This next interlude is about the War Years at Tate. No one here remembers that, of course. But it divides the history of Tate in two. Before WWII, Tate had its golf course and lodge. It was in a bubble of light, like the United States.

But a darkness was falling across Europe, and I have discovered a letter in our family archives dated November 10, 1941, that hints at the darkness.

It was to my mother, Emily Wright then, by her 25-year-old cousin Peggy. The original Wright house at Tate was shared in 1930 by my grandfather Douglas Wright and his sister, Aunt Margaret Alston. (Years later, Aunt Margaret built the house on Wildcat Hill that became the Emerson-Erwin-Traylor house.) Aunt Margaret’s daughter Peggy spent her summers as a teenager at Tate in the golden years from 1930 to 1935, riding horses and partying. Her mother took her to France in 1935, where Peggy Alston studied art at the Sorbonne. She met a dashing French painter named Paul Refoulé, and they fell in love. They were married in Atlanta, moved back to Paris, and had a son, Jon Paul. But when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Paul joined the French Army. He was captured near Dunkirk.

My mother, Emily, wrote to her cousin Peggy in her farmhouse in Bordeaux in Vichy France in the summer of ’41, when Mama was 15. Peggy wrote back this 4-page letter. I will read just a paragraph from it.

. . . some day we hope to have a home in Georgia .  .  . I should love to have it at Tate, if Paul’s work will let us live in the country. We can have a mule and wagon and the children could go to the school near the “half way” church. or I could teach them the Calvert system,. . . anyway, all I want now is for Paul to come home to us, safe and well, and then we’ll see when we come back to Atlanta. I hope you won’t feel ashamed of us, as our clothes are all old and shabby and we have seen such sad things and lived thru such terrible days that you will have to teach us to laugh again and to know that life can be good. . . . . How funny it will be to . . . be able to buy all the food we can eat! Sometimes I dream of Lucille Tate’s wonderful dinners! . . .I know Gertrude and Douglas are happy and proud with you children and I am sure Gertrude is much younger and much, much prettier than I am, and I will be perfectly jealous.

A month after this letter, Pearl Harbor changed everything. Paul spent the rest of the war in Nazi POW camps. And Peggy almost starved growing her own food and making their clothes with her son Jon. After the war, they were reunited and moved back to Atlanta, and came to Tate a lot. I loved reading this letter, because of her vision of living at Tate, learning to laugh again and to know that life can be good. That may be the life we are making happen around us now. The end of the letter is a Post Script: “I do hope you all think about planting a few fruit trees up at Tate in the back yard.”

The song you will hear now was the hopeful voice of the War Years, the female dream gal Jo Stafford singing “Ill Be Seeing You.” Ellen Rolader will be signing this beautiful song.