My father-in-law, Knox Craig, was a gifted letter writer.

Knox grew up in Oregon and graduated from the University of Idaho with a degree in English in 1942.

He lost his mother when he was 14 and his father when he was 16.

Family was important to Knox, who was a conscientious letter writer, to relatives in Portland and Pasco, Wash., in-laws in Idaho and his daughters after they left home in the 1960s.

My wife, Amy, recently visited her sister Rebecca in rural Washington and brought back a stack of family letters. Included were several Knox had written between the early 1950s, when he was an editor at the Des Moines Register, and 1997, when he died of a stroke the day after Christmas.

A letter dated Jan. 14, 1953, to Knox’s rural Idaho in-laws, Blanche and Allan Hardin, told how he was getting along with the three “wimmen” he lived with. That would be his wife, Frances, also a journalist and talented writer, and daughters Rebecca, 4, and Amy Lou, 2.

“Becky summoned me to her room yesterday afternoon and proceeded to outline a project which she had in mind for me,” Knox wrote.

The older daughter, he added, had been studying how Frances got him to do things, and was ready to try some of Mom’s techniques.

“What she had in mind was a ‘hanger’ at a proper height so she could hang up her own clothes. … some kind of a bar like the one in her closet, only at a lower level.”

“I took on the protective coloration that any husband automatically assumes on such occasions, … caution, skepticism, and mounting resistance to the whole idea – covered over, of course, with a light veneer of approval and willingness to do the job.”

“Any wife recognizes the symptoms,” he wrote “the hollow chuckle that goes with the ‘genial’ questions; the ‘smiling’ lips that seem a bit stiff; the eyes that get that trapped look.

“So does any 4-year-old if she observes with her big, brown eyes the way Becky observes.

“Her counter-attack was worthy of a veteran in the field of domestic relations. She was charming. She was full of good-natured suggestions. She even provided the temporary escape which all wise women set up in the opening round when both sides realize it’s merely a probing test-of-strength operation.

“‘Maybe we could tie a string to Amy Lou’s bed and run it to the chest of drawers,’ she suggested.

“‘Oh, you want it for just a little time while you’re playing,’ I said, hoping without hope that suggestion might carry the day.

“It didn’t. What she wanted was something permanent.

“‘Then, it would have to be in the closet,’ I said.

“She agreed, and we examined the closet together.

“With my best I’d-sure-like-to-do-it approach, I pointed out the bare walls and showed her there was nothing there on which to attach the bar – or even a string.

“‘You could put a nail here,’ she said, touching one way, and tipping the other way, ‘a nail here. Then we could stretch a string across.’

“There was a note of triumph in her voice,” Knox wrote.

“She sensed, however, that this wasn’t quite the right time to ‘go over the top.’ So, she quickly and neatly administered the coup de grace:

“‘You think about it. Maybe, tomorrow …’”

Knox added that he was “thinking about it,” and added that “a certain little party” was also thinking about it.

“When the time is right,” he concluded, “she will strike again.”

“Do you have any doubts about the outcome?” he asked.

“I haven’t. Neither does that delightful-4-year old.”

Knox closed by noting that “the youngest of our tribe,” 2-year-old Amy, was constantly grabbing at his pipe and pen as he tried to type, when she wasn’t pulling the fur on Frisky, their kitten.