By Thelma Taylor

"I told my brother I thought I would pop the question if things looked good," Conrad King, the Pleasant NM, Louisiana native said before his visit to Cynthiana to see Dorothy Jenkins, the girl he had romanced by mail.

My brother said, "You have always been a good judge of character. I guess you'll do all right but don't forget - you can always back out." With this brotherly advice, King came to Cynthiana in the spring of 1943 to meet a 98 pound Kentucky belle that he only knew through letters.

King loved to tell how the courtship took place. He was in a hospital. One lonely Sunday afternoon he asked a fellow soldier from Kentucky if he knew a good looking girl he could write to. The soldier said, "I sure do," and gave him Dorothy's address.

The first letter went something like this…..."Are you wondering how I got your address? If you will answer my letter, I'll tell you. It gets awfully lonesome here in the hospital and a few words from you would mean a lot to me.

"I am six feet tall and weight 170 pounds. I have blue eyes and brown curly hair (kinky). I am single and as homely and lonely as can be. I have been in the hospital two months. "

Dorothy didn't know whether to answer his letter or not. Finally, she let her mother read it. She said, "Answer it. He's just a lonely soldier." Dorothy let her mother read the letters at first. She said the whole neighborhood read them.

"The courtship was a community affair," Dorothy explained. Dorothy's family had a party line telephone. "When I called," Conrad said, "You never heard such clicking. Everybody listened." He sent a recording and all the girls in the neighborhood listened to it.

When Conrad got a furlough, he headed for Cynthiana. He really liked what he saw. He asked permission to take his new-found love to Louisiana to meet his family. He wanted to get married during that furlough because he said he knew there were other lonely soldiers out there wanting addresses of girls.

Dorothy said, "People around here thought it was terrible that I married a 'strange boy' but I could not have done better." When they were first married, they lived in Louisiana where Conrad secured a good job at Firestone Rubber Company. Her mother became ill and they came to Cynthiana to take care of her.

"You couldn’t buy a job in Cynthiana at that time," Conrad said. He did some research and found that there were very few men here trained to work in refrigeration. He took training at Chicago Commercial Institute and received the highest grade ever made at the school but that meant nothing to the small town of Cynthiana.

"Cynthiana was the most clannish town I was ever in. It was rough building a business. First I had to be accepted. Then I had to build a reputation for my work. Suddenly things changed. I started out in major appliance repair and had to narrow it down to refrigerators and air conditioning. I was still busy all the time," Conrad said.

The Louisiana native had seen snow but he had never worked in it. During his first winter working in Cynthiana, snow began to fall. Stanley Maffett told him to go outside and remove a leaky tank. He came back without the tank. Maffett asked what the problem was. Conrad said, "It's snowing out there!"

The couple lived on Church Street in Cynthiana until their death. They were in sight of the Baptist Church they attended. They were involved in civic and community work. They wanted a community center in the town.

Conrad said of his long life with the love of his life in Cynthiana, "I go back to Louisiana to visit my people but Cynthiana is my home." They had one daughter, Cathy. She buried them together in his adopted town.