ALS signed “Geo. S. Patton, Jr.,” four pages on two adjoining sheets, 5.25 x 6.75, West Point letterhead, no date. Patton writes to his mother from West Point. In part: “I am sorry that you will not be here Christmas as I would have enjoyed seeing you and I think you would have liked it but really such hard times would have taken away lots of the fun and shame such on short leave that it is hardly worth while…Beatrice wrote me that if you all did not come I was to stay at Jim’s. This was of course very very nice of her but I think I should have been in the way it is a sad thing that owing to the conventions of society one can never tell when a person means what they say or just do it to be polite in the same way that I drag L. P.s and pretend to enjoy it. I forgot to tell you not to send me Christmas presents but hope you have not for they are really wasted and simply get old in my trunk…I have been wearing short drawers those I had at home and find them fine after the first day or so you are just as warm in any other sort and they are a lot less bother. I am still sleeping under a blanket and have the door and window both open and ice in the bucket such a life is not conducive to fat but makes me more healthy and less a slave to climatic conditions. Buckner has me beaten though for he sleeps under a sheet and when it is very cold throws a…towel over his feet. Here is a tuna club bill, I wish you would pay it [if] you can get any money.” In fine condition.
With a reference to his future wife, Beatrice Banning Ayer (whom he married in 1910) and thoughts of the holidays, this correspondence would make the observer believe that “Old Blood and Guts” was getting along nicely at West Point. In reality, some of his days there were cause for concern. In his first year he failed mathematics and was expelled, but immediately permitted to re-enter with the following class, graduating in 1909. Patton was viewed as a loner, considered to be arrogant and remote, with few friends and a great many detractors. Among his friends, it would seem, was “Buckner”…Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr., a 1908 West Point grad killed by enemy artillery fire in 1945 at the Battle of Okinawa during World War II. Ironically, Patton died the same year as his former classmate, just four days before Christmas, the same holiday he wrote of to his mother. Pre-certified John Reznikoff/PSA/DNA and RRAuction COA.
