They say love never dies, and Virginia Johnson knows this is true.

It’s been 24 years since the love of her life passed away, yet not a day goes by she doesn’t think of him with a fondness that makes her pause and smile.

“He never stopped being a sweetheart,” she said.

Virginia, a Houston, Texas, native who exudes Southern charm, is now 91 and lives in Kalispell. Somewhere, packed away in her boxes of treasures, are the love letters she and her husband, Jim, wrote to one another during World War II.

She recently moved to a new apartment and is still unpacking her daily essentials. There will be time enough later to linger over those letters yet again.

Virginia doesn’t have to read the letters, though, to remember the love that went into them. They were young and very much in love when just three weeks after their marriage Pearl Harbor was attacked on Dec. 7, 1941. The handwriting was on the wall, Virginia said. She knew Jim soon would be headed to war. He was drafted the following April.

For the Johnsons, those letters bound them together when he was in Europe and she was on the home front.

“Before he got on that train I stood in front of him and promised that I would write to him every day, and I did,” she recalled. “The first thing he said to me when he came home on Christmas Eve in 1945 was, ‘You’ll never know what those letters meant to me.’”

Love letters may be a thing of the past these days, when young couples instead are apt to text their love sentiments to one another. But for couples during World War II, they were the glue that held relationships together. They kept soldiers from despairing; they filled the pockets of loneliness for wives who kept the home fires burning.

“It didn’t make any difference what I wrote as long as there was a lot of sweet stuff,” Virginia recalled.

She’d often detail routine moments of the day: their dog barking at birds in the backyard or their toddler son making mischief.

Jim sent letters as often as his schedule allowed. As a medic with the U.S. Army, he rode with the tanks that spearheaded the troops’ movement across southern Germany.

“Some letters from him were censored,” she said. “They’d cut out things that could give away his location.”

Those letters meant the world to Virginia, too.

“There’s no way to describe what it was like to get those letters,” she said.

Virginia was 18 when Jim saw her for the first time. They were in church.

“I went to a certain church in Houston and he went to another church. The pastors decided to merge the two churches,” she remembered. “They made me do a secretary report, so my sister and I wrote up something pretty nice.”

Virginia was wearing a pretty pink hat and a three-tiered powder blue dress when she stood at the podium to deliver her report. When she returned to her seat in the back pew, she saw an attractive man whose gaze was “fixated” on her.

Jim asked her to accompany him to a young people’s meeting at the church and she immediately said yes.

“I had never gone out on a date without my mother’s permission,” she said, recalling how her mother admonished her for being so bold.

“I never asked for her permission again. I married him,” Virginia said with a laugh.

So what was it about young Jim that caught her attention?

“He was perfect material,” she stated. “He was quality all the way, a gentleman, very caring, totally honest. He was the kind of person you can adore.”

Virginia was able to join Jim for a time after he was drafted, first when he was stationed at an Army camp in Arkansas and later at a camp in Oklahoma. Eventually he was shipped overseas. Jim served under Gen. George Patton, and was among the men who helped retrieve priceless works of art stolen by the Nazis and stashed in a salt mine in the Alps.

“It was the highlight of his war experience,” she said.

Virginia plans to see the newly released movie, “Monuments Men” that details that effort to recover the artwork.

Jim, who died in 1990, also got in on one of the most gruesome aspects of the war when his unit was sent to help liberate prisoners at Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Austria.

“He found live people hanging on meat hooks,” she said, explaining how the Nazis systematically extracted the gold from the dying prisoners’ teeth.

“When he came home, something in me told me to be very patient with him,” she said.

Jim would talk about his war experiences every night before they went to sleep, purging himself of the ugliness of war. She listened as those therapeutic conversations went on for about three weeks.

After a trip to Oklahoma to visit his sister, Jim seemed able to put the trauma of war behind him.

He went on to become head of the engineering department at West Virginia University; she worked as a nurse early on, then was head of the mathematics library at WVU for a decade.

The couple raised five children, all college graduates. Virginia moved to Kalispell 2 1/2 years ago to be near two of her daughters.

Though their marriage spanned nearly a half century, her time with her beloved Jim “wasn’t nearly enough,” she said.

“I miss him every day. When you just adore someone it’s easy to do. I just thought he hung the moon.”

If she could tell him one thing this Valentine’s Day, it would be: “Thanks for the memories. They were all good.”

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.