An 8-Year-Old's Reflections of WWII

 

For Memorial day I thought I would share the following from my mother (1937-2022, in the front of the picture) of her memories as a child during WWII.  Her brother, cousin and two future brothers-in-law came back from WWII (photo is family celebration of her cousin’s return), but she mentions the “gold stars” in her neighborhood who didn’t, and I didn’t realize this tradition  - started in WWI - is where the term came from.

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For any American, indeed almost anyone alive anywhere during WWII, it is “The War”.  The atmosphere in the whole country was completely different that it has been during any other conflict I have lived through since.

Everyone was involved, and every aspect of life was affected.  Most families had someone in the Armed Services.  The draft was in effect, and men from eighteen to forty were eligible to be inducted.  Rationing was in force for gasoline, leather, sugar, rubber, nylon and meat. Every person, regardless of age, received a ration book, which consisted of pages of stamps which were used when a rationed item was purchased.  I remember that I had my own book.

No autos, non-military trucks or appliances were produced – all factory production was directed to war materiel.  Clothing was scarce as the factories were producing uniforms and boots for the troops.  There were no nylon stockings as it was all being used for parachutes.

Travel was very difficult.  The trains and railroad tracks were mostly used to move troops and equipment.  Even if you could get on a train, if a troop or equipment train needed to get by, the passenger train was diverted onto a siding for however long it took.  The passenger trains that did run were standing room only because men on leave and wives were going wherever they had to.  If you went anywhere near a railroad track you would see long olive-colored trains filled with men in uniform, or flatcars full of tanks and guns draped in tarps.  Everyone would get out of their cars to wave to the troops.  The one time I got on a train to see my father working in the munitions factory at Red River Arsenal, just outside Texarkana, we passed a troop train and there was a lot of waving and yelling going on between the trains.

Not everyone had a car, but highway travel was almost impossible anyway because of the shortages of gas and tires.  Also there were long military convoys of large trucks carrying troops and equipment that always had the right-of way.

There were regular air raid drills, and air raid wardens would come by your door if you were showing any light at all.

Most houses displayed a small stars-and-stripes banner in the front window.  They were about six inches by eight, and most had a blue star, as ours did, to indicate that someone in that household was serving.  There were several with gold stars in our neighborhood, which meant a person from that house was not coming back.

One thing that stands out to me were people coming and going at all times of the night and day.  When recruits were still training in the States they were given short passes to come home.  With transportation so uncertain there was little advance notice they were coming.  My brother in the Army Air Corps would appear it seemed always at night, and we all got up, and often he would show up with other boys from the area, who would sometime sleep over until they could get to their own homes the next morning.

All correspondence from anyone that was “overseas” had to be on thin blue paper that folded into an envelope, and would be censored by a heavy black pen.  The men were not allowed to disclose exactly where they were – “Europe” or “Pacific” was about all the info the folks back home could get, perhaps what ship, but not where it was located.  There were of course no phone calls, and most of the men were gone three or four years.

In April of 1945 when I was in third grade the students from the three schools (all were on one campus) were called into the horseshoe drive in front of the main building, where the flag was lowered to half-staff, and they announced that President Roosevelt had died.  It was a blow to everyone; he was the only president most of us could remember, and we heard him many times on the radio during the War.

The War ended in 1945.  The men came home and everything started to return to normal. 

It was, indeed, another time and place.

Like Sand in an Hourglass…40 Years, 11 Gone

My high school class graduated in the mid-1980s, when the future was so bright we had to wear shades. I haven’t kept up with many classmates directly, but I still go to the reunions. They feel a bit like family gatherings in that even after five or ten years since we last met the conversations pick up with a familiar rhythm, as if we had just seen each other at the last holiday.

The other reason I go is that a high school class is an exclusive club that never admits new members, and over time its membership only declines. Showing up is a way of keeping track not just of people but of time itself.

The 40th reunion invite listed eleven of us who have passed. For a group of 300 American, college-educated professionals nearing 60, that’s right in line with actuarial expectations saying roughly 10–16 of us should be gone by now. And since I was very nearly number 12 on the list from a near-fatal bike accident just six months ago, I was more than happy to volunteer to make the “In Memoriam” poster that has our deceased classmates’ pictures and names, to be with us in spirit during the reunion.

Looking at those eighteen-year-olds (the poster uses the pictures from the yearbook), it’s hard not to pause and wonder… what happened?

The causes follow familiar patterns. A cluster of car accidents, mostly years ago. A few “died suddenly” in midlife, which usually means an undiagnosed heart condition or other health problem. One suicide. A couple of early aggressive cancers.

I didn’t know most of them well in school, but I remember one from the 20th reunion in 2006 when she was photographed smiling right next to me. She died in 2019 and will just be a picture on a poster this time.

The numbers suggest we’ll lose another ten or so by the 50th reunion. That’s how the curve works. And eventually, much further out, there will be no one left to keep the list. The tables suggest one or two of us might make it past 100, so the class won’t fully disappear until sometime around 2070, long enough that the world we shared at 18 will feel even more distant than it already does.

For now, we gather. Fewer each time, but still enough to recognize one another, to fall into old patterns, to share fragments of a common past that no one else quite understands.

And to look at the slowly growing poster to quietly note who is no longer in the room.

Review: The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

I ran across the term anemoia - nostalgia for a time you never experienced - on the internet and traced it back to this book.  The author made up a list of words, or re-purposes existing phrases, for obscure feelings we feel as we age, experience the passage of time, realize how little of it we have left.  Besides anemoia I mentioned, one of the words that has made it from the book into the "real-world" is sonder - the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. 

While reading I made a list of the words I liked that hit me, so the book is fun and thoughtful, even if your favorite ones never make it beyond the book.  And due to the introspective nature of the topic, this book would be better appreciated by older, thoughtful readers, less so by those in the earlier stages of life.

And I have my own term to add: “college degree” as a unit of time, which equals four years.  Its use is when you realize an event took place four years ago, which seems so recent, then you think “I could have gotten a college degree since then!”  In contrast to your real college degree, which seemingly took forever.

Remember, Your IRA Balance is Inflated by 25% Since the Government Still Gets Its Cut

 

Before I retired, my “retirement income planning” meant shovel as much as possible into my IRA, then throw some extra into taxable savings.  Then one day I’d add Social Security (if it still existed). That was my entire plan, and I suspect many of you reading this are in that same boat.

Fast-forward to my first year of retirement, when I discovered I suddenly had to become an expert in:

• Taxes, surprisingly more complex than when you have straight W2 income
• Roth conversions
• Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs)
• Return of Capital (ROC), meaning that clever investment choice I made actually has a hidden capital gain down the road
• IRMAA, not my great aunt, but a Medicare surcharge if your retirement income passes a threshold
• The Rubik’s Cube of mixing pre-tax, post-tax, and Social Security income, and figuring out the best moves more than a decade in advance

And this is years before I have to deal with Medicare, supplements, and that IRMAA surcharge I didn’t even know existed before 30 days ago.

A surprising number of decisions need to be made years in advance, and some, like when you take Social Security, are permanent.

Sure, there are plenty of experts out there, but they all have strong (and conflicting) opinions. Just look at the permanent cage matches among YouTube financial gurus:

• Roth IRA conversions: brilliant or disastrous? (Dozens of people on both sides.)
• Social Security: take it early at 62, or delay to 70? (Pros and Cons for both)
• RMD strategy: panic now or panic later? (Arguments on both sides)

There is no one-size-fits-all.  At some point, you have to learn enough about all these topics to make decisions based on your goals, whether that’s leaving a legacy to your heirs or partying it away while you’re still around. Most retirement software assumes “maximize assets at death,” which may not match your priorities, plus you can’t take it with you.

So my advice as I sit here rooting for your continued employment to pay into my Social Security is: Look into this stuff now, not the year you retire.

Believe me, as I’m currently kicking myself for some IRA vs. taxable investment decisions I made twenty years ago.

AI as a Russian Lit Study Guide: Good, with Some Precautions

Having recently retired, I finally started my long-promised Russian Literature Phase, something I promised I would do “when I had the time.” I had read Crime and Punishment about 15 years ago and loved it, picked up Brothers Karamazov (BK) soon after, and then let it sit in my digital bookshelf for a decade and a half while I kept grabbing contemporary novels and “beach reads”, which are fun but don't challenge you.  I even read the first chapter of BK once and put it down as it just didn’t hook me like C&P did.

Now that I actually have time, I decided to give BK another shot, but the first thing I did was check the translation and found that was the issue.  The copy I bought 15 years ago was a bargain-bin 1905 Constance Garnett translation in full Victorian English. I switched to the modern Pevear/Volokhonsky translation from 1990 (same team as the C&P I enjoyed) and immediately felt the difference with a modern reading flow.  But I ended up keeping both versions open so I could compare passages and deepen my understanding.

This time around, I also used AI as a personal study guide. Dostoevsky tosses in historical, philosophical, and cultural references that a well-educated Russian in the 1880s would have understood instantly, but a modern American, even one as reasonably well-read and well-traveled as moi, might not.

For an AI study guide I found Grok was not that good.  It literally made-up quotes that were not in the book, then apologized for it when I pointed out the mistake.  And it was a little too smarmy, saying things like:

Keep going — the best 600 pages are still ahead

You’ve got this.  The baby dream is 200 pages away. It’ll break you open.

Keep going. The trial is next — and it’s brutal.

Like I was a GenZ college student who needed encouragement to finish my assignment.

ChatGPT was better, and I used it the way you’d might talk to a lit professor during office hours or at the pub, tossing theories around, digging into the psychology of the characters, and chasing down historical context. At one point I was exploring whether one of the brothers had a Madonna–Whore complex with the two major female leads.  Another time I was comparing a line from The Usual Suspects (“I don’t believe in God, but I fear him”) to a passage in BK, not something you will find in a written study guide. It even gave me crash courses on 19th-century Russian politics and Pushkin when I needed them.

All of that kept me far more engaged in the book than I would’ve been otherwise. It let me go deep into the novel’s theological and philosophical arguments which include questions about God, society, scientism, morality, and the messiness of being human. BK deals with ideas that feel like they could have been written last week instead of the 1870s. The brothers themselves read like psychological archetypes we all carry around: pure passion, pure reason, pure faith, nihilism. Dostoevsky basically anticipated the major existentialists and psychologists of the 20th century.

Ultimately it is an amazing and rewarding book, worth the time and effort. When the AI asked me the main theme I got from the book, I put the line "Love life more than the meaning of it", one of many lines and passages that hit me deeply.

So this is definitely not a “beach read”, and more like a college course that requires outside work to get its full appreciation and understanding, something I think is required of most great literature.  In this case I think AI as an interactive study guide is a great tool to help, and I will continue using it through my Russian Literature Phase.