Excerpts

“I remember hearing on the radio that Pearl Harbor … was bombed. And I remember being upset but you see, all we had was the radio … we didn’t have television like you did, so everybody just gathered around the radio and listened to what they were saying. And my mother was crying, because she thought my father was going to have to go back into the navy, and she didn’t want him to go. So then I ended up crying …I knew I had to be sad” (page 4-5).

“ …we had air raids … we had to have these black shades put on every room in the house, and you either had to put them in the windows so you could keep your lights on when there was an air raid, or you had to turn off your lights. And when the air raids would happen, we would have air raid wardens that would walk the streets, so if they say a light in your window they would come knock on your door and holler at you. And during the air raid, we had to keep the radio very low, but we could listen. And then he would come around and tell us on the street when it was over” (page 7).

“ …I actually wondered about Pearl Harbor … they would tell you about how all these people got killed and they were buried in the ocean … and I never liked that. That frightened me, that part did … A little bit you saw you saw in the movies. All you saw was fighting, that’s all they showed you in the news clips. They talked about it a lot. They talked about it an awful lot” (page 8).

“And I can remember one woman in my church that her child didn’t come back and didn’t come back and I never remember her ever having to be able to make peace with it, because she had nothing to bury” (page 12).

“We just grew up, my whole childhood was a war. All through school we lived a war … we would hear about it. It went on for so long, that after a while you took it with a grain of salt. This is what was going to happen … I probably thought I was going to live this for the rest of my life, through a war … I was fortunate, really, that you know … but it was tough. It was hard” (page 11).