Mike Wolanin | The Republic Terri Metz talks about the collection of love letters her great uncle Tolbert Barnhill sent to her great aunt Sophronia Barnhill (Brewer) while serving with the U.S. Army during World War II during an interview at The Republic in Columbus, Ind., Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2024.
Romantic love bloomed for many in the grim, hardened soil of World War II. That included Terri Metz’s great uncle and great aunt, U.S. Army Private First Class Tolbert Barnhill and Sophronia Brewer, two eastern Kentucky natives who felt romance spark as teens just before he shipped to Germany’s front lines as a tender-faced 19-year-old to serve in 1944.
She was just a student at Oxford High School near Georgetown. He would become a member of what is known as the Greatest Generation.
“I love a good love story,” Taylorsville’s Metz said. “And I love family history.”
And the tale of her relatives, who lived most of their married life in Lexington, Kentucky, represents both. They were married for 70 years before Tolbert Barnhill died in 2019 at age 94. She died just five months later in 2020 at age 93.
He ran the kitchen at a federal corrections facility in Lexington, retiring in 1978. She worked for 27 years at Stewart’s Department Store in accounting.
Metz acquired in 2023 a container of about 50 of their written exchanges, stretching from 1944 during the conflict to 1947 after the war. She is a woman who also has kept her great-grandfather’s diaries, marking a time when men actually kept such life records.
Her great uncle’s missives are simple and sweet, laced with hints of longing so common in the flowing cursive of the day: “Honey, it won’t be long ‘til your birthday, will it? I wish I could get you something.”
Other letter portions are so human and vulnerable and, well, very understandable for lonely young men of the day dreaming of their sweet one.
“In one, he wrote, ‘I can’t wait to see you in short shorts,’” Metz said with a chuckle.
They married in 1949. Metz recalled a relative relaying their honeymoon hunger for privacy. Seems Tolbert carried Sophronia over the threshold into their hotel room — and left their luggage outside the door until the next morning.
Metz never exactly knew what her great uncle’s military duties were while in Germany, though she knew he sometimes fetched supplies.
“He never talked about World War II,” she said, echoing what so many relatives have experienced with those who served then.
He cracked a little by age 85 when he would sit with Metz.
“He would tell us about going into unoccupied houses (in Germany) and he said that they would just sleep there because it was warm,” Metz said.
But not quite comfy. One night, he snoozed on a kitchen counter.
“He also said he spent a lot of cold days down in a foxhole,” she said.
His wartime letters, like his later-years conversations, were short on details because of Army restrictions.
In marriage, the roads they traveled often were literal ones, visiting every state but Alaska. At age 90, he went on one of the military honor flights to Washington, D.C., creating one of the highlights of his life.
Metz’s own two children, ages 38 and 41, have assured her they will keep the letters in the family whenever she dies.
“They want those records,” she said happily.
Records of life. Records of love perhaps made stronger by absence. Records of two yearning people with no firm promises of tomorrow while on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean but united by one heart.
She cannot imagine being without the correspondence.
“I would lose a very special part of history,” Metz said. “This is a part of what makes me what I am.”
Metz acknowledged that, in today’s technological age, handwritten letters seem rare.
“I think they’re a lost art,” she said.
And what of seeing their apparent decline in a keyboard/email/social media age?
“It’s a sad day is what it is,” she said. “Sure, I love technology as much as the next person.
“But boy, if you love family history, it kind of hurts all that, because you probably don’t have the paper records of things like this to look back on and share.”
