In Ava, Missouri, Mrs. Hutchinson walked into the office of the Douglas County Herald with a request that surprised the editor. She asked them to stop sending her the papers. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to read the news, she read every line about the war as closely as any mother with a son in uniform. Her worries were different. She had been faithfully forwarding the paper to her boy, Fireman Second Class E.E. Hutchinson, serving on a submarine somewhere in the South Pacific. But letters had been few, and she had no way of knowing if the papers ever reached him. More than once, she wondered if stacks of unread issues were piling up in some forgotten postal bag while her son remained cut off from the world back home. In the end, she decided there was no sense in continuing the subscription if she couldn’t be sure he was receiving them.