About Me and Honeylights Letters
Ang, Betty & I at my high school graduation.
I am Joni Adams Sesma, daughter of Angelo and Elizabeth Adams, aka Ang & Betty. I am the third of their five children. Ang Adams died in 1998 after a massive stroke. Betty died in 2009 at the age of 88. I always knew that she had saved his letters and had moved them from house to house. I knew that he made a scrapbook about his World War II service, but I didn’t know that he had kept nearly all of his war records.
I didn’t know that he had been working on his own war history, until after he died and I saw his post-it notes and penciled-in comments in his files. I had gone out to help Mom after a hip surgery and she had all these boxes sitting on the seats of the chairs around the dining table. I stayed up through the nights reading all this material my Dad had saved and then reading Betty’s diaries (with her permission.) She didn’t quite believe me when I asked if I could take it all with me so I could “do something” with it. I thought I would make a nice book for my mother. I planned to show their two lives during 1944-45 while Ang was overseas. But I soon found World War II research groups on line and I began to think I should make all this available to other researchers, particularly the 57th Bomb Wing Association.
I'll include every letter and diary entry, even those that might reflect poorly on my father or mother. It was difficult to read some comments that make him appear racist and also very close-minded. I just didn’t think it was right to paint a rosier picture of him than was real. Maybe he was racist at the time, and I can imagine him being close-minded. He may have come from the big city of Chicago, but he had not been exposed to much of the world beyond. Maybe he “atoned” for these “sins” in later life when he was able to help so many people in his various civic-leader capacities.
This site was first published via Apple’s iWeb in 2007. It covered April 1944 to April 1945. I'm so happy (and proud) that I was able to present a printed copy of the entire site to Betty during my last visit with her in December 2008. Apple ended iWeb and I rebuilt the site with Wordpress in 2014 to cover the full year 1944. A 70th anniversary tribute of sorts. Then my Wordpress site was attacked with a virus. So this is the third publication, using Weebly.
I called the sites “Honey Lights” because Ang started and ended so many of his letters with “Hi Honey” or “I love you honey.” I remembered that we gave him a plaque with the quote from the Odyssey when he took us to Greece and his village in 1988. See my funeral tribute to him “Great Captain” written before I ever imagined I’d become obsessed with telling this story. And so, now, I’ve used “Honeylights” over and over. This time, I decided "Honeylights Letters" might bring on the Third Time's the Charm Luck to this third iteration of my obsession with Ang and Betty Adams life during World War II.
A note on the transcription: You may start thinking, “Boy, she’s a lousy typist!” While I don’t claim 100% accuracy, I tried to correct my typos. The rest will be “errors” that I left because that is how Ang or Betty wrote them. Betty, in particular, used her own shorthand and abbreviations, due to the limited space she had to write in her diary. Anything in [brackets] is something I have inserted or indicates something I couldn’t read, e.g. “[?]”. I noticed that there was often a pretty big gap between when the letter was written and sent and so I’ve indicated the postmark date for the letters. I also noted if the letter was a V-Mail. I transcribed Ang’s notes in his scrapbook and his flight log, and have indicated [from scrapbook] or [from flight log]. Regarding dates: Ang was confused about dates on several occasions. This is understandable given that he was traveling or sick or just plain depressed -- and of course, he didn't know he was creating a historical record.
[Edited/Updated 12/27/16]
I didn’t know that he had been working on his own war history, until after he died and I saw his post-it notes and penciled-in comments in his files. I had gone out to help Mom after a hip surgery and she had all these boxes sitting on the seats of the chairs around the dining table. I stayed up through the nights reading all this material my Dad had saved and then reading Betty’s diaries (with her permission.) She didn’t quite believe me when I asked if I could take it all with me so I could “do something” with it. I thought I would make a nice book for my mother. I planned to show their two lives during 1944-45 while Ang was overseas. But I soon found World War II research groups on line and I began to think I should make all this available to other researchers, particularly the 57th Bomb Wing Association.
I'll include every letter and diary entry, even those that might reflect poorly on my father or mother. It was difficult to read some comments that make him appear racist and also very close-minded. I just didn’t think it was right to paint a rosier picture of him than was real. Maybe he was racist at the time, and I can imagine him being close-minded. He may have come from the big city of Chicago, but he had not been exposed to much of the world beyond. Maybe he “atoned” for these “sins” in later life when he was able to help so many people in his various civic-leader capacities.
This site was first published via Apple’s iWeb in 2007. It covered April 1944 to April 1945. I'm so happy (and proud) that I was able to present a printed copy of the entire site to Betty during my last visit with her in December 2008. Apple ended iWeb and I rebuilt the site with Wordpress in 2014 to cover the full year 1944. A 70th anniversary tribute of sorts. Then my Wordpress site was attacked with a virus. So this is the third publication, using Weebly.
I called the sites “Honey Lights” because Ang started and ended so many of his letters with “Hi Honey” or “I love you honey.” I remembered that we gave him a plaque with the quote from the Odyssey when he took us to Greece and his village in 1988. See my funeral tribute to him “Great Captain” written before I ever imagined I’d become obsessed with telling this story. And so, now, I’ve used “Honeylights” over and over. This time, I decided "Honeylights Letters" might bring on the Third Time's the Charm Luck to this third iteration of my obsession with Ang and Betty Adams life during World War II.
A note on the transcription: You may start thinking, “Boy, she’s a lousy typist!” While I don’t claim 100% accuracy, I tried to correct my typos. The rest will be “errors” that I left because that is how Ang or Betty wrote them. Betty, in particular, used her own shorthand and abbreviations, due to the limited space she had to write in her diary. Anything in [brackets] is something I have inserted or indicates something I couldn’t read, e.g. “[?]”. I noticed that there was often a pretty big gap between when the letter was written and sent and so I’ve indicated the postmark date for the letters. I also noted if the letter was a V-Mail. I transcribed Ang’s notes in his scrapbook and his flight log, and have indicated [from scrapbook] or [from flight log]. Regarding dates: Ang was confused about dates on several occasions. This is understandable given that he was traveling or sick or just plain depressed -- and of course, he didn't know he was creating a historical record.
[Edited/Updated 12/27/16]