This is a warm, wistful, wise love story. Told with the help of hundreds of letters written and cherished through the years, Sealed with a Kiss is a won-derful evocation of love in a simpler time. Bob and Fran met as young teenagers, and as their relation-ship developed from flirtation to infatuation to college romance and finally to marriage, they faithfully confided in each other with frequent letters. This charming snapshot of mid 20th century America is a joy to read, and will touch a cord with the young and the young at heart. I loved it.
—Barbara Morgan, Editor-in-Chief,
Reader's Digest Books, retired
to a local variation on Spin the Bottle), they agree to write. Remarkably, they do, beginning a correspondence that will last for eight years, encompass hundreds of letters, and end with an enduring marriage.
As Bob and Fran move from middle school into high school and college, they never live in the same town or even the same state. Long distance calls are still too expensive to be a relationship staple. Instead, the teenagers’ bond, which begins as friendship and only later deepens into love, is forged through writing.
Describing high school and college, family and friends, home and travel, frustrations and dreams, practical jokes and serious car accidents, companionship and “chemistry,” the letters paint a vivid and unselfconscious picture of two lives in transition from childhood innocence to adult choice.
With its heartfelt story, wealth of nostalgic references, and evocative images of actual letters and cards, Sealed with a Kiss makes both a wonderful read and a touching gift.
In 1957, Bob Zielsdorf is thirteen and living an ordinary middle-class suburban existence in York, Pennsylvania. On a trip to Massachusetts to visit a friend, he meets fourteen-year-old Fran Jordan. Though they spend less than an hour together (admittedly, an hour that includes some innocent kissing, thanks
