SOMERSET, Ky. (LEX 18) — Our country changed forever on this day 81 years ago.
Even with films and history books, nothing compares to an eyewitness account. Earlier this year, a woman in Somerset came across letters written from Pearl Harbor.
"It's their story," said Libby Morris. "And it's a beautiful history."
Blake Morris is Libby's son. He absorbs the stories that you can't find in the books.
"I'm a big history buff," Blake said. "And an avid reader."
So, the answer is yes, I've always been interested in history, particularly World War II."
Raymond Eugene Lankford joined the Navy in 1940 when he was 19 years old.
"They seem to be awfully worried about me as they hadn't heard from me since the bombing of Pearl Harbor," he writes in one of the letters.
About 75 or 100 of the love letters recovered were written to Joan Northcutt, who lived in Kentucky. The two would later become married.
"That promise you made still stands, doesn't it?"
Libby and Blake believe that promise refers to Joan waiting for Lankford to return home.
"It's beautiful to read about how he begs her to wait for him to keep that promise," Libby said.
Earlier this year, Libby got a call that some of her father's clothes had been found in his former home in Pulaski County. Within 10 minutes, she was at the property. She asked if anything else was there. Once she began looking, she found what she had always been wanting to see.
"I went through it for about 30 minutes and I opened one box and there the letters were," she said.
Libby says her mother never allowed her to read the letters. She said they were too personal.
"There were so many questions I didn't ask when I was young and wish I had asked," she said. "It broke my heart that I'd never have an answer to these things. And then I was given this gift."
Lankford died in 2008.
"There is no better gift than opening up these letters and looking through his eyes," Blake said.
Now, she's a daughter whose wish has become that gift.
"I can not only hear him the way I remember him, but I also learned so much more about him that I didn't know," Libby said.
"They're such a treasure," she added. "So I knew that somebody had a hand in it."
The couple was married for more than 49 years. Blake says the letters will be delivered to the National World War II Museum sometime next year. The letters Joan sent to Gene were burned in a torpedo strike.
