Brides of 1941

In 1934, Dr. Lelia McLatchey Skinner and her husband T. Wayne move to a copper mining town in Sewell, Chile, to earn enough money to pay for their children’s educations. The catch? They had to leave the kids behind in America. Lelia’s guilt unfolds in letters to her offspring flooded with angst and worry.

First-born Roberta attends Smith College at the onset of WWII. There her party-girl ways lead her to her future husband, Forrest (Buster) Bedford, a 1939 Princeton Tiger graduate. His studies at Columbia School of Law are interrupted when he enlists, and a curious courtship ensues.

This time capsule of Americana would’ve remained a piece of hidden history, if not for letters unearthed three-quarters of a century later. Brides of 1941 is an intimate glimpse into a Greatest Generation coming-of-age story. Author Bonnie Bedford Park, Roberta and Buster’s youngest Baby Boomer daughter, reveals it.