Last Updated on May 23, 2026 by admin
The postcard is dated October 12th, 1944.
It is small — three and a half inches by five and a half. The handwriting on the back is in a thin black ink that has, in eighty-one years, faded to brown. The stamp is a violet three-cent stamp showing the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima — which is wrong, because the Iwo Jima photograph was not taken until February of 1945. The postcard was, evidently, sold later and used as memorabilia by the sailor’s daughter.
The handwriting reads:
Dear Margaret —
We are fine. Pooli is fine. She has been on the bridge twice this week, against orders, and has, I am told, three battle stars now. The men feed her bacon ends, which she does not deserve.
She is on my knee as I write this. She has put her paw on the corner of the paper as if she is, herself, signing.
Tell your mother I will be home before Easter.
Your father — and Pooli, who has decided to add her mark.
There is a small smudge in the lower right corner of the postcard, in dark ink, in the approximate shape of a cat’s paw.
The sailor came home before Easter.
The cat — Pooli, of the USS Fremont — came home with him. She lived in Pasadena, California, with the sailor and his wife and his daughter Margaret, until 1959. She is buried in the small backyard of the small house in Pasadena, under a flat stone that reads only:
POOLI
1944 — 1959
Veteran
The postcard is in a frame on Margaret’s kitchen wall. She is eighty-six. She has the postcard, and the smudge, and the cat.
Mostly she has the smudge.