
When she recognized the diary in the display, her tour group notified the museum's curator.
Curator Eric Rivet let David take a closer look at the artifact that mentioned her, using white gloves to protect the old papers from skin oils. He told the Associated Press that it was the first time in his 17 years of museum work that someone found "themselves mentioned in an artifact in the museum."
"I had a letter from Laura Mae, and she said she loved me, yippee," one entry read.
The museum gave Davis a scanned copy of the diary to keep.
"It was just nice to find out that he did care about me. And was so sorry that it happened the way it did," she said, adding that the find brought tears to her eyes.
