Thursday, December 23, 1999

Lessons learned on heels of war

By WILLIAM D.A. HILL | News-Journal Staff Writer

Each life is touched by some event which becomes a main guidepost through the journey of life. The 20th century presented many such events from the Great Depression to World War II to assassinations to adventures in outer space.

How do such events affect lives? The question was posed to the staff writers and staff photographer for The News-Journal´s Southeast Volusia Bureau. They were asked to recall an event in their time which became a guidepost and touchstone in their lives. The staff members were asked to think of an event which represented a dividing point in their own time, an event which colored and shaped their lives and how they have lived. In short, it is the kind of event after which nothing was ever again seen in quite the same way.

Knitting drew a crowd to our living room the fall of 1940. Women of our neighborhood came with bags of yarn, sat together talking and knitting.

The women tugged yarns from their bags, got it on their long needles and went about their knitting while 6-year-old boys like me watched and wondered why.

At the long dining table, another group of neighbor women rolled bandages, wrapped them in paper and stuffed them into brown boxes marked by a red cross.

Playing in life´s sandbox was more fun, but the women didn´t understand the joy of catching bees in bottles, playing tag and climbing trees. They sipped their tea, chatted, laughed, knitted and rolled bandages.

The forms of sweaters and caps emerged from the knitters´ hands, and the finished garments were wrapped in tissue paper and tucked into boxes.

The two groups of women filled their boxes, brought out more empty boxes and went back to their mundane task filling the boxes labeled in bold, black letters: Bundles for Britain.

Guys called Nazis bombed Britain, I discerned through dinner table conversations among the adults. The British needed bandages and they needed clothing to get them through a winter.

Names rolled off adult tongues with clues about good guys and bad guys. I can´t even write the name Hitler without remembering the inflection my stepfather gave the word. He was a civil trial attorney and I´d heard him talk about bad judges, bad lawyers and bad guys, but not the way he spoke of the satanic demon named Hitler.

My mother´s lips curled inward and her jaw tightened when she said the words Hitler and Nazis. My Grandfather O´Malley, not one to delete expletives, coated the names in adjectives unfit for young ears. He often pronounced der fuhrer´s name as if it had an S before the H.

The name Churchill was spoken with reverence. He was the good guy in this mess, the leader of the British for whom my mother and her friends knitted and rolled bandages. The inflections given his name led me to believe he ranked high in the heirarchy of the Almighty.

Nobody talks about presidents today the way my family spoke of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. At our house, it was OK to call him FDR, but my grandparents called him Mr. Roosevelt. My mother and stepfather called him President Roosevelt.

FDR´s place in the hierarchy was plain to anyone entering our home. His portrait hung on the living room wall, next to a painting of the Virgin Mary.

By winter 1942 when I was 8, my grandfather was the man seated at the head of our table. My stepfather was in uniform, an Army major, and eight cousins and uncles also were in uniform. America was at war on two oceans.

I knew where Britain was by the fall of 1942. I also knew about Guadalcanal, the Philippines, Australia, Midway, Attu, Dutch Harbor, El Alamein and a lot of other places. Life was no longer about our street or our town. It was about the world and we learned about it in our daily newspapers and on the radio. At school, the Weekly Reader reported on the war.

Along two coasts of our nation, blackouts were the rule and practice air raid drills were conducted weekly. Rationing of gasoline, sugar, pork, beef, rubber, leather and shoes was enforced by books of stamps in my mother´s purse.

Neighborhoods had no younger men, and a lot of dads were in uniform, too. Mothers and older sisters worked in war plants. Children hauled scrap metal, rubber and bundled newspapers to school. We had a song, “American Patrol,” we sang as we stacked the scrap in a vacant room at the school.

World War II taught children many lessons. At 6 years old, death is a concept not well understood, but standing in silence before a flag- draped coffin while a bugler sounded “Taps” made it clear to an 8-year-old.

Between 1941 and 1945, the burial detail played out its ritual 250,000 times for Americans who would not come home again.

It is a remembrance indelible on the canvas of my life, a scene of knitting women, rationing, scrap drives and the mournful song of the bugler.

Special Project: THE FLORIDA QUEST Laptop Lauren and the Trackers are the main characters in the Florida Quest, a 4-week, multi-media project involving thousands of students in Volusia and Flagler counties. In this quest they discover Homefront and Heritage!