Their love stood the test of time — and home improvement.
After 80 years, a stack of World War II-era love letters pulled out of the walls during a Staten Island house renovation have been returned to the descendants of a prolific Navy man who wrote warmly — and frequently — to his wife.
Dottie Kearney, 51, uncovered the sheaf of correspondence between Brooklyn-born boatswain’s mate Claude Marsten Smythe and Wisconsin native Marie Borgal Smythe back in the mid-1990s, when Kearney and her husband bought the Eltingville fixer-upper — once home to the Smythes — and started tearing out the
