Jon Bouman to the Bouman Family

Jon Bouman to the Bouman Family

Bouman, Jon Anthony, 1873-1958

WWP23149

1927 October 6

Letter from Jon Bouman to his family.

Gift of William C. and Evelina Suhler

Germany--History--1918-1933

Correspondence

Berlin, Germany

Rachel Dark

Denise Montgomery

English

PROOFREADING

Evelina Suhler is the granddaughter of Jon Anthony Bouman and inherited the family collection of his letters from the years of World War I. She and her husband gave the letters to the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library & Museum in 2013.

Dearest;

Yours of Tuesday came in this morning. The Niemann proposition has come to naught;
I telephoned to his house and spoke to his wife, he being out of town, and she told me that they had changed their minds and would now rather have a German girl who understood some English – at all events, the deal was off, sorry and all that, &c.

It might have been suitable enough and I knew of another channel through which I could verify his respectability &c. and I found his address was in a good class street close to the Tiergarten. However tis evidently had not to be.

I will send the cheque in good time to reach you by the 15th, although you say you can pull thru till then.

So Dora is going to be tied up next week. An October wedding seems somehow a melancholy affair to me. Give me May!

This “Svengali” film was amusing. Note “Leard”, who was portrayed as a fat young man who always went to sleep at the fatal moment. He must have fed like I did today on pea soup with pigs’ trotters, jugged hare with red cabbage to follow. This was at a Bavarian restaurant at the sign of the Bavarian Roaring lion (I hadn’t been there before) and a notice on the menu says “Roar like a lion when your glass isn’t full.” They also serve “giant “portions more suitable to Bavarian hardy mountaineers than to a man who writes fool stories all day. When I had finished I felt I had a meal and could barely crawl down the Charlottentesse to Unter den Linden at the Tonndorf café to have some coffee to help it down and there I sat, feeling how true the communists’ description of the bourgeois is: “the animal that digests”. So after that I had a long walk about the streets; it is dark now when I leave the office and my beloved Tiergarten is dangerous after dark.

I wish you had been within calling distance the other day when those German flyers hopped off from Norderney, for I had London on the telephone while my colleague had Norderney on another telephone and we were just waiting for the word “go” but it took a long time and I spent the time in calling all the folks successively to the instrument and asking after their wives and families; Frank King, Henry Fullick and Angus and all. They told me there was a dense fog in town. Here in Berlin we don’t get them because it doesn’t lie in a river basin like London. In fact the weather has been quite pleasant if on the cool side, but bright.

So if you had been there we could have had quite a nice chat. The word “go” was long in coming and eventually we were told that the connection must now be severed. Five minutes later we heard that “They were off”! Just bad luck again. We had used those two long distance phones for about 1 ½ hours cost about pound 45 and very little to show for it. Bodker of Reuters roared with amusement and said he’d get the sack if he spent money at that rate. But of course Reuters doesn’t have the crazy competition we are up against.

Well, in another fortnight’s time I shall be on the way home. I think I’ll stop over a night at Rotterdam and see Aunt Lena on the way.

With love to all,

Jac.

Letter

Bouman Family