Our parents were just coming out of the Depression. Most of them grew up in want unparalleled in the U.S. today. Grandma had hobos sitting on the porch so often, though what she didn't know was that there was a nearly imperceptible mark on the corner of her house which meant the woman inside would not turn the hungry away. Grandpa owned a dairy and delivered milk to those who could never pay just as he did for their paying next door neighbors. Another grandpa took fish from his commercial catch to leave on the doorstep of those he knew were starving. In a day when 10 cents was real money, merchants "carried" folks on the books when they themselves were in danger of foreclosure.
The shortage in housing forced newlyweds such as Lawrence and Millie to rent a bedroom in the farmhouse of people who had a spare room. When Algoma Plywood and Veneer stepped up production just before 1940, men from the Birchwood plant were transferred to Algoma. There was not adequate housing in town for the number of men who were eventually placed 3 or 4 to a room at the Kirchman Hotel. From there they went to Timble's Barbershop where they could bathe. Brick veneer walls in that old hotel, built as the Baster in 1868, did little to keep anybody warm. Open transoms above the doors enabled rooms to get some heat coming from the stove in the hall. Two hundred years ago, men traveling the post road between New York and Philadelphia would share rooms and beds with men they had never before laid eyes on although with 3 or 4 in a bed, they might have kept a little warmer.
Rationing of sugar, tires, gas, shoes and all kinds of other things produced a black market besides tearing some families apart. Who got what? The tug of war over sugar between Grandma and Gus eventually led to Grandma and Grandpa retiring and moving into town. Grandma, brought up in her papa's hotel in Lille, France before being the owner of her own hotel, wanted to use sugar for a pie a week. Gus wanted the sugar for cake. Gus's siblings lived on neighboring farms so they were able to stop by. Gus wanted to offer a sweet. Vacations or just riding 6 miles to see Grandma and Grandpa on the farm were mostly not to be. Tires were poor and if one did have the gas to travel those 6 miles, a flat or two was always part of the trip. If one did have a few vacation days coming from Algoma Plywood and Veneer, the Plumbers or the Foundry, it would certainly be taken during haying or harvesting. There was a sense of duty. Work came first and families pulled together.
Kids who went to country schools carried in the wood for the stove and a pail of water for drinking. During the winter they set their dinner pails - no lunch buckets then - on top the school stove to thaw out and warm up. At a time when girls only wore dresses, the accommodating teachers would allow girls to wear slacks in school to keep warm. Those who were embarrassed wearing long cotton stocking held in place by garter belts didn't know they'd grow up into a world where garter belts were sex symbols that came from Victoria's Secret. Girls wore snuggies, a kind of cotton underpants with legs. They looked much like the Sphanx of today but served to keep the wearer warm instead of smooth and curvy.
City school kids were cold too. It seems like everything was cold and dark then. Even the summers until the war was over. Five and 6 year old kids knew how to weed gardens and put tin cans in the bags behind the kitchen door. Kids knew that the cotton cloth over a glass jar strained the cooking lard and grease so it could be used again. Every 4-year old finding a milkweed pod knew enough to take the silk home. It was needed for parachutes. Woman with silk stockings had something worth more than their weight in gold because Pearl Harbor meant the end of silk stockings for most. Silk was needed for the war effort. During the Depression older sisters with jobs would mail their" run-in" silk stockings home to the farm where Grandma would mend them so the younger girls had stockings to wear.
Old clothing was remade. One old picture shows a little girl in a dress made from her uncle's old shirt. The shirt was one worn only for church and "for good." Mothers made woolen snowsuits from men's old suits or coats. Kids whose mothers were not good seamstresses were lucky if they had hand-me-downs because no woman would spend 10 cents on those expensive patterns. Kids thought the woolen snowsuits smelled bad when they began drying out in the school cloak room or near the kitchen stove. Kids who could hang their snowsuits next to the stove checked to see if left over mashed potatoes were turned into patties for mashed potato sandwiches. Again! Four year old Char ate so much gravy bread that she thought the Lord's Prayer included the line, Give us today our gravy bread.
Plug-in Christmas candles on little wreaths were found in windows of some homes in 1941 and '42 but then blackouts started. Country people who never needed shades or drapes for privacy put something over the window to block any nighttime light. Nobody knew if some German plane could get through to bomb Kewaunee County. By the early 1950s we worried about the Russians as much as we did the Germans ten years earlier. Nancy was in 8th grade when she and a number of her classmates were volunteering for Civil Defense stints, watching the skies over Algoma from their perch in the cupola of the Stebbins Hotel. Practicing with the binoculars, the girls sighted on seagulls as if they were the enemy planes printed in the training manuals. Nearly 60 years later, Nancy had everyone laughing when she told the story and then made a comment about the security of the country being in the hands of 8th grade girls. What was so humorous in the retelling could not begin to describe the responsibility those girls shouldered.
Farm equipment and household appliances were hard to come by. Clarence and Myra got the last refrigerator in town and Ray and Regina only got one because he worked for a hardware dealer. Warren and Bernadine had to plug the rental refrigerator with quarters to keep it operating. Setting aside a supply of quarters was the first thing that happened on payday. Sy said whenever they heard a terribly loud racket, the neighbors knew Grandpa was out in the field with the Fordson. When the war came, King and Queen were back in business because horses don't run on gas.
Family life was interrupted as men went off to war and the remaining men worked harder than ever for the war effort. Women did their duty too. Clarice did hers when she had 125 kindergartners in her class in the old Quonset near the Sturgeon Bay shipyards. Helen did her duty too. She gave up a job she enjoyed, one in which she could wear nice clothes and stay clean, to take a job at the Plywood doing defense work, getting dirty and getting terrible rashes on her legs because of the resins in the glues. Most of the women had rashes prompting Dr. Hirschboeck to come up with a tincture.
There are few memories of Dad until kindergarten when he would come home for dinner - at noon in those days - and put me in his bike basket to take me downtown to kindergarten on his way back to the Plywood. I really never missed him. I probably didn't know he was supposed to live with Mom and me. He was as blind as a bat and was rejected from the military, but he was always at the Plywood. During the late 1950s he told us he was cleared by the Secret Service for defense work at the Plywood and could never tell anyone. What 15-year old would believe such a story? Even Mom didn't know it. Still, it was plausible because General Omar Bradley's grandson rented the upstairs of our home and he was at the Plywood too. The hull of the PT boat taking General MacArthur from Bataan was built at the Plywood. Besides the hulls, the Plywood built airplane wings and nose cones, so maybe that's why Bradley was there. While helping Mom do some sorting years after Dad died, we found his Secret Service clearance and other documents! While Dad was not around in the early years, he was there later. Friends Dick and Joyce never really had a dad. His tank was blown up in the Pacific theater. As a baby, Dick was held by his dad, but he and Joyce never even knew him.
Some dads came back so changed that they were unable to speak about the war for years. Hank was a POW. Elmer was with MacArthur when he went into Japan after the bomb. Richard piloted the captain upriver for drinks. As it was, the very young commercial fisherman was in the pilot house when the JG could not keep the ship on course in heavy seas. When Rich said he could do it, the captain was so frustrated that he allowed the enlisted man to take the wheel. The Lake Michigan fisherman handled the turbulent Pacific Ocean and the captain never forgot it.
June and Jean have no memory of their dad when they were little, but they didn't know until they were adults that it was because he had the dreaded TB. He was a musician who taught reed instruments and played with a number of orchestras. Everybody was told he was on the road and had neither the time nor money to get home. He wasn't home for nearly three years. Things were rough and relatives helped support them. No doubt tongues were wagging. Victims of tuberculosis went to sanatoriums in those days. There was no choice, except the one Mammy made. Mammy was the grandma, who when she learned her son had TB, hid him in her attic and tended to him for those three years with secret help from the family physician. How he lived in the attic without anyone knowing brings to mind the story of Anne Frank whose family was secreted in an Amsterdam attic at the same time.
Jeanne knew that she and her sister could never mention the war or ask questions about it. Her dad was 90 when he decided he had to talk about it so that it would never happen again. This shy retiring man now speaks to any group who wants him, commanding the attention of a general. Cal's dislike of a general - Eisenhower - became quite apparent when Ike ran for president. Young as I was, I knew something was wrong with Ike who was a national hero. Forty years later Cal would tell me about Normandy. I knew the horrendous loss of life, but I didn't know so many men were lost because they could not swim with their packs that were so terribly heavy. Cal felt military leaders know they send men to their deaths, but Ike sent them not to artillery fire but to a watery grave. Packs that became lead weights.
People were admonished that "Loose lips sink ships." Loose lips could also mean jail. Bob, and everybody else, was dead when Elaine shared a story on what should have been their 50th anniversary. She and Bob had set September 1942 as their wedding date. Bob was the single child of older parents. The family doctor sat on the draft board and knew Bob's number was coming up. He suggested to Bob that since he was getting married, if he moved the date up a few months, he might escape the draft. Bob and Elaine began quickly planning an early June wedding. In 1942 everybody was sure that this good Catholic country girl had obviously turned into a wayward big city heathen. Elaine couldn't breathe a word, but she needed help and turned to Auntie Dee, her landlady. Maybe Auntie Dee told Uncle Dunk. Who knows? He knew the score. He was in World War l and played with John Phillip Sousa. Though Elaine had a job at a large department store, money was scarce. In its bargain basement, Elaine found an affordable wedding dress - $3.00 - only because of a spot on it. On a Sunday afternoon when nobody was around, Elaine and Auntie Dee took Energine into the garage and cleaned the dress. Tongues never got the chance to wag because it was years before a baby came.
Each night at 5, Mom would put me on her lap while she listened to the news from WTMJ. War news surely affected her because nearly 20 years later, Ed Murrow began hosting a TV program. The first time I heard that voice, I froze remembering Mom's tightening arms while remembering, "This is London." Years later an NPR program again sent shivers through me. I knew the voice of Gabriel Heater. Today I can guess what Murrow and Heater were saying in those broadcasts. Hearing those voices is feeling Mom's tightening arms around me. For a two year old child who knew nothing of war, the voices are still there to frighten me.
Those of us born in that five or six year period grew up a little faster. We knew what it was to live with less and to be sure we helped others with work and other needs. Had we been born 5 years later, we'd have been Boomers. We'd have been on the cusp of change which eventually became plenty. We had that "plenty" too but we treated it differently. We learned our lessons at an early age from parents who went from the Depression right into the World War ll years. As preschoolers we bridged the Depression and Pearl Harbor. Big impressions were made on little kids. Circumstances within that short period affected us and made us what we are. We are different and we are cautious. We have that sense of duty. We never fought in that war but we remember. We are part of the World War ll generation that is passing away all too quickly.
Note: Above photo is taken from Women of the Plywood: The World War ll Years, c. 1998. It is estimated that 85% of over 1,300 wartime employees at Algoma Plywood were women who worked 50 hour weeks while raising children, taking care of the home, planting huge gardens, canning,sewing and mending, making bandages and knitting and more. Others went home to do all those things in addition to milking cows, picking eggs and driving tractor. Somehow they coped and even found time for fun in a world turned upside down.
