Preface to the Letters

Dorothy and Bill: Their Letters

                This collection of letters was written between 1943 and 1947, by Mary Dorothy Vaugh and Bill Whitcomb.  They were childhood acquaintances, living in India with missionary parents, and attending the same school, Woodstock in Mussoorie, India,  from kindergarten through 12^th grade.  They began in different classes but Bill was moved to Dorothy’s class which ultimately was the class of 1942, graduating just at the United States entered World War II.  

Their first meeting, that we know of, was in 1929 when Billy 5, and Dorothy 3, appear in this photo.  They are pictured together in a group of North India Presbyterian missionaries in 1929 posing in front of Kellogg Church in Mussoorie, India.  Billy’s   There are over 100 people in the photograph, with around 20 children, and somehow Dorothy and Billy end up seated together with just one child between them.  Bill's

parents were in the E & R (Evangelical and Reformed) church but he and brother Tommy somehow were rounded up with the Presbyterian children after church and told to sit in the front for the group picture.

                Their lives together continued until 2014, when after 67 years of marriage, Bill passed away at the age of 89.  The story of how they fall in love and decide to make their lives together is documented in the letters they wrote each other during World War II, while Dorothy was attending Wooster College and Bill was stationed in the Army Air Corps in India.

                Bill’s father, Elmer Whitcomb, was a physician, the oldest of 13 children of a Minnesota farming family.   After serving as a marine in World War II, Elmer married Adella Rodeheffer  from Ohio in 1922.  He finished his medical training at the University of Minnesota in 1924 and practiced medicine in Cresbard, Minnesota until he was able to pay off his medical school debts to his father.  Bill was born in Cresbard on November 29, 1924.  Elmer tried to get an appointment with the Methodist Mission Board but they did not have an opening but he found that the Evangelical Synod had an opening in the Central Province in India to complete the building of a hospital.   

 In 1929 he and Adella, and their three small boys, Tom 5,  Bill 3 and John 2, first went to London where Elmer studied in the School of Tropical Medicine.  They continued on to India, working until 1953, with two furloughs, after which they returned to the United States and then served a term as missionaries in Ghana.  They had a fourth child, a daughter Anna Mae, was born in 1932 in India.  

Dorothy’s father, Mason Vaugh, had three degrees from the University of Missouri in Agricultural Engineering.  He married Clara Pennington in 1918 on a furlough from training in the Army during WWI.  He served time in France and returned to Columbia, Missouri to complete his studies.  He and Clara wanted to enter the mission field and were offered a position in Brazil which they decided to decline.  Ultimately given the choice of working with the Presbyterian church in Africa, China or India, they chose India.  They arrived in India in November of 1921 and their first daughter, Betty Ellen, was born in October the following year.  Dorothy was born on June 8, 1926 in Mussoorie, a hill station in the Himalayas.

Bill and Dorothy attend Woodstock School which had been established in the mid-1800’s as a boarding school for missionary children.  Located in the first range of the Himalaya’s, the school exists today, with 500 students, and is a fully accredited with graduates going to the U.S., Europe, Australia, and India for their university educations.   Woodstock has a rich mixture of cultural traditions, some very American and some representative of the multiple cultures that had made up the student body over the years.

  Having spent most of their school lives in boarding each class at Woodstock develops a deep bond and alumni keep in contact with the school and each other in ways that are unique.   The classes during the first half of the 1900’s had from 25-40 students.  The class of 1942 had 42 graduates.   They all had difficulty leaving India in the winter of 1942-43 because the German U-boats were active in the Atlantic, making the crossing by commercial ships very risky.  Dorothy and her parents finally got berths on a ship which went from Bombay to Durban, South Africa, where they waited for six weeks before a convoy with Navy vessels could give them protection to cross to the United States.  Bill spent several months in India, enrolled at the Lucknow Christian College to take some courses, before he got passage on an American troop transport from Bombay, down and around Australia and New Zealand, finally arriving in San Francisco.

In the fall of 1944 Dorothy, then in college at Wooster in Ohio, wrote a letter to all her classmates from Woodstock asking for their news, and especially from the boys, about where they were serving.  One of the first responses that Dorothy received was from Bill who gave the details of his return to the U.S. from India and of where he was serving.  That began their correspondence which grew in frequency as Bill was assigned to an Army airbase near Calcutta in India.  Because of the censorship he was unable to give Dorothy details but it was clear he was in India and because of the places he names she was able to deduce his location with some accuracy.  

Their acquaintance becomes more and more intimate as they share details of the plans for their lives.  In 1944 Dorothy was 18 on her June birthday and Bill turned 20 on his birthday in November.  By the next year, 1945, the relationship blossoms into a courtship with a proposal of marriage and acceptance, with the caveat that finalizing their commitment will have to wait until they are finally able to be together when the war is over and Bill returns to the U.S.

They exchanged over 400 letters detailing not just their personal lives but the events of the war, culminating with V-E day and later V-J day.  

They were married on March 22, 1947 in the Wooster chapel.  Pictured with them are  Bill’s brother John Whitcomb on their left, and brother Tom on their right.