A love story

Betty Eckhoff first laid eyes on Gordon Evans one September day in 1942 in her freshman English class at Dorsey High School in Los Angeles. She saw his shock of black hair and knew immediately she wanted him.

Betty was already well beyond her years in maturity. She was a beautiful, bright-faced 15-year-old girl, and somehow she seemed to see a glimpse of her life stretching before her as she looked at the handsome boy across the classroom.

“She was a person throughout her life who knew what she wanted, and she wanted our father,” said Suzanne Evans-Ackerman, Betty and Gordon’s daughter. “…They wanted each other.”

She wasn’t alone in her admiration. Many other girls sought Gordon, but nobody drew him in like Betty. Gordon, who was a year older than Betty, was already a self-possessed young man. He’d left a troubled home in Utah and learned to fend for himself before reuniting with his mother in Los Angeles, where he spent his early teenage summers working in his stepfather’s foundry. He saw in Betty not only an extraordinary beauty, but a seriousness of purpose and a sense of adventure that matched his own.

They fell in love, a love that would soon be mightily tested. Gordon found it impossible to stand by while the United States became more deeply embattled in World War II. He managed to successfully lie about his age and enter the U.S. Marine Corps in September of 1943, rather than finish his senior year of high school. He shipped off to the Pacific theater, where he would take part in some of the bloodiest battles of the war – including Guadalcanal – as an infantryman and expert marksman.

Betty wrote Gordon every single day. Her thoughts never wavered from him, a focus so intense that it troubled some of her family.

“It was being faithful,” said Jeanne Rosen, the youngest of the couple’s three children. “Her friends and even her family would say, ‘Betty Jean, you are young, you are beautiful. Date other men. Go out, you are giving up your youth.’ And she didn’t listen to any of that. She wrote him every day for two years.”

Gordon wrote back when he was able. His letters were unsparing. He described the horrors he witnessed, and more – he drew them. Gordon was already a gifted artist, and he sketched battlefield scenes that were both horrifying and astonishing in their honesty. The letters, in their passionate entirety, were Betty’s lifeline to Gordon.

“It was a real bond,” Rosen said. “And my father, when he wrote those letters back, was illustrating all over them with scenes from the battlefield, and political sarcasm, even at that age, 18 or 19. And then my mom – I just learned this from my aunt this past year, would get these letters and pin them on the wall, and it would give my aunt shivers and nightmares because here are all these gruesome pictures from the war.”

Betty’s sister, Barbara Hall, recalled that sometimes when the family was away from their home, Betty would suddenly insist they return to see if a letter from Gordon had arrived.

She would throw such a fit that her mother would relent. Her father, a sportswriter for the LA Times, would often look at Gordon’s drawings in astonishment.

“Oh my God,” her father would say, according to Hall, as he beheld the artwork. “Gordon has a sensitive soul.”