And another place where the people in France has got it on the Americans and that is that when they write a letter here they don’t half to pay nothing to mail it but when you write to me you have got to stick a 5 cent stamp on it but judgeing by the way you answer my letters the war will be all over before you half to break a dime. Of course I am just jokeing Al and I know why you don’t write much because you haven’t got nothing to write staying there in Bedford and you could take a post card and tell me all the news that happened in 10 yrs. and still have room enough yet to say Bertha sends kind regards.
But of course its different with a man like I because I am always where they is something big going on and first it was baseball and now its a bigger game yet you might say but whatever is going on big you can always count on me being in the mist of it and not buried alive in no Indiana X roads where they still think the first bounce is out. But of course I know it is not your fault that you haven’t been around and seen more and it ain’t every man that can get away from a small town and make a name for themself and I suppose I ought to consider myself lucky.
Well Al enough for this time and I will write soon again and I would like to hear from you even if you haven’t nothing to say and don’t forget to send me a Chi paper when you get a hold of one and I asked Florrie to send me one every day but asking her for favors is like rolling off a duck’s back you might say and its first in one ear and then the other.
Somewheres in France, Feb. 7.
Friend Al: I suppose you have read articles in the papers about the war that’s wrote over here by reporters and the way they do it is they find out something and then write it up and send it by cablegrams to their papers and then they print it and that’s what you read in the papers.
Well Al they’s a whole flock of these here reporters over here and I guess they’s one for every big paper in the U.S. and they all wear bands around their sleeves with a C on them for civilian or something so as you can spot them comeing and keep your mouth shut. Well they have got their head quarters in one of the towns along the line but they ride all over the camp in automobiles and this evening I was outside of our billet and one of them come along and seen me and got out of his car and come up to me and asked if I wasn’t Jack Keefe the White Sox pitcher. Well Al he writes for one of the Chi papers and of course he knows all about me and has seen me work. Well he asked me a lot of questions about this in that and I didn’t give him no military secrets but he asked me how did I like the army game and etc.
I asked him if he was going to mention about me being here in the paper and he says the censors wouldn’t stand for mentioning no names until you get killed because if they mentioned your name the Germans would know who all was here but after you are dead the Germans don’t care if you had been here or not.
But he says he would put it in the paper that he was talking to a man that use to be a star pitcher on the White Sox and he says everybody would know who it was he was talking about because they wasn’t such a slue of star pitchers in the army that it would take a civil service detective to find out who he meant.
So we talked along and finely he asked me was I going to write a book about the war and I said no and he says all right he would tell the paper that he had ran across a soldier that not only use to be a ball player but wasn’t going to write a book and they would make a big story out of it.
So I said I wouldn’t know how to go about it to write a book but when I went around the world with the 2 ball clubs that time I use to write some poultry once in a wile just for different occasions like where the boys was called on for a speech or something and they didn’t know what to say so I would make up one of my poems and the people would go nuts over them.
So he said why didn’t I tear off a few patriotic poems now and slip them to him and he would send them to his paper and they would print them and maybe if some of them was good enough somebody would set down and write a song to them and probably everybody would want to buy it and sing it like “Over There” and I would clean up a good peace of jack.
Well Al I told him I
