Letters to Skeet
Lauren Wiginton -
In a recent clear out, my brother found a box that turned out to be a time capsule. Inside were dozens of handwritten letters sent to my great-grandfather/Gramps — A.P. “Skeet” Gibson — by his friends serving in WWII.
Skeet never served himself. Scarlet fever as a child had left him unfit for service. From his home in Amarillo, Texas, he became something else: a steady point of contact, a piece of home.
At a time when the world was on fire, his friends needed to stay connected. Connect about the real, and truly dark shit they were experiencing. Their letters were a mix of exhaustion, humor, and longing - inside jokes and fantasizing about a future when they could just joke over coffee together. These letters are proof of friendship as survival.
"The war looks like it’s about won in Germany; then we will have to fight a little more out here in the Western League and it will all be over"
Skeet was someone that people flocked to - playful, goofy, ‘sweet as can be’, a little mischievous, trustworthy and endlessly kind. He was the funniest person I knew and I was only around at the end of his life. He loved a good prank, especially at his wife Sybil’s expense: hiding her purse, pretending to fall asleep while driving, just to get a rise out of her.
From Sybil’s obituary - “Skeet and Sybil were fun loving people. He did a lot of joking and she played the ‘straight’ role in those jokes.”
Among these things, we also found a newspaper clipping of Skeet playing the part of a woman in an Easter play – and a letter from 20th Century Fox asking him to come to LA to audition to be a “female impersonator”, based on his “very commendable’ performance in said play.
Maybe it was real, maybe another prank…? Either way, he kept it and we found it, 79 years later.
If it was real, I doubt that in the Texas Panhandle in 1946, his community would support leaving a career in baseball (he also shared the diamond with Babe Ruth, but that's another story) and insurance to pursue a life as a “female impersonator".
But, whatever life he chose, he was going to have fun with it.
This started as a piece about the lost art and joy of letter writing - the anticipation and intimacy. But it became something else: a piece about Skeet — about being the kind of person others want to stay close to, to laugh with and share hard times with, even from a world away.
Could you sit down right now and write a letter to someone like that? Who would it be? What stories or mundane bullshit would you share? Do we even have the attention span for that anymore?
Maybe start small - a postcard with a stupid little joke (like one from another piece in this issue).
For Skeet — who made it look easy to be the one worth writing to. Turns out, the best man for the job stayed home cracking jokes, answering the mail and somehow became everyone’s favorite soldier during dark times.
