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Deacon Joe Sleet’s correspondence with the widow Nellie Wallace was full of promise for the future. When they began writing one another in late 1925, Mrs. Wallace had hoped to find a man who would love and care for her as her deceased husband once had. When she placed an ad in the Get Acquainted section of a western magazine and the deacon responded, she believed he was the answer to her heart’s longing. “I’m not a flapper,” her advertisement read, “but I would like to exchange letters with a man between the age of twenty-five and thirty-two. I want a husband good and true, there is a chance it might be you,” the notice concluded.
Twenty-two-year-old Nellie Wallace lived in Tchula, Mississippi, 1,500 miles from Joes Sleet’s home in El Paso, Texas. Of all the letters she received in reply to her ad, Joe’s struck her fancy completely. In a short time Nellie was writing Joe to the exclusion of anyone else. Through his letters she learned that he was a deacon in the Baptist church and that he was a widower. Nellie confided in him that she too was the victim of a sad romance, her husband having died some years ago.
The correspondence was hardly a month old before Joe had been granted permission to call his fair correspondent “Sweetheart.” Another week and respective photographs were exchanged; still another and a row of x’s appeared at the bottom of their letters. Another month passed and more letters were delivered at the Sleet home. In one of those letters Nellie admitted there was a “spark of love aglow” in her heart.
To learn what happened to Deacon Sleet and Nellie Wallace read
Object Matrimony: The Risky Business of Mail-Order Matchmaking on the Western Frontier.
