John Odell

Elmer & Virginia John Odell

Elmer Odell and Virginia Schill were high school teenagers from separate "sides of the tracks" when the first chapters of the Second World War began to be written. They would become a part of that narrative as they grew to adulthood and joined the Greatest Generation. As Elmer flew combat above the battlefields of Europe, Virginia wrote newspaper stories about life on the home front. Between 1939 and 1944, Elmer and Virginia exchanged hundreds of letters, which sat in shoeboxes for decades. Here are the best of them. These missives vividly chronicle their separate odysseys and their growing love for each other. To open this book is to follow them through the turbulent years of World War II.