There are various pages, some hand written, some typed, of notes by Donn on his life. The hand written ones are very slap-dash stuff that was only meant to jog his memory. Being notes written for himself, they are often completely unreadable. His writing his barely readable at all, but these quick bits are especially rough. Some of it became more extended notes and some was fleshed out into full blown stories. Mostly none of it got finished.

This is a typed set of notes on the war years. A few of these he finished and they mostly ended up in the Bitner biography.

What is so painful here is looking at all this and realizing he only wrote about a tenth of it or less. It is also interesting that the war period was far and away the most documented. He put down a ton of detail here and glossed over much of the rest of his life. I believe it points to how much those times meant to him. How much WWII service and the servicemen meant to him. Using his scrounging and beachcombing skills in service to the country and the weary soldiers was a source of pride.

Imagine if all this was fully written what we might have. Also note item number 31 under Casablanca. I had seen notes about shaving the pig in various places. That story didn’t get written…