Return to Sender
A Church Finds Letters Lost Since World War || by Stella Kapetan
On May 19, 1943, during World War II, LeRoy Segar Kussy was stationed at Sheppard Field in Texas and wrote a letter to his pastor at Chicago’s Irving Park Lutheran Church asking for a reference for his application for Air Cadet. “I also want to thank you and the church for sending me the lovely prayer book,” he added. The Rev. Joshua Oden tucked the letter in a box along with the more than 1,000 others from parishioners away at war with whom he corresponded. Kussy was killed 13 months later at age 22 when the B-24 bomber on which he was a top turret gunner was shot down over France. Seventy years later, in 2014, the church gave the letter to his family as part of its Return to Sender project. “I’m sure I was in tears,” Joan Hoyman recently said by phone from her California home about first reading her half-brother’s letter. “I’m in tears now.”
The Return to Sender project started in 2006 after Oden’s box of letters was discovered by three parishioners in a second floor, seldom entered, walk-in storage closet during a major renovation of the more than 100-year-old church building at Harding Street and Belle Plaine Avenue on the northwest side. The project aims to return the letters to those who penned them or a family member if the author was killed during the war or survived but has since died. The church so far has found recipients for the letters of 137 out of the 236 letter writers.
“My mother saw it and said, ‘That’s where I last saw my brother before he left and never returned,’” Juli Hoyman said. That piqued her curiosity about her uncle who was killed before she was born. Her research led her to the church site. She contacted Greenslade and then her mother, who can still recall how Kussy, nine years her senior, would pull her in her wagon and would walk with her on the Florida beach searching for colored seashells. “He was very good, very honest, very caring,” Joan Hoyman said. “He was lots of fun to be with. I loved him very much.” He is buried in the Ardennes American Cemetery and Memorial in Neupre, Belgium.
“ He Was Incredibly Proud of Me”
Alfred Holmquist survived the war and died in 1969. To give his letters to his family, Greenslade had only to turn to fellow parishioner, Holly Lundquist - Holmquist’s daughter. “I was beside myself with emotion,” Lundquist recently said about learning of her father’s letters. “I was incredibly moved by them. I remember the feeling that I was now holding in my hands a piece of paper my father held in his hands a long time ago. I don’t have anything of my dad’s in his handwriting. They are a connection to another place and time.”
After the letters were discovered, they were given to lifelong parishioner and expert in the church’s history, Ralph Greenslade, to search for recipients. He said he and his wife “sorted them out, dusted them off, cleaned them and organized them by name.” In “a labor of love” he scours the internet, makes phone calls across the country and searches Social Security death indexes for next of kin.
Lundquist said her father, nicknamed Butch, was “a big family man,” devoted to her, her sister Bonnie and their mother Dorothy. He helped Lundquist with school science projects and taught her skills to be self-sufficient. “I learned to mow grass,” she said. “I learned how to paint. He taught me how to change a tire.”
Some families, like Kussy’s, discovered the project through their genealogy research. The Kussy family had a summer home in Florida during the war. Hoyman’s daughter, Juli Hoyman, was traveling through Florida in 2013 and posted a vacation photo on her Facebook page.
“He was incredibly proud of me,” Lundquist said, recalling that he left early from work to attend her National Honor Society induction and how happy he was when she headed off to college since he had to leave high school to help support his family as an apprentice butcher during the Great Depression. He was a butcher at various grocery store chains for many years.
