SATEAWE. BRR OUS DS
September 12, 1944

Nos ii

Dear Fellow Jayhawkers:

Somehow this is 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 me. I feel such a void. Something has gone from me.
Your friend and mine - good, old honest "Teep", T. P. Hunter (lst 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 Guam, it seems so trivial. This thing we cail death nas brought him
closer to me at this very moment than he has been for years. The glories of his
life seem magnified a hundred-fold.

A Chinese philosopher once said, “Life seems so unreal attimes 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. P.'s precence 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. P., 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 moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea.

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

On August 17, T. P.'s sister-in-law called Mrs. Allen from Tulsa conveying
to us the sad newse 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 guadalcanal, Bougainville - in fact, all of the tough
Marine engagements, that he would make it.

In T. P.'s letter to me on Januarty 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 box. I thought for a while they were going to call in the outfielders
to get us out. Fortunately for us, however, we got out before they had time."

T. Pe was our outstanding pitcher in his senior year and his baseball term-
inology fit most aptly into this very difficult situation. T. P. 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 istrue for most of the boys that return.
The bad part of the whole war is these boys who have to give their lives to win.
"IT had some of those and for them it must have been more than a game." .. -

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