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.

Today's Kids Think "Cicero" Must be a Rap Group

My grandmother's high school diploma from 1931.  Look at the options for getting your 16 required credits, which she focused on the classics like Caesar, Cicero and Virgil.  Compare that with the average college graduate today.  And this was from a podunk region in Tennessee, not some big metropolis like NYC or Boston.

How Long Does One Keep Furniture?

My parents went out as newlyweds in 1958 and bought solid oak furniture, then used it through the time my mother passed away in 2022.  It's all still sitting in the Old Man’s house in 2024 as he “maybe” gets ready for an estate sale and downsizing: coffee table, end tables, bedroom suite…

That’s 66 years of using the same furniture, two thirds of a century.  Now these aren’t and will never will be antiques.  They were sold to yuppy-equivalents in the late 1950s at department stores like Macy’s.

One way to think about this furniture is sentimental, as there are decades of family pictures with them in the background, mostly Christmases and Thanksgivings, sitting there as silent witnesses to the growing up and leaving of the kids, the aging of the couple who bought them, the death of one of the buyers after six decades, and soon the second.

But instead of being sentimental about it, seeing these pieces actually makes me a bit angry.  “Why didn’t my parents ever update their furniture? Were they cheap or is it a depression-era generational thing?”.  “Did they not pay attention to evolving tastes and styles?”.  “Modern furniture is not that expensive, why did they hang on to it?”, and so on.

So to be fair to them I wandered around my house and figured out the ages of all my furniture, wondering what was the oldest piece I own.   But I am not a good comparison since I got divorced not once, but twice, so started over with nothing at 30 then almost nothing again at 40.   The second time I did end up with my nice home-office desk I had bought a few years before, which as the only worldly possession I owned after the second divorce, I could say it’s a $250,000 desk.   It is now the the oldest piece of furniture I own: 20 years old.

But I won’t have it much longer.  When I retire in a few years I plan to walk out of my current house with some clothes and start over again at 60 (but keep the wife and bank accounts this time).  I will be downsizing and moving to another state, and there is no reason to haul any of my current furniture with me.  If I am lucky that will be the last time I start over, but if not, then I will walk away with nothing yet again for the last time in a few more decades, checking into some furnished care facility at the very end.

I just have a different mindset about furniture so shouldn’t be too hard on my parents about keeping the same pieces all their lives, but it still bothers me a bit every time I walk into that house and see furniture that was already old and out of date and I hated when I was kid.

Getting Old in Just a Few Pictures

One of the most humbling things about going through my mother’s old photographs is seeing people I am related to go from young adults to old people in just a few photographs.  We all intellectually know this is true of everyone, including ourselves, but the fact of aging and getting old doesn’t really hit us until we are past middle age and feel aging hitting us acutely (as I am now in my mid 50s).  At that point we are no longer able to convince ourselves “that will never happen to me”

By inheriting the family records I see in just a few photographs how people aged from young, vital and beautiful to old people in what for me is a blink of an eye.  Note the modern AI colorization of old black and white pictures, which will be a separate post.

 

 

The super strange part for me is finding pictures of these relatives at my age (mid 50s) from about 80 years ago, and they look super old!  I look pretty good for my age, but my relatives back then at 40 looked 60, at 50 looked 80.  Maybe it’s healthcare, vitamins, diet, or maybe the fact I work on a keyboard and most of the men out on a farm, but it’s a little discerning to see people my age looking decades older.

Of course everyone above - but the bottom one - was dead before I was born.  

I suppose my own photos will make my own life like look like a blink of an eye to whoever goes through my album - if physical pictures even exist - in 50 years.