Scope and Contents This is a collection of letters (and telegrams) written by Umberto Nobile in Illinois to Hermine Speier in Rome during June and July of 1939. The contents of this folder mark the beginning of Nobile’s employment as an aeronautics professor at Lewis University in Romeoville, Illinois and the start of the lengthy separation that necessitated the couple’s incessant epistolary correspondence between 1939 and 1942. In his letters, Nobile paints this period as an especially emotionally tumultuous...