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http://denver.yourhub.com/Centennial...ry~370828.aspx

Contributed by: Kevin Hamm/YourHub.com on 10/2/2007

In March 1945, World War II still raged in Europe. Germany was making its last stand. V-E day was two months away, and German forces were still fighting fiercely.

At Thorpe Abbots airfield on the southeast coast of England, U.S. Air Force Cpl. John Backus was working to keep the B-17 bombers of the "Bloody Hundredth" group flying for their missions over Germany, all the while watching for German air attacks.

"At 0345 an explosion some distance away, shook me, and immediately afterwards a buzz-bomb flew over - you can't mistake that noise," he wrote in his diary on March 22, 1945. "Must have been on its way toward London. When I got up at 0700, there were 3 fresh vapor trails in the sky left by rockets (V2). Anyhow, this is mild compared to what the Germans are getting every day."

Back home in Tulsa, Okla., Backus' wife Katherine was working long hours as a secretary at the Stanolind Oil Purchasing Company, taking care of the family's affairs while looking for a new apartment, and treating herself to a pair of "very impractical red kid sling pumps," as she wrote in a letter to her husband.

"It has been so long since I bought a pair of devilish shoes that I just couldn't resist these," she wrote. "However, I wish you could hurry home, as I really want to save them for you."

The letters and diary entries have been collected in a book titled We Just Did: The World War II Letters & Diary of John & Katherine Backus. The book was edited and published in 2006 by Centennial resident CJ Backus, John and Katherine's daughter.

CJ didn't know about the letters and diary until she found them in her father's dresser drawer while putting away his laundry a few months before he died in March 2002. At that point he was 94, and the time had passed when they could have talked about them.

"I had missed my window of when we could really have had this conversation," she said. "If he'd been on his game he would have said, 'Put those back and don't touch them.'"

"Grubbing," she said he would have called it, his term for going through people's things without asking first.

CJ's mother died in October 1991, and even after she died her father never said anything about the letters. CJ had heard many of the stories while growing up - the shared stories of a family's history - but reading the letters and diary gave her insight into who John and Katherine Backus were as people, rather than just as parents as their children see them.

"It taught me who they were before we were born," CJ said. "That they were a man and a wife and they found love."

John was the storyteller in the family, and hearing the family stories told in her mother's voice in her letters gave them a fresh perspective, CJ said. She often asked her mother what they did during the war - to go beyond the family stories - but she always got the same answer.

"We just did," her mother would tell her, adding that CJ's generation talks too much about everything, CJ said.

CJ was motivated to put the book together to honor her parents, she said, and to tell the story of the war from the perspective of not only the men fighting in it, but the women back home who were doing things that traditionally were a man's responsibility, such as selling a car as well.

"It tells you what the women were doing and her viewpoint, and it's not all blood and guts," she said. "She was a really strong woman but she acquiesced because of the time, but here she is selling a car and keeping things going and doing well in her job. She missed the point sometimes about how advanced she was."

Now that she's done with the book, CJ, a retired teacher and school administrator, and member of the Columbine Genealogical and Historical Society, plans to start a small business to market and sell it, as well as do research for other people, especially genealogical research.

For her, becoming so intimate with the letters her parents wrote while separated during the war reinforced what she knew all along, she said - that she grew up in a loving family.

"The biggest thing was just their terms of endearment back and forth and how much they loved each other, how much they missed each other," she said. "It just cemented why we had a nice life."