To Pat Bird, Ipana Toothpaste Girl (1942)
You sent a package to a soldier in Iran
with shaving cream, a razor, comb, shampoo,
your picture, happy faced, with brightest smile.
Ipana Girl in magazines you're called
for all the world to see but mine was very special,
it was just for me. I wrote to her, how beautiful,
your skin so soft, your teeth so gleaming white.
I stowed it in my wallet, carried it for years.
Time passed me by, for sixty years I thought
of her, remembering what life might have been.
She's Mrs. Allen now and died three years ago,
too late to tell her through the years how much
the shaving cream, the razor, comb, shampoo
the picture in my wallet meant to me.
BIO: I have lived in Long Beach, California for forty-five years, studying under
Frank Gaspar and Bill Johnson. I won the prized Drury award for poetry in
2005. Eleven poems were published in Spring Harvest, California Polytechnic
University, years 1989 through 1994 and I studied painting at Long Beach
City College for twenty years.
I was born in Zenoria, Louisiana in 1921, graduated from Trout Goodpine
High School in 1941, attended Louisiana Tech and Louisiana State University, spent three years in
US Army in 1942 - 1945.
I lived on Funny Louis Creek in Searcy, six miles from Trout, Louisiana.
Most of my writings have traced my memorable years from boy to man on Funny
Louis Creek. Those were memorable times, out of sync with living of today,
a simpler, more thoughtful time.
I worked as a procurement agent for the Department of Defense, Armed Forces
Radio and Television Service, Hollywood, California and retired in 1986.
