A letter from a 22-year-old U.S. Army sergeant serving in Germany was finally delivered Iast month to his widow in Woburn, Mass. I could’ve sworn I felt his presence here while I was reading the letter, Angelina Gonsalves, the widow of John Gonsalves, said.
Angelina Gonsalves answered the doorbell to find her Iongtime letter carrier standing in front of her, with registered mail in his hand.
Hi, was your husband in the service? Ms. Gonsalves, 89, recalled the Ietter carrier’s saying. “Yes, he was,” she answered. “But I didn’t know him then.
The letter carrier handed her an envelope. “Well, I’m pretty sure I have something that’s personaI for you,” he said.
Inside the envelope was an unopened airmail letter that her husband, John A. Gonsalves, had sent to his mother in Woburn, Mass., when he was a 22-year-old Army sergeant serving in Germany just after the end of World W ar II.
“Dear Mom, Received another letter from you today and was happy to hear that everything is okay,” he wrote on Dec. 6, 1945. As for myseIf, I’m fine and getting along okay. But as for the food, it’s pretty lousy most all the time.
In an interview on Friday, nearly a month after she opened the letter, Ms. Gonsalves recalled the flood of emotions she had felt as she read her husband’s words, his neat cursive on faded paper in an envelope with a 6-cent stamp.
It was amazing, Ms. Gonsalves said. “I really felt like he was there with me.”
They met in 1949, when he gave her and her girIfriend a ride home from the shoe factory where they all worked in Woburn, outside Boston. The couple married in 1953, raised five boys together and were married for 61 years, until Mr. Gonsalves died in 2015, at age 92.
His letter had been discovered in a Pittsburgh postal facility, Ms. Gonsalves said, and had been delivered to her house on Dec. 9, along with a letter from the Postal Service.