A LOST ART — California resident Vince Marant is hoping someone reading his story will be able to provide any contact information for Claudia Lynn Henry, a former Steubenville woman who wrote him several letters while he was serving in Vietnam. Henry was a student at Kent State University and found Marant’s name on a GI list posted to a bulletin board at the school. Her words made all the difference to him, bringing him a piece of home and a peace of mind right when he needed it most. -- Contributed

STEUBENVILLE — Vince Maranto is waiting. He has been waiting since 1969.

For more than half a century, he has been wondering … questioning if the day will ever come.

But with every passing year, his attempts have been futile. That is why he is turning to the Ohio Valley in the hope that someone from the Steubenville area will perhaps be able to put an end to a story that began long ago.

The 76-year-old Tustin, Calif., man is pleading with the public for any contact information they may have regarding a former Steubenville woman by the name of Claudia Lynn Henry.

No, this isn’t a long, lost love story. Nor is it a branch in his family tree who is being sought.

FADED, YELLOWED LETTERS HOLD SPECIAL MEANING — Vince Marant served in the Marines during the Vietnam War. While fighting overseas, he received letters from a young college girl he had never met. Now, 56 years later, with limited resources and dealing with health issues, Marant is asking the Ohio Valley for help in located that student, Claudia Lynn Henry of Steubenville. Records indicate she resides in Fort Pierce, Fla., however phone numbers are not valid. His hope is to thank her or her family members to let them know just how much those letters meant to him all those years ago. -- Contributed

You see, this is something else entirely. This is someone whom he has never been able to forget for the past 56 years.

But first … we have to start at the beginning.

The year was 1969. Maranto was serving as a Marine in the Vietnam War. One day, he was handed a letter addressed from someone in the United States. Someone he had never met. Her name was Claudia Lynn Henry and she was a student attending Kent State University in Kent, Ohio.

Upon opening the piece of mail dated March 10, 1969, Maranto began carefully reading the words penned on the sheets of paper. “Hi Vince,” the letter began. “Well, I really don’t know quite how to begin. I’ve never sat down and tried to write a letter to someone I don’t know before.” She provided her name, noted she was a junior at Kent and relayed she was a childhood education major.

“I saw your name along with several other Marines’ names,” she continued, “and after passing the list, posted at the dorm desk for about three days, I decided to write. I picked you to write to simply because I like your name. Since I don’t know anything about you, I’ll just write about a little of everything and anything.”

And she did. She said she knew he was from Louisiana from that posting on the bulletin board put up for students to write to soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War. She claimed she didn’t know much about geography, so she stuck to the topic of Ohio. Henry wrote about the outbreak going on at the college during that time. About how art students were demonstrating, demanding better facilities. She relayed how the art students decided to set fire to a wooden ROTC building that had been converted to an art building at 1:30 a.m. that week, causing approximately $3,000 in damages. She talked of finals and studying, going home to Steubenville for spring break and wanting to go to Florida but being “too broke.”

She discussed the weather and described what she looked like, being as how she did not have a photograph to enclose.

Henry penned things she enjoyed doing, looking for common ground. She mentioned anything from an Alfred Hitchcock thriller to a Julie Andrews musical were the films she liked. She loved sports of all kinds and noted she had a brother who was a junior playing football for Steubenville Big Red. She told Maranto music was a huge part of who she was and included her favorites were the 5th Dimension, Glen Campbell, Jose’ Feliciano and Andy Williams. She ended the letter with a poem about the ocean.

She ended almost every letter she sent to the Vietnam soldier with a poem.

Maranto wrote back to Henry following that initial first letter. And before long, the two were corresponding a couple of times a month for several months during that year in 1969.

So why, after all this time, is Maranto searching for Henry?

It’s simple. His children were grown, his wife of 40 years had lost her “courageous, but futile battle with the scourge of cancer” and it was time to clean out the family’s storage facility. Amid the toys and holiday decorations, the framed photos and fishing equipment, sat an olive drab footlocker.

For the first time in 40 years, he lifted its lid, the top tray containing war photos and mementos. Upon lifting the tray, he found at the bottom his uniform adorned with ribbons and medals. Beneath the uniform, he located what he was looking for … a packet of letters, yellowed with age and tied together with a green boot lace.

“Why I held on to these letters all these years only God knows, for they were written by a person I have never met,” Maranto explained. “Yet, they were inspiring and informative, honest and revealing, fun and upbeat and were written to me at a time I so desperately needed all of the above.”

Maranto continued about the art of letter writing, saying how it is “slowly and inevitably giving way to the electronic and digital age.”

“For centuries, mankind — with pen and paper in hand — has recorded historical events, argued points of view, extended invitations and announcements, conveyed plans and ideas, expressed joy and happiness, sorrow and tragedy, hopes and fears. We also shared our most personal thoughts and feelings. And in some cases, fell in love with those words on paper, or perhaps the people who wrote them.”

“With all the activities and demands in the life of a young college student, Lynn took the time and effort to lift the spirits of a young Marine fighting thousands of miles away,” Maranto commented. “A Marine that she had never met.”

The letters continued from May through September.

On May 2, 1969, Lynn wrote to her newfound friend about her family’s plan to go to Florida for two weeks and how she was looking forward to trying her hand at surfing, as she was excited because of her love for the ocean.

“After we get home from our vacation, I’ll be working for the rest of the summer,” she wrote. “For the past two summers and again this summer, I’ll be working at Beneficial Finance Co. in Steubenville. I work as a secretary. It’s really enjoyable because the people in the office are really great.” She closed that letter with, “I hope this letter achieved its original purpose of cheering up your day,” followed by another poem.

In a letter dated July 3, 1969, Henry wrote of the following day being the Fourth of July. Her family would be visiting an area lake and she hoped to learn how to ski. “Nevertheless, don’t think I’m forgetting what is going on on the other side of the world on July 4, and what you’re doing,” she added in the letter. “Tomorrow — all day — has been designated as a ‘Think of Vince All Day’ day. Then, maybe I’ll feel a little more of the spirit that should prevail when I watch the fireworks’ display tomorrow evening.”

Again, another letter found its way to Maranto dated July 19, 1969.

Her words included, “Well, sometime tomorrow, the astronauts will be stepping down on the moon’s surface. That is almost incomprehensible to me. Cmdr. Aldrin will never be able to explain his feeling when he first steps on the moon. Wow! I guess it is supposed to take place around 10 p.m. tomorrow night. Earlier, it was scheduled for 2 a.m. Monday morning; but since everything was going so smoothly, they decided to move the time for getting out onto the moon by about four hours. Thank heavens. At 2 a.m., I’d never know whether I was seeing the moon or Mars.”

The final letter Maranto received from Henry was dated Sept. 18, 1969. She closed the letter with, “Well Vince, it’s 1:30 a.m. and I think it’s time to turn out the lights. Please, take care … and I’m thinking of you.”

Sitting inside that storage facility in Tustin, combing through that stack of letters tied together with the green boot lace, Maranto’s daughter walked in. She asked if he was alright, then noticed the letters scattered about the footlocker. She retrieved one and asked who Lynn Henry was.

His reply did not come quickly, for he was “struck momentarily” upon hearing and absorbing that name. It was the first time in half a century he heard those two words said out loud.

She noticed all of the letters were from Henry, saying she must have been pretty special, to which he responded, “She was.”

“An old flame? High school sweetheart?” she asked. “Never met her,” he replied.

“You think it’s possible to fall in love with someone you’ve never met?” Maranto asked his daughter. She sat down next to him wanting to know more. He briefly described how their letter-writing relationship began, to which she questioned if they had ever discussed meeting in person.

“Yes, of course, many times,” he stated. “But fate played a hand.”

“What happened?” she asked her father. His reply: “A president’s promise and lost luggage.”

He recalled how Richard Nixon promised in his campaign speech that if elected, he would work to end the war. Once elected, those serving in Vietnam spoke about going home every day for months.

But nothing came of it, Maranto explained, and he was serving a six-month extension in a country he had been in for more than a year. He tried blocking it out of his mind by just doing his job, until one day, a sergeant pulled him aside telling him to pack his gear to go home. Well, Maranto dismissed it as another rumor until a commanding officer told him they were leaving.

“We were told we had 48 hours to pack,” Maranto told his daughter. “Imagine, 48 hours for close to 1,000 men to pack and leave. It was total chaos. However, a joyful chaos. So, we quickly packed our gear as we were told, and loaded it onto trucks to be taken to the air strip for our long trip home. But of course, wishful thinking. We were not coming home.”

Maranto and the others were taken to Okinawa because of concerns things would flare up again in Vietnam and they would be close enough to respond. Their gear did not make the trip and was sent elsewhere … perhaps back to the United States, Maranto thought. His belongings were gone, and with them, his letters from Henry.

He remembered portions of her address, such as Prentice Hall at Kent State. He remembered part of her home address in Steubenville.

And so, he tried sending a letter, explaining what happened. How he was now somewhere else in the world and could not receive mail from his last address.

“I never heard back,” Maranto said inside that storage facility. He recalled in one of Henry’s letters her mentioning she was moving to an apartment during her senior year, so he had hope that the letter would be forwarded to where she had moved.

Another letter was sent to her home address — at least what he could remember of it. He was hoping the post office would match the name to the correct address.

Weeks passed but no letters arrived. Months passed. Still, no letters.

“I was pretty sure she was still writing and hoping her letters would be forwarded, but no such luck,” Maranto said. “It’s only a guess, but at some point, when she stopped receiving my letters, she must have thought something terrible happened to me or I had lost interest. It could be things changed in her life.”

He tried sending a few more letters to her while stationed at the Marine Corps base in Parris Island, S.C., where he finished out his enlistment. Both letters were returned.

“Did you try other ways to contact her?” Maranto’s daughter asked him. “Sure did,” he responded. “I remember one day, I went to the bank, got $20 worth of coins, found a pay phone booth off base and spent hours trying to reach her. But I only got wrong numbers, special operators and folks hanging up on me. I also called Kent State University, but because of privacy laws they would not help. I even considered driving to Steubenville.”

His daughter thought it strange and wondered why it was so difficult to locate her. He explained in those days, social media was not invented and no Internet existed.

Upon being discharged from the service, Maranto had learned his best friend from high school had been killed in an auto accident while he was overseas. During his time of grief, he became close with that friend’s sister.

A year later, he finally received those items which he had packed back in Vietnam, including Lynn’s letters, although some were missing. It had been more than two years since they had communicated. By then, both had continued on with their lives.

“We began this lovely letter writing relationship that was so very important to me at that time in my life,” Maranto stated. “And now, decades later, I want to meet and thank her. I’ve tried locating her with little to no results. I have no idea as to where she lives or, in fact, if she’s still alive. If not, I would want to share my story with her family.”

Maranto wrote to the Herald-Star, asking for help in locating Henry. He stated due to his limited resources and health issues, he is unable to find her on his own.

Newspaper staff searched records and the Internet. An address was found in Fort Pierce, Fla., along with phone numbers and e-mail addresses. However, the numbers were either disconnected or now belonging to somebody else. And the e-mails? Unable to be delivered. Records show her married name is Schmitt, and included the names of her grown children.

Henry did fulfill her college dream of becoming involved in childhood education, as she worked for a while in the Tallmadge School District prior to her and her husband moving to California.

Henry would now be 76 years of age. It is unknown if she still has any family living in the Steubenville area, or any friends whom she attended school with residing locally.

Anyone who can provide information, can contact Maranto through e-mail at jmara10349@aol.com.

It is not known whether Henry remembers how she wrote to a Vietnam soldier during her junior year at Kent State back in 1969, whose name she selected from a GI list on a bulletin board, simply because she liked his name.

It is unknown if perhaps she, too, saved his letters in a special place or if she revisits them from time to time.

And it is not known if she truly understands just how much she helped change the mindset of a soldier who needed to hear those pieces of home in order to simply survive the war.

Maranto compares those letters to the song “Angels Among Us,” saying, “She suddenly appeared in my life and unknowingly saw me through the carnage I was experiencing with her wit, humor and kindness. And sadly, just as smoothly as she had entered my life, she gracefully vanished.”

“You know, it just occurred to me … perhaps she moved on because her task was completed,” he concluded. “But I’ve never forgotten her, especially that first letter. I always said that one day, I’m going to find her and thank her. She provided a comfort zone when all around me was violence, confusion and grief.”

But until that day comes, until that moment arrives when this Vietnam veteran can actually say the words “thank you,” to the girl who got him through one of his life’s most difficult times … he will continue to wonder.

He will continue to wait.

(Stenger can be contacted at jstenger@heraldstaronline.com.)