"It was just hard, not having contact, not knowing every single day that he was OK," said Springfield, Mass., native.
Hood's father, Andre, kept a sterner facade. The former Marine just wanted to see Christopher without the scraggly facial hair he had nurtured through his senior year in high school.
"We noticed on the first phone call, he already had changed to 'Yes, sir' and 'No, ma'am,' " Andre Hood said. "I had been trying to get him to do that for years. I think this was exactly the transformation he needed to become a man."
FOR THE RECORD - An article in Saturday's edition misspelled the last name of a U.S. Naval Academy plebe and her mother. The name should have been spelled Bojanowski.
The Baltimore Sun regrets the error.
Grace Boganowski wasn't necessarily looking to be transformed. The academy recruited her to play lacrosse, but she worried about her fitness heading into plebe summer.
"She never wants to disappoint anyone," her mother said. "So it was important to her to be a strong member of her squad."
Boganowski grinned at the memory of her first day, how impossible it seemed to hold her Reef Points, the academy's pocket guide to naval jargon, at a perfect 90-degree angle.
"People are yelling at you and you think it's the hardest thing you'll ever do," she said.
She worried about her mother, who cried all the way home after dropping her off. So in her almost-daily letters, she kept a sense of humor.
After her mother saw a picture of her on crutches, trying to keep up with the squad's march, Grace Boganowski wrote that she was part of "the gimp squad." Another time, she wrote about a mouse that had scampered across her desk, christening him Angus.
She wrote about how much she liked hefting logs and crawling through mud. "She sounded happy," her mother said. "And so it was like, 'OK, she's gonna make it.' "
As they planned their weekend (movies, junk food and a 20-minute shower topped the wish list for the plebe), Kathryn Boganowski suggested that her daughter grab more casual clothes. No, Grace Boganowski said, she'd stick with her uniform.
"I look really good in it," she told her mother.
