Vintage Love

Vintage Love

CAROLINE PRESTON ’75

HOLLYWOOD’S WW II LOVE STORIES TYPICALLY END IN TRAGEDY or a happy reunion. But in reality? “It’s much more nuanced,” says Preston.

Her graphic novel tells a wartime love tale that keeps readers guessing with plenty of twists and turns. Its narrative unfolds in a colorful scrapbook kept by Lila Jerome, the bride of dashing Army engineer Perry Weld, who is off fighting in Europe.

On each page, snippets of the narrator’s diarystyle commentary appear with photos of 1940s ephemera such as magazine ads, travel postcards, stamps, war bonds, fabric swatches, uniform patches, and military stationery. Preston, a retired archivist, found some items, such as a 1946 Chevy owner’s manual, online. “You can find anything on eBay,” she tells DAM.

Without resorting to any digital wizardry such as Photoshopping images, she artfully assembled each page’s cut-outs by hand, scanned them, and sent them to the printer. She includes postcards that G.I.s sent home from newly liberated Paris and a mass-produced map that listeners to FDR’s Fireside talks used to pin-point his descriptions of the ebb and flow of battles. “I have areal appreciation for stories contained in old things,” says Preston, who admits to being a lifelong collector of historical ephemera.

The inspiration for War Bride came from Preston’s aunt, a Vassar dropout who wed a boyfriend she hardly knew just before the war began. They later divorced. To research her book, Preston attended war reenactments and visited Normandy beaches and a Charlottesville, Virginia, history buff who had transformed his basement into a home-front museum. She also scoured Ladies’ Home Journal and other wartime women’s magazines for fashion tips and advice columns that told readers how to be “good” wives while their husbands were away at war. Not surprisingly, Preston has amassed a collection ofWW II scrapbooks. After the war, many women stuffed them into attics and forgot about them. “They’re a really interesting study of what was happening on the home front and in women’s lives,” she says.

Betsy Vereckey