Letters From India

My father, Eddy Custer '43, joined the American Field Service immediately after graduation and spent a year serving in India as an ambulance driver and company clerk. Throughout his travels, he wrote lengthy letters to his parents and to his older brother Tom (AOF '36). Tom's daughter Barbara recently came across a cache of these letters and sent them to my brother. In many ways, these letters are typical of any young man off to war - filled with yearning for home, affection for loved ones, stories of the wonders and the tedium of travel and then service, and constant entreaties to write letters.

This embroidered seal accompanied the letters

For some reason, it had not occurred to me until I read these letters that the "home" for which Dad was pining as he started his journey would be gone by the time he returned. In the fall of '43, there was no inkling that Avon would not go on forever, and he mentions the excellence of the fare in the Refectory and Chef Candles' magnificent Thanksgiving feast among the many things he missed.
By the time Dad returned from India, the school would be closed, and his parents would no longer live in the Diogenes apartment where he grew up. He learned of the school's fate in a March, 1944 TIME Magazine article. In May, he wrote "I still can't believe Avon is closing. It seems like a fantastic nightmare." Later in the month: "I disagree with you that there are other places in this world equally nice. Any school after Avon will seem grim to me..."