November 2003: TALKING OVER OLD TIMES
A while back Franseska Rasmussen wrote about living in a box car during WWII. For we Oldies, memories of that era remain fresh in our minds. I was 5 years old when Hitler invaded Poland. I had the little boys interest in war and fighting and paid attention. I even remember the 1938 Munich Conference, with my father listening to the radio, and hearing Neville Chamberlain say that he had conferred with Chancellor Hitler and he believed it would bring “peace in our time”. My father didn’t believe it and it turned out that “our time” was mighty short. My wife remembers being at the New York World Fair and seeing the people at the Czechoslovakian Pavillion weeping because they had no country to go home to.
Actually, my earliest memory goes back to 1934. In our family 1934 was known as “The Year of the Chinch bugs”. Chinch bugs were a little, housefly-like insect. I wonder what happened to them. I haven’t seen one in years. But back in 1934 there were hordes of them. My memory is of a scalding hot summer day in 1934, when my mother took me with her to the field where my brother and my father were working. I suspect she was taking water out to them. They would plow a furrow and before long the furrow would be swarming to the top with chinch bugs. They had a sort of iridescence that made it look like the furrow was full of rushing water. My brother and father would pour oil (burnt oil they called it, drained from the tractor), light it and consume a million or so chinch bugs. For all the good they accomplished they might as well have sat under a shade tree drinking lemonade. The chinch bugs won the war. I don’t remember it but my father would relate another incident. Our neighbor had a wheat field. Chinch bugs loved wheat and oats better than anything. The neighbor set fire to it (I guess to teach those pesky bugs a lesson). My father said the air was thick with bugs coming to our crops. He had to skim them off the stock tank to enable the cattle to drink that evening. Times were bad enough in the ‘30s without nature turning against you.
1936 was the hot year. ’34 was hot too but if you watch the weather forecast you’ll see a high percentage of records for heat set in 1936. I remember it well. I was all of 5 years old then. My mother fixed a pallet on the floor in front of a window for me to sleep on. Cooler than in the bed. The only air conditioning back then was in the higher priced movie theaters. At our house we didn’t have electricity so we didn’t even have a fan. I remember the old ladies at church saying it was the end of the world. Something for a little boy to worry about. Nature made up for it, though. That winter had record cold so the average yearly temperature came out about normal.
Even though the depression was in full swing I don’t remember unhappiness. Complaining, yes, but not unhappiness. Being farmers, we had plenty to eat, though cash was mighty short. My Dad often talked about shipping a load of hogs to Chicago and not getting enough for them to pay for the hauling.
In 1939 I was 8 years old and I remember coming down for breakfast one September day and my mother telling me Hitler had invaded Poland. WWII was off and running. As I said before, I had a little boy’s interest in war. I was disappointed that there was so little action in France at the start, but pretty soon things got better and Russia invaded Finland. Being of Scandinavian extraction, I rooted for the Finns like I do now for the White Sox. For a while it was great. The Finns had a saying “One Finn is worth 10 Russians” and it looked like it was true. Actually, it was, but they weren’t worth a hundred Russians and those were the odds they faced.
In 1941 I was ten years old. I remember a Sunday in December. It was a cloudy, but relatively warm, day. My mother and father were both taking afternoon naps, a frequent activity if we didn’t go someplace or if nobody came to visit. I was listening to the radio when the quiz show I was listening to was interrupted by the announcement that the Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor. My reaction was a fierce anger. Those Japs were going to “get it” this time! It wasn’t till I was an adult that I realized how close we had come to being the ones to “get it”. When my parents woke up I told them what had happened. My mother said “It isn’t real, it’s just a radio program”. I guess she was trying to reassure me but I didn’t need reassurance. The next day at school we had the radio turned on all day while we did our lessons. For the next 4 years the war touched us deeply. We school kids collected scrap iron (the junk man gave us a dollar for it, probably more than it was worth). The teacher kept it under the school bell. We spent it later on something for the school but I don’t remember what. Another time we tromped through corn fields and gathered milk weed pods (used for making life jackets). I remember the sacks hanging on the fence to dry and feeling proud that we had done something for the war effort. We also had a program that consisted of buying what were called war stamps which were placed in a book, which when filled, could be exchanged for a 25 dollar war bond. There were quarter books and dime books. I managed to fill up 5 books by the end of the war.
It wasn’t long before the war became closer for me. One of my cousins, Arthur Hansen, had enlisted in the Marines the summer before Pearl Harbor. Three years later, my parents stopped at Arthur’s parents house. His mother was home. So my parents were there when the telegram was delivered that said that Sergeant Hansen had been killed at the invasion of Palau. From that point it wasn’t so much like a game. To think that big, blonde, smiling, good natured, guitar playing Arthur was dead.
I had another cousin, this one on my father’s side of the family. Her name was Dorothy and she was a nurse. Her husband was part of a B-17 crew flying missions out of England. I had never met him since they lived in California. He had completed his specified number of missions and was eligible to come home. They needed volunteers for one more mission. He volunteered. You can guess what happened without my writing it. I didn’t know the man. Had never met him. Even so, my eyes filled with tears of pride when I heard the story.
I’ve ended up on a mighty sad note. Actually there were lots of fun going on, but I’ll save that for another day.