“You are so lovely, darling, that I often wonder how it is possible that you are mine. I'm really the luckiest guy in the world, you know. And you are the reason.”
Bill Moore of Aurora, Colorado, wrote these words 70 years ago. He was a 20-year-old soldier fighting in World War II in Patton’s Third Army, and he was writing a letter to the woman he would later marry, his beloved Bernadean.
Moore, now 90, was recently reunited with this decades-old love letter after a stranger found it by chance. As he read the words aloud -- a beautiful moment captured in a KMGH-TV video -- he could barely keep his emotions in check.
“My darling, lovable, alluring Bernadean,” Moore read, tears leaking from his eyes.
Bernadean died in 2010. She and Moore were married for 63 years, and had three children together.
“I loved her, and she loved me,” the WWII vet told KMGH. “That's all I can tell you. It’s a heartache not being with her all the time.”
According to CBS News, Moore’s letter to Bernadean was found serendipitously by Ilene Ortiz of Westminster, Colorado, who discovered the note in a vinyl record that she’d bought at a local thrift shop.
Ortiz reportedly enlisted the help of a local news channel to find the author of the letter. She was eventually connected with Melina Gale, one of Moore’s kids.
"I can't believe Ilene found this," Gale told CBS. "Most of [my parents’] dating was through letters in the war. And that was the one thing I remember her talking about. It meant everything to get that letter. And we can't find them. So this is the only original we would have."
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