LOVE
How a romance blossomed at WWU across time and distance BY ALEX AAMODT
LETTERS
I
T WAS ONLY because he had to clean out his garage a few months ago that Dr. Elmar Sakala ’65 found the letters, forgotten in a dusty box, untouched for years. He and his wife, Darilee ’69, were busy preparing to leave on a trip, yet the letters stopped him in his tracks. “Elmar would come to me and say, ‘You’ve got to listen to this letter! Listen to what you wrote!’” Darilee remembers. Over the next several days Elmar kept opening more and more of the letters and reading them to Darilee as they went about their daily work, the memories continuing to flood back from 50 years previous, when their lives lacked the stabil-
Elmar and Darilee Sakala found a bundle of long-lost letters in their Loma Linda, Calif., garage.
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Westwind Fall 2016
photographs by CHET WILLIAMS