Paul Eakin

Courting Katharine Paul Eakin

Courting Katharine is a story of two people - my grandparents - learning about one another and falling in love. Through their letters to one another you will vividly experience what it was like to live in the early 1920s in America. Katharine was a high-spirited, young woman, one of the first woman to go to Berkley. She was a Suffragette, and the youngest daughter from a well-to-do family from Monmouth, Ill. Sam was the son of an early oilman and farmer in Pennsylvania, relocated to Jerome, Idaho with most of the family when the canals were built and cheap farmland was available in southern Idaho. Sam fell in love at first sight, and kept almost all of her letters from the first. Katharine thought of him just as a good friend - until one special night. And from that moment on they are almost always separated from each other. Sam is working as a farm hand with a knack for fixing those new-fangled tractors and cars, while Katharine takes a teaching job in Manhattan, Kansas. Their only link are the letters they write to each other. Katharine pours her heart out into her letters, describing her world and the people in it with a passion and detail that is breathtaking. They both give amazing descriptions of the way life was almost a century ago. Courting Katharine is simply this: Sam and Katharine falling in love.