Dear Folks,

We’re through and had our squadron party last night (mine was the prettiest girl present), but still no orders come in for us instructors. Rather than apply for leave now from the local authorities, I think I’ll request a delay in carrying out the orders, when they come, to count as leave so that if all goes well, I won’t have to come back here after going home. It looks now as if it would definitely be the east coast and probably for at least a short while, Norfolk. There the squadron might be officially commissioned, though checking out in whatever planes we’re to get might be elsewhere in the East, and if we get a new flat-top, it might be somewhere else still. Pacific duty eventually (via Panama Canal?) is still of course most likely. It would be satisfying, however, to have a hand in the other scrap before it’s over, though I don’t know how much we could accomplish without great risk of being sunk that land planes couldn’t do.

To-day naturally has been free for me and happened to be also for Russ Keller, who returned the other day unexpectedly early. We spent a very pleasant afternoon on the beach, then after carefully avoiding Sunday night supper here by staying in town for that meal, went to a touching movie, “Lassie Come Home.”

I’m sort of hoping to get two more days off and work in one final trip, a wild scheme for borrowing a navy rubber boat and somehow launching it west of Melbourne on the St. John’s River and reaching a point west of Cocoa the end of the first day and one west of Titusville after the second all of course downstream but north, all this taking shape as yet only in my mind.

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