WEST SALEM – As author Dandi Daley Mackall settles onto the couch in her library, her excitement about her new book is written all over her face. While most authors are eager to talk about their latest project, Mackall’s most recent release carries an extra helping of emotional weight and reason for joy that the story has finally been told.
The weathered trunk — “Lt. Frank R. Daley” stenciled in white on its battered emerald front – sitting on the library floor in front of the brick fireplace holds a story that Mackall has been waiting more than 20 years to tell.
“With Love, Wherever You Are,” released Tuesday through Tyndale House, tells the story of how Mackall’s parents met during World War II – an intensely personal story that has taken her some time to sift through as she prepares it for the rest of the world to read.
Inside that 70-plus-year-old trunk are hundreds of yellowed envelopes, each one holding a treasured memento of days long gone by. Written on the pages within those envelopes are more than 600 letters Mackall’s parents exchanged when they both were stationed overseas during World War II.
Mackall’s father, Lt. Frank Daley, was a doctor who served in several different places in Europe. Her mother, Helen Eberhart Daley, was a Red Cross nurse who served at a makeshift hospital in France that housed German POWs, along with injured Allied soldiers.
Even before Mackall knew about the letters, she knew that she wanted to tell the story of how her parents met and their experiences in Europe during World War II, so she recorded her father telling her the stories.
“He talked them onto cassette tapes. I had like 20 of them,” Mackall said. “But after he died, it took me a couple of years before I could listen to them.”
Before her father passed away at age 78 in 1996, he told his daughter about his old Army trunk that he wanted her to take home to Ohio. He told her about the letters but made her promise not to open them until her mother had also passed away.
“Your mom is embarrassed by how mushy our letters were and how many secrets they hold. She’d burn those letters, and I wouldn’t want that,” Mackall’s dad told her.
Mackall did as her father asked, gathering the trunk from the attic in the Missouri home where her parents had spent their entire married life, and she hauled it back to Ohio, where it sat unopened.
Her mother passed away in 2011 after spending the last five years of her life living in Ohio with Dandi.
“That was the best five years I had with her,” Mackall said.
“She was loaded with stories, but we didn’t mention those letters,” Mackall said. “Neither of us mentioned it, but she knew, and I knew and we knew that we knew.”
Mackall had started researching World War II in preparation to write her parent’s story long before she opened the trunk. One day, she was talking with her mother while they were playing cards and she was trying to nail down the date something happened in 1944. Her mother’s memory was not aligning with what Mackall’s research had uncovered so both were starting to get frustrated. Dandi’s mom slapped the cards down and said, “Well, Dandi. Just look at the letters.”
After the awkward silence passed, the pair finished their card game and then Mackall did just that – she opened the trunk.
Inside, she found the hundreds of letters, some bundled together with boot strings, others loose in the trunk among the pile o papers. She also found other items, including several medals her parents had received.
Mackall said she had several “false starts” as she started reading through the letters because the emotions unveiled through her parent’s correspondence was so real and raw.
“It was so hard, because I had this trunk full of letters,” Mackall said. “So the first thing I did was I started reading through those which took a lot of time. I couldn’t do it solidly because I would get teary, and upset. So I interspersed it with reading World War II books and doing research and taking notes on the events, trying to get the timeline right and learn more about where they were.”
After reading through the letters and continuing her study of the time period, she started to write down her parent’s stories.
“But it was episodic, not a story like a novel has to be,” Mackall said.
Her former editor, Karen Watson, who is now Publisher of Fiction at Tyndale House, and her father-in-law kept spurring her to tell her parents’ story.
“There was just one day when I decided, do it or don’t. And I decided I would do it,” Mackall said. “So from then I told myself I’m just doing it for our family, so that means I don’t have to shape it. I can put it anybody I want. I have a ton of characters. That story was almost 1,000 pages.”
Watson asked Mackall to send her the mammoth manuscript in spite of its rough state. She said she was headed on vacation and would read it on the beach.
“She wrote back and said, ’I just want you to know we are very interested’ and then she said, ‘But now you need to go back and write about Helen and Frank instead of mom and dad.’ So I discovered them,” Mackall said.
As she went back through her story and started to trim, a process which took two years to complete, several characters fell by the wayside, including several uncles whose stories she had included. Five of her mother’s brothers fought in World War II.
After years of trimming and editing and rewriting, Mackall finally had a finished product, which brought a huge sense of relief, but left her wondering if anyone else would want to read her parent’s love story.
“I was so close to it that when I finished, I honestly didn’t know if it was really good or if it was only good to family and horrible to everybody else,” Mackall said. “I’ve never completely felt like that with a book before.”
After completing the novel nearly a year ago, Mackall had to wait to see how her story would be perceived by the reading public, a process the author called “very nerve-wracking.”
“The first review we got in was a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly and the next is Booklist we just got this week and it was a star so I thought, ‘Maybe this isn’t just for our family,” the author said.
“I’ve never had this much marketing and publicity push from a publisher,” Mackall said.
Mackall said she had to do very little fictionalization to tell the story.
“The most outrageous scenes in the book, they actually happened just like that. And I know because I heard them since I was a toddler and I always asked for them over and over. So I even had dialogue,” Mackall said. “But we have to call it fiction when you have dialogue and thoughts. Because how do I know really – I have the letters that tell me some of the stuff they were thinking.”
Mackall recounts the story of how her parents met with an ease born from hearing the tale countless times from the people who lived it. After writing her book about her parents, she easily refers to them by their first names – Helen and Frank – instead of calling them mom and dad.
Helen was a nurse at a hospital for well-off women who were pregnant. The women would come to the hospital a few weeks before giving birth to be pampered and stay several weeks after for similar treatment.
“She came from very hard stock where her mother birthed her babies on the kitchen table and then rose to give everybody breakfast,” Mackall said with a laugh.
One day, not long after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Helen had enough of dealing with the rude patients at the hospital so she quit her job and decided to join the American Red Cross.
“She really did it because of her brothers, I think. She thought about them not having a nurse if they got injured,” Mackall said.
Frank Daley was a fun-loving, very handsome guy, Mackall said. He was in medical school when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Although he and his classmates had signed up for deferments, he was called to basic training soon after graduation.
Frank ended up at a hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan, where he was put in charge of the disease ward. A few weeks later, Helen arrived at the hospital for her training. She arrived on Easter morning and discovered she was the Head Nurse for the amputee ward o the hospital.
“Helen straightened her uniform and opened these double doors and looked in and every single bed, and there were a lot of them, were rigged up like puppets with no one to pull the strings,” Mackall said, choking back emotions. “She looked around and couldn’t stand it. So she just closed the door and ran down the hall to a bathroom.”
Helen splashed some water on her face and cried for the first time she could remember. But she quickly gathered her composure and went back out to face her patients again. As she was leaving the bathroom, she literally ran into Frank Daley, who was trying to go into the bathroom. In her haste, Helen had accidentally entered the men’s room.
“So that was their first meeting,” Mackall said.
Helen “wanted nothing to do with any of those guys,” but Frank was smitten from their first encounter. So he continued to patiently pursue her. A few weeks later, Frank was sent away to prepare to be sent to Europe without being able to tell Helen that he was leaving. Desperate to reach his beloved, Frank risked a late-night, clandestine phone call to ask Helen to marry him.
“And then there was this dead silence. He thought maybe they got cut off. But the next thing she said was, ‘Are you out of your mind?’” Mackall said with a laugh.
They quickly got married before being sent their separate ways by Uncle Sam. Through the use of coded letters – a few of which are included in the book – the pair was able to meet up for some clandestine rendezvous, including one in a hidden room underneath a barn owned by French resistance fighters.
Mackall said it has been a privilege to get to know her parents in a way she never had before.
“I always knew they loved each other like crazy, but to see that going back and forth and some of the stuff they went through, it explained why my mom was so tough. And dad, too,” Mackall said.
Mackall, mother of three and grandmother of three, spends 8-10 hours a day writing or rewriting. She also records thoughts or notes as she walks the 5-mile trek around the lake in her community.
“When we first moved here, people out here referred to me as ‘that lady who talks to herself as she walks around the lake,’” Mackall said.
Mackall has written nearly 500 books in her more than 35 years as a published author. Her early works were novels written for adults. Once she had kids, she started writing books that were appropriate for their ages, and she has continued to write books for all ages.
Mackall will appear at 7 p.m. Friday at the Ashland Public Library to host a book launch party for “With Love, Wherever You Are.” The event is planned in conjunction with the Ashland County Historical Society and the Ashland University Campus Bookstore. Copies of the book will be available for purchase and Mackall will be reading excerpts and signing autographs.
Because the event takes place after regular business hours, guests must register with the library by calling 419-289-8188 or visiting the library website, www.ashland.lib.oh.us.
