San Diego State University student actors bring decades-old letters written by Aztecs who served overseas during World War II to life in Dear Doc, a theatrical performance.
The USS Midway Museum has promoted Dear Doc, which centers on letters addressed to Dr. Lauren C. Post, an SDSU geography professor and World War I veteran. Post became a cherished connection to home for students serving overseas, and servicemen shared their experiences, hopes and challenges with him through wartime correspondence. As KPBS reports, Post received letters from several thousand former San Diego students who had gone off to war. His wartime newsletter experiment began in spring 1942, and he published the correspondence in a monthly newsletter called the Aztec News Letter that connected those students to each other and to the campus they'd left behind.
Post kept mailing that newsletter until March 1946, by which point he had sent out 48 issues, according to the American Association of Geographers. The letters document the experiences of San Diego State students who served in World War II. Those letters arrived from locations scattered across Europe, North Africa, Japan and the South Pacific, according to a history published by San Diego State University.
A Collection Still Housed on Campus
Exactly how many letters make up the archive depends on who's counting. KPBS describes the tribute as honoring the authors of 5,000 WWII letters held in SDSU Library's Special Collections and University Archives, while 10News similarly reports a collection of 5,000 letters kept on campus. San Diego State University's own account puts the figure at 4,848 letters comprising the World War II Servicemen's Correspondence Collection, spanning 1941 to 1946, and notes the documents have been securely housed in the university's Special Collections and University Archives for decades.
Dear Doc itself was written by Jonnie Wilson as a tribute to the authors of those letters, per KPBS, and the production features authentic wartime letters, dramatic readings and live music. The production is brought to the stage by Write Out Loud, in a partnership co-produced with Scripps Ranch Theatre.
From the Flight Deck to the Hangar Bay
From the Archive to the Stage Dear Doc has been presented before as a theatrical tribute to the wartime correspondence.
One earlier Dear Doc event paired the letters with live music and wartime exhibits. An event listing for the production, from theresandiego.com, described the goal as focusing on human connections rather than just historical facts, folding dramatic readings, music and special WWII exhibits into a single evening.
For SDSU, the letters represent a direct line to a generation of students whose college years were interrupted by war, and whose only tether to campus life for years was a professor willing to collect and share their words.
