Deborah

To help you make a decision and for your convenience, you will find on page four of this letter a ballot.

Just check one and mail within the next week.

The ballot shows two options, yes and yes.

Be it in his letters or his short stories, Jerry had a way with a closing line.

His fiction often showcased an ironic reveal in the final sentence.

In one story, the peacenik babbling in the mental institution turns out to be a former war commissioner.

In another, the motorist who stops to help a stranded woman turns out to be an executioner on his way to put the woman's son to death.

They were like Twilight Zone episodes almost 20 years before the show went on the air.

Jerry shared drafts of these stories along with poems.

Deborah appreciated his lyrical turns of phrase.

I call them Jerryisms.

Instead of war, he says man-made madness.

As a student at Columbia studying to be a writer, Jerry was exempt from the draft.

But in the winter of 1943, he decided to leave school and enlist.

Aside from his parents, Deborah was the first person he told.

Since one of my guiding rules, he wrote, has always been, to thine own self be true, I feel I can't stay out any longer, just paying lip service to my beliefs.

From boot camp, Jerry's letters arrived in Deborah's mailbox every day.

His clever short stories with the tidy Twilight Zone endings gave way to reportage.

Jerry detailed the eccentric characters he met, the sergeant with a jaw like a rock, the chaplain who was a secret lush.

But he also shared his feelings.