JAYHAWK REBOUNDS
Noe 11
September 12, 1944
Dear Fellow Jayhawkers:

Somehow this ig the most difficult letter that I have ever attempted to
write, Over a dozen times I have begun it and each time I have walked away from
my desk because words fail meg I feel such a void, Something has gone from me.
Your friend and mine © good, old honest “Teep", T. P. Hunter (1st Lt. 9th Marines)
was killed on Guam, July 21, 1944, And yet this morning he feels closer to me
than at any moment that I have known him, Across the miles that span Lawrence,
Kansas, and Guem, it seems so trivial. This thing we call death has brought him
closer to me at this very moment than he has been for years. The glories of his
life seem magnified a hundredfold. ?

A Chinese philosopher once said, "Life seems so unreal at times that I do
not know whether I am living dreams or dreaming life." The life here and the
life hereafter seem so much a part of all of us that T. Pe's presence is manifest.
He will live forever in our hearts, What more love can a man have that he lay
down his life for his friend? But T. Pe, being the man that he was, would em
brace for his friends the thought of Lord Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar":

-- Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me!

And may there be no meaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

Charles Frohman, the great playwright, facing death while standing on the
deck of the ginking Lusitania and watching women and children tding his place
in the lifeboats, said, "Death is life's greatest adventure."

On August 17, Te Pets sister-in-law called Mrs. Allen from Tulsa conveying .
to us the sad news. I was in Boone, Iowa, conducting a coaching school for the
Iowa State High School Athletic Association, and did not learn of T. P.‘s death
until Sunday, August 20—¢ Somehow I could not believe it, because I felt that
after T. P. had been in Guadalemal, Bougainville - in fact, all of the tough
Marine engagements, that he would make it.

In T. Pots letter to me on January 1, 1944, you Rebounders will recall that
he stated, "Thought you might like to know a little about our game with the Japs
on Bougainville, Well, everything was going fine until they got me and my boys
in a hot boxe I thought for a while they were going to call in the outfielders
to get us oute Fortunately for us, RAPHE we got out before they had times"

Te Pe was our outstanding pitcher in his senior year and his baseball dicaiic
inology fit most aptly into this very difficult situation, T. Pe continued, in
his January lst letter, by saying, "I have called it a game, Doc, and to me that
is just about how it seemed. The same is true for most of the boys that return.
The bad part of the whole wer is these boys who have to give their lives to wine