How Adventures in the Attic led to an India news story, about a 1920s American romance & a jungle honeymoon

Last Sunday in India, a Mid-Day news article published details about Gladys’s Jungle Diaries after a reporter there discovered this blog.

It’s always fun to throw a post into the wind, then see it blow across the world to another country and grab someone’s interest there. A bloggers dream, actually. Oh, the wonders of the internet!

A week ago, reporter Prutha Bhosle emailed me to request an interview about my book in progress on the adventures of Gladys in India. (She’d was intrigued by my post Adventures in the Attic.) We arranged for me to email her details, then we’d audio Skype. Scheduling the latter proved to be a bit tricky: my day is her night! With a 9 1/2 hour time difference, who would be doing the interview in pajamas? It did help that she was a night owl.

I thought hard about what details would be most relevant to people in her own city of Mumbai (Bombay, when it was part of British India). It seemed to me that Gladys and Ken’s 1926 jungle honeymoon adventures in Kerala India (near Mumbai) including the story One Less Crocodile would interest Prutha and her audience most.

But it turned out that Prutha was especially intrigued with how near-100-year-old original handwritten letters unfolded a love story:

Ken pursued Gladys for almost 10 years before they married! Although I knew they ended up married for 64 years, I never realized how hard Ken had to work for his prize.

Gladys was not only an independent woman but also a year older than Ken. At Walla Walla high school (Wa-Hi) in Washington State, they graduated together. But he was young (albeit brilliant), graduating at age 16, so still looked like a mere boy.

They were then buddies at the University of Washington, in Seattle. When Gladys graduated in 1919 and began working as a physical education teacher (including in San Diego, CA), Ken patiently and persistently wrote her. He was so eager to tell her about his job offer in India he wrote her on the train only hours out from Seattle on his way to the East Coast for special training before boarding the steamship to Madras.

When I first discovered their letters, I read them out of order and wrongly assumed he was not terribly romantic. But later I realized he had to woo her for a long time while she thought of him only as a friend. It’s awfully cute seeing the progression of the letters in order.

It was after he began writing his letters about life in India (see Ken in the Raj) that he finally grabbed her interest. In 1925 he came back to the USA to for a home leave to visit her, and she was startled by how he’d grown into such a handsome man “with a very fine mustache”. Once he knew he’d finally caught her interest romantically, he immediately proposed! Within the year she boarded a steamship herself, with her wedding dress.

You may recall this note he passed across their house to her after they’d been married three years:

You know I’d give you anything on earth you wanted, so here’s a letter since you wanted one. But what can I say? Except that I love you, and you already know that, and besides no letter can tell you that as my lips and arms and all can. ~ Ken, in his letter Dearest Funny Baby

I think Prutha’s interest in the people behind this story revealed that no matter what culture we live in, our hearts all beat the same. We all share a common interest in our ancestors and how they impact us, and curiosity about what draws people to each other.

Want to read Gladys and Ken’s fun and wild India stories? Click the Jungle Diaries tab to see all stories posted so far, and SUBSCRIBE to see future ones!

See Prutha’s article:

American Author Traces Her Ancestors Love Story Through Letters: A North Carolina-based author relies on a trunk full of letters from 1920s India and Google Earth to reconstruct a love story of her ancestors for an upcoming book ~ by Prutha Bhosle