Alisa Allgood is reading Vietnam War letters between her parents Dick and Sarah after they were laid to rest in new Bozeman columbarium
By Jen Clancey STAFF WRITER
On April 27, 1971, Richard “Dick” Allgood sent his first letter from across the Pacific Ocean to his wife, Sarah Allgood. Dick, who had entered the Vietnam War as a helicopter rescue pilot, continued exchanging letters with his wife, also a member of the U.S. Air Force in Texas, for the next year. Both kept as many letters as possible, chronicling daily routines, evenings by the grill and the birth of their daughter Alisa.
The result: hundreds of letters stored in a cardboard box in Big Sky telling the story of a young couple staying in touch during the war. Alisa Allgood, a resident of Bozeman, discovered the box while clearing out her dad’s storage unit in 2021, one year after her parents died. Dick and Sarah moved to Big Sky in 1992 after years of visiting for vacations.
Grieving the loss of her parents, Alisa struggled to get through reading all of the letters. Finally, this spring she opened that first letter, from April 1971, and began reading them in chronological order on her podcast, “The Allgoods: Vietnam Through the Eyes of Love.”
“When I thought about it … I thought it was the easiest way for me to share the story,” Alisa told EBS, discussing the podcast. Her father, an avid reader who sometimes would finish a book in a day’s time, began losing his eyesight late in life due to cancer. Reading the letters aloud, Alisa found a deeper meaning to the podcast.
“It became a little bit more profound because … for the people that can’t read anymore, they can still listen,” Alisa said.
Many knew Dick as a staple in the Big Sky community and the owner of Allgood’s Bar and Grill for 18 years, after Sarah and Dick moved to Big Sky in 1992. Some might not know the details of Sarah and Dick’s military service, in which both were U.S. Air Force captains. Dick served in the aerospace rescue and recovery squadron under the call sign “PEDRO.”
In this unit, Dick and a tight-knit group of pilots would suppress fires from downed aircrafts and rescue aircraft crews. Sarah worked as a U.S. Air Force nurse, assisting in open heart surgeries at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas.
Just one month into service in Vietnam, Dick learned that Sarah was pregnant. In the letters, the couple discussed names and decided on “Alisa,” who was later born in January 1972.
Alisa said she was struck seeing her name decided in handwriting, and also what the letters revealed about her parents’ personalities.
“The people who knew my dad would never believe he could write like this,” Alissa said. She then read a paragraph from one of Dick’s letters to Sarah.
“Love is such a short and simple word to name … I think of a thousand different ways that I love you each day. Many of them little things, but they all add up into the best thing that has ever happened in my life,” Dick wrote.
Bozeman columbarium provides final resting place for Allgoods, veterans
For years, a table in Alisa’s living room held the urns of her mother and father. Her father wished to be buried in the Sunset Hills Cemetery, in spaces reserved for veterans and military service members. Dick was a proponent of a columbarium project that the Bozeman American Legion Post #14 completed in November 2024.
The legion organized a memorial on April 21, which honored Dick, who was also awarded a U.S. Air Medal in 1971 and a 2017 Montana Congressional Veteran Commendation award, and Sarah as the first service members laid to rest in the top left corner. With two columbariums holding more than 400 spaces each, the cemetery can finally start to take names off waiting lists and onto plaques below their remains.
“It took 12 years total to get it open. But when I saw that space there … I thought about all those other families on those lists, how proud I was of my dad,” Alisa said.
“I wouldn’t have been able to do this if the columbarium wasn’t open. I’ve been working hard on getting that going and the money in the right place so it could get built—so I could get them outta’ my living room. So I could have a place to go,” Alisa said. “I feel, as hard as it’s been, grateful for the unfolding of things now.”
Alisa is only a couple months into documenting the letters on the podcast. When she’s done, she hopes the letters can add to the varied history of the Vietnam War, and also inform herself and her family, including her 10-year-old son, about the love between her parents in their younger years.
