Ref-life Would Never Be The Same Again

"Life would never be the same again" NANCY POTTER Story by Breana Comiskey

A small, cheery woman with a reddish brown pageboy, Nancy Potter is an English teacher at the University of Rhode Island who has published many short stories including her latest collection Legacies. I was living on a farm in eastern Connecticut. I was very aware that the war was going on in England because I had an English pen pal. People grew up early in those days. My pen pal was in an air raid shelter in London, and she would write letters about the war. During two bad winters, she spent almost every other evening in the air raid shelter. I was standing on the stairs when the Pearl Harbor announcement was made on the particular day, and the declaration of war followed very suddenly. I can remember looking down at the carpet and thinking life would never be the same again. I was then in high school, and there was a belief that we were all going to be involved. The junior and senior classes were convinced that not only the men were going to be involved, but the women would be, too. I had been 16 when I went into college and just 19 when I left. It was two years and eight months that I was at Tufts University. We squeezed four years into that time. There were no vacations. We had a day at Christmas and a day at Thanksgiving and that was about it. The idea was to get classes through so that they would be ready for the war. I had several friends in my college class who were in the service. Almost immediately, there were two young men, who were freshmen, who left after a month. Both disappeared. They were shot down on a military flight over the North Atlantic. I did work as a volunteer in a hospital in Boston to relieve civilian nurses. We were very convinced that everyone ought to be tremendously involved in the war effort. I enjoyed the hospital volunteering, but I found the experience absolutely terrifying. I had been sheltered, and I had not realized that there was as much pain and misery in the world. The hospitals were very short staffed and seemed to me that there was always too much to do. I think the responsibility was really too much for me at that age. There were entertainment centers called "Buddies Clubs" or USO Clubs, which came a little later, and this meant that typically on a Saturday if you were a good patriotic young woman, you would go to a Buddies Club and you would serve doughnuts and coffee, and

you would sit and talk with servicemen and sometimes servicewomen. There would be a tremendous opportunity to meet people from very different parts of the country. Servicemen were very lonely, very homesick, and they simply liked to sit and talk with someone. They would like to show photographs of their homes and their parents and their girlfriends and talk about all that. What do you recall about the newsreels and how the war was portrayed? The war was always portrayed as winnable, but important, popular and fought for a just reason. The newsreels were extremely manipulative. We were taught to be more than scornful of our enemies: the Germans and the Japanese. Our enemies were portrayed as dangerous, inhuman, uncivilized, unworthy of any sympathy. The Americans and allies were portrayed as radiant, good, decent, honorable and always fighting valiantly. It took me many years to see this manipulation. All of us went to the movies, partially to see these newsreels since there was no television and newsprint was quite censored, we had the belief that if we saw something there, that we would see it in a more intense dimension. Since we knew servicemen who were flying or were out on ships, we knew that the newsprint news was not accurate. We received letters from people which were censored and we knew that there was another side. We were all very greedy for the news. I think all of our patterns of life, particularly our romances, our attitudes toward objects, our attitudes toward the future, our attitude toward education, all had to do with the war. I cannot imagine a day that I spent from the time I was 14 until I was 19, that I wasn't aware of the war for a good part of the day, and it had an impact on everything that I chose to do. There was no point at which, except being asleep, that I wasn't aware of the war because I had a great number of friends who died. I had one college classmate whose fraternal twin died. After she got the message, we just simply sat through the entire night trying to think of things to say to her, and we couldn't come up with anything very extraordinary. I can also remember coming home from lunch one day into my dormitory room; my mother had sent me a letter, and out of it fell an obituary of a young man who died in Iwo Jima. The report of his death had happened a good two weeks before his family heard about it, three weeks before it was in the newspaper, and a month before I heard about it. It was absolutely terrifying. This was happening all the time. It did have a great impact on our lives. I exchanged mail with several young men who had been in high school classes. Every time you went to a Buddies Club, there would be billboards with names of service men who needed to be written to. We were constantly writing letters. This was considered to be an absolutely essential activity to boost morale. Did you feel that the war was for a good cause?

I never doubted that it was. We talked about the cause a great deal. We believed rather simply that the American involvement in the European theater was an attempt to free those parts of Europe that had been overrun by the Axis forces that had annexed Austria, Poland, France and were busy trying to overrun Russia. In the Pacific theater we were convinced that the Japanese were going to overrun the entire Pacific and land on the west coast and move over eastward. It takes a little propaganda to convince quick minds that this is true, and the propaganda was extraordinary. I had actually read Mein Kampf and hated the sound of the book. I saw it as more than distressing. It was dangerous. I didn't see how Nazism could be stopped except by the massive military effort. My enthusiasm about the war began to pause when the bomb was dropped. Our sense of the justice and the worth and the rectitude of the war were beginning to be challenged then. As the war went on, people grew tired. They got tired of sacrifice. They got tired of withholding their hopes and expectations of normal life, and they began to chafe a little at the restrictions. Rationing was no longer as much fun as it had been initially. Going without was much less fun. I have to confess, it was harder for me to get psyched up for the worth of the war. We wanted the war to get over and the decision to drop the bomb was a decision to shorten the war and to save a number of people who would have died otherwise. Yet, was it fair to kill perhaps 200,000 people to save the lives of 25, 30, 50,000 American soldiers? I remember a great number of us sitting there crying because it had been a terrible experience of losing friends and having had this part of what we considered our youth used up by the war, but also because all these Japanese had died whom we'd never get to know. And that seemed very wrong -- very wrong. I think for girls and women, and perhaps boys and men, of my generation, the war forced them to grow up prematurely. It made them far more serious about the bare realities of life: life, death, values. It robbed them, in a sense, of some childhood. Perhaps it was a good thing. But it made us more critical of later generations who seemed to have a somewhat easier time. Table of Contents

Copyright 1995

The Threat of War Becomes Real

MABEL SMITH Story by Ellie Kaufman

I was interviewing Mabel Smith in her large, airy farmhouse. She's a sensible, dutyminded woman, who likes to get involved in community affairs. Married in January of '39, she spent the war time coming up weekends in the summer to Rhode Island by train and raising three children. I can remember being here in Matunuck at Labor Day time when the Germans marched into Poland. I was very aware of the buildup, and of the fear of war that people had. In the summer of '37 I took a trip to Europe, and went to Austria. People there were very enthusiastic about Hitler, but you did wonder. Oh, they were for Hitler, they were. He encouraged young people to have great pride in the Aryan race and in the German nation, and he encouraged all sorts of athletic disciplines, the great strong Germanic, the master race, as he called it. Oh, it was a little scary even then. I didn't know too much about the anti-Semitism, but I was aware of it. I knew it was part of Hitler's build-up, and his policy. I can remember when Chamberlain made his agreement, and sort of sold out the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland. That made a great many people uneasy. He said he was getting peace for our times, but you felt that it couldn't last. After the war in Europe started, we were constantly talking about whether America would be drawn into the war, and just what we should do. Once things had gotten further along, we felt very definitely that we were doing the right thing by going in. Some people didn't agree with that, they felt that maybe Hitler had the right idea of how to run a country. But I didn't ever feel that way. I did feel that war was wrong, and wished that we could stay out of it. But then, when it got beyond a certain point, I rather wholeheartedly supported it. My husband was in the textile business. He didn't go into the service because textile manufacturing was considered a strategic industry. They felt that those who had management jobs in these big companies that were completely converted to government production were doing something more important than going in the service. He always did feel a bit badly about that, whether some people thought he was shirking. My three brothers-in-law (my sisters' husbands) were in the service, so you had a little funny feeling about that. One of my brothers-in-law was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge in December of '43 [sic]. He had kind of a bad time of it, but still came home safely. Another on of my brothers-in-law was a doctor on a ship in the Pacific, and the third was a lieutenant colonel. They both returned safely.

Things were rationed during the war. You got a book for every member of the family, even though they were young. Sugar and meat, and of course gasoline, were rationed. We bicycled a great deal because of the gas rationing. I had a little seat on the back of my bike for my little boy. I can remember going to a dance and bicycling home four miles at two in the morning. When the war finally ended, my sister-in-law and I were sharing this house. She remembered how people had wanted to celebrate the end of World War I, and got our four little boys all rigged up with something to bang and make a lot of noise with, and they marched around. It was just something to remember the day by. But there was a remarkable feeling that it was finally over. Looking back at the war now, how did the war affect your overall life? Well, I suppose in a philosophical way the war opened our eyes to a lot of social concerns and what is worth fighting for. It was kind of a time that one dates things by, before and after. Before, we thought that our way was right -- that we had the best possible country. A lot has happened to make one wonder. Table of Contents

Copyright 1995

A Farm Girl Plays Professional Baseball WILMA BRIGGS Story by Ben Tyler

Wilma Briggs is an elementary school teacher. Her feelings about women in the family were not what I had expected, considering her unusual career for the time as a professional baseball player. I was born in 1930 and grew up on a farm in East Greenwich. There were 11 living children in my family. We had a 60 acre dairy farm, and a lot of work to do. Not a lot of money, but a lot of food. We had our own garden, grew our own food, and played a lot of baseball.

We didn't get a daily newspaper, only the Sunday paper. The kids just didn't do much reading other than the comics and the sports section. We knew there was a war - my father was an air raid warden. We had blackouts where they would have the practice air raids, and he'd go out and stop traffic. That's about as close as I came to the war. None of my brothers were old enough to be in it. We would get up a 6:30 and go to the barn before breakfast. We had probably 35 milking cows, and we milked by hand. It was only my father, my two older brothers, and myself. We all milked, or the boys would milk and my father and I would feed, which meant I swept out in front so that it was clean for the grain to be put down. When we got home from school, we'd have to clean the barn. Homework was a problem. When I got home I had farm work to do, which meant if I didn't get homework done in school, it didn't get done. But we fit everything around baseball as much as we could because that was our hobby. We had baseball equipment because my father had a team. All the neighborhood kids came to our house to play which was convenient for us because sometimes they helped us finish up the work so we could play earlier. When the little kids got big enough, they helped in the barn. By the time they were older we had expanded and moved to Pt. Judith. The number of cows that we had, all purebred, registered Ayrshires, grew from 35 to 208. There was a lot more work to do then. It took a lot more hands to do the work. That's when the little kids helped. Did your family make a lot of money from the farm? (Laughs.) Farmers never make a lot of money. They were always, you know, underpaid for everything. We never had much money, but we never knew that as kids. I thought that we were rich. Most kids didn't have horses. And we had sleds and bicycles and ice skates and that kind of thing. But we hardly ever went anywhere. Once a year we'd go to Fenway Park or something like that, or we'd get a treat to go out for ice cream. We didn't go to the movies very often. Some kids went regularly. We went, if we were lucky, once a month. We had only on family car. My mother was just a house wife, but you know, I think back on what she did. She reared 11 children, helped in the garden, helped pick the beans, canned beans and tomatoes-she did so many things. Laundry for 12, 13 people, cooked for our family, and half the neighborhood. Everybody seemed to eat at our house. The canning that she did was absolutely incredible. She canned like three hundred quarts of vegetables. We never had to buy canned vegetables-ever. We'd just go down cellar and bring them up. I remember during the war years I was in the 4H and I had a victory garden. As a matter of fact, it won a $25 war bond. They were called savings bonds until the war, and then they were called war bonds. And I won a war bond and a camp scholarship because of my victory garden. What type of clothing did you wear?

Well, I wore dungarees, even to school. I wore them every day because we didn't have a lot of money. My mother and father had to buy dungarees for the boys and I'd say, "Well, get me some too." I was wearing them in the barn. And we wore the same style clothes working as we did to school. By the time I got to high school and started playing basketball, and was on the gym team - I needed slacks anyway, so I wore slacks or dungarees to school, and I got away with it. I was the only girl that did, but then I was the only girl who played on the boys' basketball team, too. Had it not been for the war, I never would have played professional baseball. That started because of the war. People didn't have money to go places. Phil Wrigley of the Chicago Cubs was certain that all the men would be drafted, and the major league ballparks would be empty. That's the reason he started that league, the All-American Girls' Professional Baseball League. So, because of the war, I got that chance. That league started in 1943, and I joined it after high school in 1948. Had it not been for the war, that part of my life would never have come to pass. And I think because I went out there and played ball-I met a lot of people from all over the United States, Canada, and Cuba, which I never would have done. I traveled, lived in the best hotels, ate in restaurants, lived in private homes-that's an experience. I think it gave me the courage years later to say, "I think I'll go to college." The league ended finally in '54. All those things that people couldn't do during the war years they could now do. They had money in their pockets, gasoline in their gas tanks, and television came out. I think that's what broke the back of that league. People could do so much more after the war. How did the war change your life? I think our whole country changed after the war when all the "Rosie the Riveters" continued to rivet when the war was over. I really believe that's one of the major problems in our world today. I think that was the beginning of the downfall of the family. The family unit started to disintegrate right after the war when Rosie kept riveting. Families found out that they could have two incomes. And now, 45 years later, parents need those two incomes to survive. Because of that, nobody's home. The kids know their baby-sitter better than they know their parents. They know their teacher better than they know their parents. Everybody seems to be going in a different direction. And I really think that all happened because Rosie was needed to rivet during the war, but when the war was over, she didn't stop. Table of Contents

Copyright 1995

Coming to Terms with the Holocaust... and Prejudice at Home JUDITH WEISS COHEN Story by Jason Gelles

There are two sides to Judith Cohen. There is the up-beat, enthusiastic side of her that I first encountered. Later on, I discovered a more serious side. She spoke in low tones, and appeared possessed by a greater force, almost enchanted. Life was difficult before World War II. Her father had a hard time finding work during the Depression. Life was a game of hop-scotch between homes. Business would go bad and her family would move, again and again. Finally they moved to a small flat on Taft Street in Providence and Judith went to Hope High School. My big worry at that time, as I remember, in 1939 and 1940 was whether I was going to be able to go to college. Nobody in my family had ever been to college, but I wanted to go. Judith Cohen took a job at the Outlet Department Store after graduating from high school. It was a time when she felt her dreams rise. I worked from January 1940 to September 1940. My father had $100 that he had saved, and he borrowed $100. I earned $100, and got a $100 scholarship. The tuition was $400, and I started college. At that same time, war rumors filled the good times atmosphere that Judith had just begun to experience. We weren't at war yet, but we were beginning to hear what was happening in Germany. We were all very frightened. An aunt and uncle of my father's came over from Germany. The uncle came first, and then his wife and his children came later. They were on the last ship Hitler allowed to leave. That uncle could not come to this country unless somebody here would support him if he ever couldn't get a job. My father did not have much money. He just had his job and no savings at that time, and the real struggle with hoping he could educated his children. But father was the one who signed for my uncle to come. If it hadn't been for my father, they would have all been wiped out. Any family that was left was gone. My

aunt's mother stayed there. They couldn't bring her, and they heard that she died of starvation in a concentration camp . So, those were the sorts of rumors that you were starting to hear. You didn't know about all the killing, about the Holocaust, but you started to hear things. Especially if you were Jewish, you were beginning to be frightened by it. I had just begun to see the other side of Judith Cohen. The side whose door was opened by the coming of the war. As more and more news came out of Germany, you just felt you wanted to do something. Hirohito was going to dominate half the world and Hitler the other half, although they both said they wanted to dominate the whole world. Hitler's plans were to wipe out the Jews all over the world. It wasn't just wiping out the Jews, it was to take over the United States. I don't think you needed propaganda. All you had to do was read Hitler's book Mien Kampf, and it was all spelled out there.She seemed to see it as if it were yesterday.I think we were all very much worried about what was going to happen to us, and to our way of life. Judith graduated from Pembroke College and in a short while decided to join the Women's Army Corps (at that time the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps) or WAAC's. I was the kind of person -- I still am -- that liked to be involved in things.Judith was sent to Georgia for basic training. That was the one time I saw the real segregation in the South. Buses with the Blacks having to sit in the back, and drinking fountains labeled "White Only." We had all led a somewhat protected life. I probably more so, because I was younger than everybody. I had never heard that kind of swearing and vulgarity. There were women who just talked that way constantly. There were women, particularly from the South, who had never had been in a place with a flush toilet. These women were very, very poor. Many of them joined the army to get fed. I had never known people like that. Judith was assigned to the New York Port of Embarkation to do what she really wanted to do -- work in the Public Relations Department on an Army newspaper. She was paid $50 a month to start, but her room, board, and clothes were provided -- much different from her earlier job with a small New York newspaper. That $50, to me, was the first real spending money I had ever had in my life. Judith experienced prejudice first hand, as she recalled: Once I was in the base hospital, supposedly asleep, and somebody started making remarks about Jews. I didn't say or do anything that time. Then it happened again the next day -- this time I got up and criticized her very strongly. She never said anything like that to me again. She spoke against Italians. She spoke against Blacks.

She told a story of her own college. I do remember something very striking at Pembroke. There was a Black woman in my class, and she could not live in the dormitory. My friends and I were very upset, but at that time, nobody knew about activism. You respected teachers, deans, and so forth. You wouldn't dream of going and complaining about something. You never had heard about anybody who had started a movement, or had a protest. When I went into the WAC's, I was friendly with a woman who had gone to Vassar College. The same thing had happened at Vassar, but they had a protest. I was struck by that. This Black woman did drop out of college the second year, and we felt very badly about it. I wish now that we had done something about it. There was also antiSemitism that we didn't know about at the time. I recently read an article in the Rhode Island Jewish Historical Association Notes, about a quota for Jewish women at Pembroke. While I was there, there was a quota for Jewish women in the dormitories. I mentioned that I was Jewish. I felt that I was going out on a limb and felt awkward that she made no immediate response. Those were the days when you never told people you were Jewish. You just...it didn't come up in...I don't remember how old I was the first time I said " Well, you know," to somebody "Well, you know, I'm Jewish." That took a lot of courage to do. When war ended, Judith left military service. Although the army had given her many memories and experiences, the most important thing that it would give her was the GI Bill. My husband to be was still over seas. I just suddenly got this brilliant idea of going to graduate school. Both Judith and her husband went back to college on the GI Bill. A few years after the war, Judith married, earned her master's degree, and had children. There was the feeling that the kind of slurs, insults, and jokes that people make about minorities had helped lead to Hitler. I can remember saying, "When you start thinking of other people as just the butt of a joke, it's not that far off to thinking they're not human beings, and you might as well burn them up and make them into soap." I think there was a very strong feeling after the war that there wasn't going to be that kind of discrimination again. Judith Cohen seems to still have this optimism today. The war had broadened her horizons socially and economically. The things that affected my life were the Depression, the Holocaust, World War II, and the Vietnam War. I think there were some personal, good things that came out of it meeting my husband, meeting lots of other people, living a different kind of life, being in the armed services, meeting the women from Vassar and finding out about activism, many things that helped me develop as a person. I don't recommend war as the way to develop as a person, but I think that it did have an effect on me -- probably changed me.

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Copyright 1995

Learning to Live Together in Good Times and Bad NAOMI CRAIG Story by Aileen Keenan

In addition to reading Aileen's edited version of the interview, you can now listen to a Real Audio presentation of the complete interview with Naomi Craig while you view images and read material related to her remembrances. You can revisit specific pages in the presentation, or begin the interview at any of several points, using the table of cues and contents.

A "church person" and defense plant worker, Naomi Craig participated and coordinated countless activities with zealous efforts, despite the heavy discrimination surrounding her. I graduated from high school in 1935. We had a big class because I went to Commercial. I took up short-hand typing; I wanted to be a stenographer. Black people had a hard time going to school. We were not taught to be proud of being Black. We weren't taught Black history. And when they spoke about Africa, it was always something negative, as if they were people that didn't know anything. It gave you a false sense. So we couldn't have a sense of pride like the young Black people do now. I had a lot of friends who were Black and a lot of friends who were white because I was an open type of person. I could bridge the gulf, but I knew there was discrimination,

particularly when I went to get a job, when I graduated from high school. I couldn't get a job. I went to offices of the different insurance companies. I was a crackerjack stenographer, and I was smart, but I was colored. When I would go down for a job, the girl in the office would look like this, and then she called for the employer. He'd come; he'd say, "Uh, uh Miss Jennings, um, yes, well the job is filled." I'd go home and call right back. "Is there a position open as a secretary in your office?" "Yes there is." By my voice, he didn't know that I was colored because I spoke the same as anybody else. And so I said, "I was just down there." "Oh," he said, "Oh were you the Miss Jennings that was down here?" I said, "Yes, I was." He said, "Oh, well one of the girls..." I said, "You said the job was open." He said, "Well, one of the girls has decided that she's going to take it." And this was the run-around that I got. When I went to the school department where they were giving out jobs to help people they said to me, "Naomi Jennings, you've done very well, haven't you?" And I said, "Yes, I have." She said, "Well," she said, "we don't have any jobs for you as a secretary or a stenographer." Because these jobs were going to white girls. I said, "There's nothing for me?" She said, "I have a little job for you taking care of these twins if you want to take that." I said, "No, thank you." And I went out. You know I was crying. I cried all the way home. I got home and I said to my mother, "I'm never going to be able to work." She said, "Why?" I said, "Because they're only giving out jobs to white people." She said, "That shouldn't be." I said, "it shouldn't be, but it is." I eventually got a job at the Outlet Company, running the elevator. All the kids would come down, and they would see you running the elevator, and they'd laugh. They'd ride up and down with you, and the store was full of people shopping and doing things like that. When the war came, women went to work for the first time in factories and driving trucks. If a delivery truck came to your house, a woman would be driving it. The women were postmen. Up until that time, we didn't have women postmen. The women were garbage people. They were because all the available young men were in the service. I started work in a war plant, Federal Products in Providence, where they made gauges and precision instruments. They taught us how to make these micrometers. We were taught how to do everything in that line. I was top notch, but I couldn't do anymore than what they had shown me. I did it so well that I could take tension in my fingers to know just how a gauge would run. That was the biggest thing for the war effort. People came in from the government telling us that we were part of the war, that we had to do the best we could, and we would make these indicators that were going out all over to precision places. We had such a feeling of being part of the war. In 1943, I was going with my husband at that time. I said, "Oh, should I marry him while the war is going on? What should we do?" We couldn't think because if he went over in the service, and got killed, then what? I had to make up my mind because he only had a

short time. Finally, we did decide we'd be married. We married on a Friday and he left on a Sunday. He went first to Fort Devens and went right up to Wyoming. I never went out to Wyoming to see him because it was desolated out there. It was awful. You had a segregated army. All the blacks were together. They weren't getting the same supplies as the white contingent. It really wasn't fair. It made people feel like this is our war, too. We were all in it together, and our men were going over. Then my brother went into the Navy, and my sister's husband went. Then the war was coming nearer to us. I don't think I felt sad during the war. I was writing to my husband, and getting letters from him. You go home at night to see if you had a letter, and write letters as soon as you got home. Your whole life was writing and getting letters. I went to a Methodist Church. I did religious work, too. I would go down to the Cape in the summer to open up a Sunday school for young children, and for people who came to work in kitchens for the very wealthy people who would go down to the Cape. I would play the piano and sing at church. There were servicemen down there because there was Fort Devens. Those colored servicemen, they said colored at the time, would come up to the church, and we would open our house for them, and have friendship times for them, so they wouldn't feel so lonesome. The USO's did not have many places for colored people, mostly whites were in the USO's. So the colored people made it nice for the colored soldiers. It was discrimination all the way through. I was a church person. I taught Sunday School to young children. It was hard trying to keep them interested and keep them thinking, particularly if their fathers had gone. We had children without their fathers. Mothers got interested in church more because there was a war, and a lot of people who never went church started going. Churches were full. Then it got to be so we knew that this was war, and this was terrible. People were getting killed. When somebody came home that was a friend of yours with a leg or and arm off, the sleeve would be hanging empty, then you began to think, oh, this is terrible. By '43, my husband had gone into the service. My two sisters came home, and it made it kind of crowded. So I went to live with my mother-in-law who lived by herself because both her boys were in the service. I would go to work; she stayed at home. She had all my food ready when I got home. She was delightful - the most wonderful mother-in-law that ever was - a beautiful woman. Roosevelt, to us was like a hero. Oh, he was great. Whatever he said, we believed. If he had told us that we were going to win this war in three days, I think I would've believed it, but that's how we thought of him. When he was on the radio, every house was quiet, even little babies would be quiet. And you would listen when he was talking, "My fellow Americans..." (Laughs.) "There he is!" and we'd listen to him. And his wife, I loved

Eleanor Roosevelt. She didn't come into her own until after he died, as a speaker and as a great person for civil rights. She was the most fair president's wife. And when Marian Anderson, this Black woman, was supposed to sing on the stairs right in front of the Washington Monument and nobody wanted her to do it, Mrs. Roosevelt had her sing. And then all the people of color just loved Mrs. Roosevelt. There was a war going. Our men were fighting in this war. Why couldn't we have some kind of freedom in this country here too? After a while I thought the war was getting awfully tiring. I thought it ought to come to an end. I wanted to be able to go on with my life with my husband. I wanted to see if I was going to have a family, and he was going to come home, and how we were going to buy a house and what we were going to do. It was hard to find a job because everybody came home at the same time. When my husband came back to Federal Products, they didn't have a job for him. Oh, they told him all the time while he was in the service, when he came home his job would be open. And my husband's job was pretty good at Federal Products. But when he came back, somebody else had it, and they couldn't just put the other person off. They would give him a job, but it would have been a menial job. So, he had to start all over again. That was difficult, very difficult. We had a terrible time buying a house. Oh yes we did, because we were Black. We went to buy a house and they said, "Well, uh." When my husband came home, he just got home from the service, and they said we couldn't get a mortgage. You weren't shown houses in the sections you wanted to buy. They would take you over to a place that had all rundown houses. When they asked me on the telephone, "Would you like to see a house?" I would say, " Well certainly." And we would meet at the house. And I would go there and his face would fall because I would be a Black woman. Talking over the telephone, he wouldn't know. Do you feel that what women were expected to do and be changed in any ways when the war was over? Yes, they did change. They had gotten the feeling of their own money. Making it themselves. Not asking anybody how to spend it. And they were spending it. And then when their husbands came home, it was kind of like, "Oh." You had to ask for money. You had to begin to curtail the things that you would have been buying, had it been your own money. The war taught them how to stand on their own two feet. So, when their husbands came home, a lot of them didn't know how to be wives anymore because they had gotten kind of bossy. It was hard to get adjusted to somebody telling you "do this" when you've been doing what you want. How did the war and the immediate post-war years affect your overall life and the lives of those closest to you?

I always had a feeling my husband was coming home. But I do feel that when my husband came home, he could've had a better job. People did not appreciate the sacrifices that Blacks had to make. I felt that I could've had a better home to have moved into at that time. I felt that the banks weren't kind to us as they were to white people, loaning them money to get them started. We couldn't get mortgages like other people could. I felt that people didn't appreciate that we went through the same things the whites did. Another thing that the war did for us, it opened up our eyes to know that in trouble you're close. When a tragedy happens, it brings you together. Why can't we live this way after the tragedy? When peace came, people began to separate and then you began to see racial conflicts. Should not have been. Should've been, we were with you during the war when things were hard, when a tragedy struck, when a hurricane came, we were all together. Now, there's peace, we need to be together, too. That's what we need to learn. To live together in the good times as well as the bad times. Table of Contents

Copyright 1995

Her Students Became Soldiers MARY BRISTOW Story by Kristen Elliott

Mary Bristow, a South County native, is a quiet, retired English teacher who helped out in the war effort and kept in contact with her many students who went away to war. A resident of West Kingston, she still lives in the house where she was raised. I began teaching English in 1936 and loved it. Once the war started, many of my students were drafted, or as soon as they graduated they had to sign up for the war. I really felt bad when the students were drafted. they were so young, only eighteen years old, with so little preparation. They were leaving, maybe never to return. Those who did leave sent many letters to me. Oh, I had hundreds and hundreds of letters. I can remember one particular letter that still sticks in my mind. A boy named Charlie was in the Navy, at boot camp in northern New York, I have forgotten just where. It was

the most impressive sight that he had ever seen -- just hundreds and hundreds of boys all in white uniforms, all lined up to receive communion. He described the whole scene in great detail. It was a lovely letter. I saved it for years. Another boy was stationed down around New Orleans and he wrote me weekly letters. None of the letters were censored. They never ever told secrets. They were very careful. They were very nice letters. They were not written as though they were written to an English teacher; they were written to a friend. What other work did you do for the war? I was also a air raid warden instructor. I went to Providence, to the armory on North Main Street, and there we were trained. We then came back and conducted schools where we taught air raid wardens procedures of how to act in case of an air raid, how we were to keep people in shelters during the air raids, and what to do with casualties. I didn't particularly enjoy being an air raid warden instructor, but I was glad to help. I was glad to do it. I was doing my patriotic duty. During the war we had food rationing , and I was on the board for sugar rationing. That was a very special project. I was the local chairman for Kingston and South Kingstown. Sometimes I was very angry because some people came in and filled out applications for more sugar than they were entitled to. They said they were going to can peaches and pears, and I know that they were not going to do that, but most people were very cooperative. The sugar rationing went very well. Another thing we did was to can fruits for the hospital. Groups of women throughout South Kingstown gathered at the Neighborhood Guild and we canned. We worked for days and days and days canning peaches for the hospital and then they served them to the patients. But this was a community action. At school we had drives collecting metal, and people brought in pots and pans right out of their kitchens. Oh, my, what a mess! But, we did it. In school we sold war bonds, and we had competitions in school to see which homeroom would sell the most. This was another sign of patriotism. I was glad when the war ended and the boys could come back and finish their education. We had one big class of returned veterans, and one particular teacher had all the veterans in her homeroom and she just loved them. They were more mature. They had had such experiences, you just can't imagine. I know three of the boys were having difficulty with English, so I used to tutor them during a free period to help them. Somtimes they couldn't even talk about their experiences; they were just so deep that it would have torn their hearts right out to relay the stories. Table of Contents

Copyright 1995

A Pacifist in a Time of War RACHEL HIGGINS Story by Hannah Gould

Rachel Higgins is 83 years old. I was struck by how much she realized the prejudices of people during the war, and of how she stuck to her philosophy of peace. My roots as a peace person started when I was seven years old, during the First World War. My father was a minister, and he kept getting all this propaganda, and he would throw it into the wastebasket. I got very curious, and I went into the wastebasket and pulled everything out! And what did I see? These ghastly pictures of what the Germans were said to have done to the Belgians, piles of babies' hands that they'd cut off! They were piled way up and these things were so awful! I shouldn't have seen these pictures, but my father didn't know that I was going to get into the wastebasket. I filled my mind with that stuff. Some of it was propaganda and exaggeration, but some of it was no doubt true. So that really, really impressed me, and I had dreams of bombs falling. I don't know any other child around whom it bothered, but it really sank into my subconscious. That's how I first became a peace activist. When World War II came along, I think it was everything together; it sort of added up to the fact that I was not to be a war person, I was to be a peace person, and devote my life to that sort of thing. Peace was my commitment from that time on. All I knew about the war, before America got into it, was what I had read in the paper. There was a lot of pacifist sentiment over here about what was going on. I don't remember the United States being that interested in getting into the war, but it was being talked about in some government circles that maybe we should enter the war. I felt absolutely numb after the invasion of Poland and after Pearl Harbor. I can almost feel it today; I just sort of went into a state of shock. Just about that time I signed a pledge which was put out by the National Pacifist Organization. This was a pledge that I would not take part in any military activities or anything of the sort. I found it very difficult to know where to draw the line, and I spent night after night agonizing over it, but of course it was silly because I'd never be called on to fight. I was looking around to see what I could do in a non-violent way so I got a job in the Red Cross headquarters.

It was really hard for me to know where to draw the line about which activities were peaceful, and which activities supported the war. There were some people who came around to collect coat-hangers for metal. The government needed metal to build weapons and that sort of thing. I thought, "Shall I give them coat hangers: That will help them make armaments." Where does one draw the line? Well, they never did get to our house. I was relieved. In the end I came to the conclusion that one never really keeps one's skirts clean because in a world war everyone's involved if they like it or not. One of the things I noticed greatly during the war was the prejudice. There was so much prejudice for so many different racial and ethnic groups. I think people have forgotten, but Peace Dale was largely Italian during the war, and we were at war with Italy eventually, and people began to wonder about the loyalty of the Italians. There was some talk of shipping them off to internment camps. Just a little ripple that it might not be safe to have them around here. I thought it was the most awful thing I'd ever heard of. I can remember an incident of discrimination against the Japanese during the war. There was this Japanese man I knew, whose sister was in one of the internment camps. The government at the time was willing to let anyone who wanted to sponsor one of the young people, and to let them come and work. A friend of mine, with the help of the church, brought this man's sister here. Her name was Mary, and she was the most beautiful Japanese girl I've ever seen. Well, she went to South Kingstown High School, and she was very smart. There was another girl at the school whose mother was a teacher, and she was very jealous because Mary got better marks. Letters began to appear in the paper that perhaps we had a disloyal person in our midst. These were really nasty letters, letters about Mary. She was the only Japanese there, the only Oriental in our midst. These letters were trying to stir up hatred against her. Well, Father Greenan, who was the priest at St. Francis Church, knew Mary somehow or another, and he wrote a letter to the paper. It came out in The Narragansett Times defending Mary. He also stuck a copy of this letter under the door of the school. The letters ended. I guess it was a really scathing letter. What a terrible thing to do to a young girl like that. I think that the war had a good effect on women in general. I only knew one woman personally who worked, and she was very proud of it. She was a society lady, and she went into this factory and did all this mechanical work. When she came out she felt so good about what she'd done. Especially since she'd never done anything like that with her hands. I think the war did a lot for women's morale, because for once they were needed in the factories and places like that. They could do just as well as a man when they got into it. I think women also gained more self-confidence during the war. I don't remember where I was when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, but it was so stunning, I had to let it sink in gradually. I had helped to start a program called the Community Program for Peace, and we helped to protest testing for other atomic bombs. I also picketed, and leafleted, and protested the Vietnam War. I think World War II was for a good cause. At first I thought we shouldn't go into it, but after Pearl Harbor what else was there to do? I realized that there was really nothing else

to do. I think the cause of the war was to eliminate this militaristic group which really wanted to dominate the world. I don't think any of the changes during the war years affected my life, and my life today was not very changed by the war. I never lost my commitment to being a peace person. Table of Contents

Copyright 1995

A Teenage Volunteer, Too Young to Join the WACS EILEEN HUGHES Story by Ellie Kaufman

We had just finished dinner, and I think I was in the living room reading the paper. I heard my mother say, "Oh, dear God. They have bombed Pearl Harbor!" I said "What?" and she said "Pearl Harbor. That's Hawaii. Do you know how many troops we have over there?" and I said "No." This conversation is one that Eileen Hughes, a petite gray-haired woman in her mid 60's, will never forget. I interviewed her in the kitchen of her Narragansett home. The atmosphere was comfortable and homey, and Mrs. Hughes seemed eager to tell her story. Before Pearl Harbor, I didn't realize how serious the war in Europe was. I think that it was something that seemed very, very far away. We were far away from Japan and far away from Germany. It was horrible what was going on in Europe, but I don't think I realized how close it was going to hit us, until Pearl Harbor. In 1939, I was in junior high school. Like everyone else, I worked an after school job. I think I made $10 a week and I worked every night after school. This was during the Depression and everyone was poor. There weren't as many distinctions between who makes this, and who's in here, and who's down at the bottom. We were all the same and it was very tough, but everybody pulled together and we managed.

I spent my money on different things: probably cigarettes that I shouldn't have smoked, movies, ice cream, candy bars. As we got involved in the war, I noticed that many of the movies I saw were geared towards the war, especially after Pearl Harbor. I liked the war movies because they always make it look like we were winning. My brother quit high school to join the army. A lot of the boys did. A lot of the boys in my class didn't bother to graduate. Everybody was very patriotic and they quit school to enlist. There were very few boys left in my senior class when we graduated. Some of my friends' fathers were already in the service. My brother was just barely 18 and he was over in the Philippines by the time he was 19. We were angry to think that things had gone that far. I myself was interested in joining the army from the time I was a very little girl. I don't know why, but I always felt that's what I wanted. At that time, when I was growing up, the women's army was the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps, the WAAC. You could go in at 18 with parental signature. About the time I was entering my senior year of high school that was changed to 21. I was very angry because I really, really planned on going. I wrote to the President of the United States and said I just wanted to go and I didn't think it was fair. I thought they should let me go, but they didn't. Instead, I did Civilian Defense. We spotted airplanes. We had to go to classes to be able to recognize them. I put in over 1,500 hours spotting planes. We had air raid drills and most of us volunteered and did messenger work. It was kind of scary. We were blacked out here. All the houses in Narragansett had to be totally blacked out on the ocean side. We had to buy these special shades for our windows and every night, as soon as it turned dark, you had to draw your shades. That was regulation and they had air raid wardens. If you didn't have your shades drawn, they would come and knock on your door and make you draw them. After Pearl Harbor, a lot of troops came in here and a lot of Navy came into Quonset. As a young person, I went to a lot of USO dances on Saturday nights. That was volunteer and kind of fun. All of these men that were stationed around here were young boys, all away from home who couldn't always get home for the holidays. So we'd invited them home for Sunday dinner and things like that. It was fun. I didn't want to get serious about any of them because I really wanted to go into the service. Some of my girlfriends did. They were more prone to "I'd like to get married." I was still angry because I couldn't go into the service when I had wanted to. I was very firm about it. I liked a lot of them, and I loved to dance and have fun, but I did not want to get serious. There was much fear of bombing because of the submarines rumored to be floating around nearby. I don't think most of us realized that attack was a real possibility. We had this attitude, sometimes Americans are like this, that the Americans would take care of it. I suppose we just figured because we were the U.S. of A. nothing would happen. Fortunately, nothing did, but it could have and I think some people did fear it.

After graduating from high school, I went to work at the Naval Air Station at Quonset Point. There were many jobs up there. My mother was a school teacher, and I just walked right into once-and-a-half of what she was making. It was incredible. It was because of the war, there were good jobs for us then. It's an unfortunate thing, but the war brought prosperity. Of course, then there was rationing. We were just beginning to get used to having a few things more when we got cut back. You couldn't get sugar, and often we'd have the tickets to get the meat, but it wasn't available. It was a hardship, but you learned to live with it. Some people found ways of getting around it, but we didn't do that. We just lived with it. When the war in Europe ended, I was here in Narragansett, working at Quonset Point. I came home from work, and my mother said, "The President is going to make an announcement at seven tonight." I remember saying "Oh, I hope this war is over." That was the first night that my mother had been able to get some lamb chops at the store. But we got so emotional that we couldn't eat because we knew my brother would be coming home. At about 7 p.m. President Harry Truman made the announcement, and it was like everything was so still. Then all of a sudden there was this huge uproar. You could here people screaming and it was nothing but one big party. My girlfriend came running up. She was yelling, "Yahoo! Yahoo!" and I went running down. Everybody went crazy. It was sad for those who lost loved ones. One of my girlfriends was crying because her brother had been killed. Still, it was a wonderful feeling when it was over. Eileen Hughes eventually got her wish and joined the army, serving in the Korean War. World War II. I think that probably it gave me more opportunities to do more. It's a terrible thing to say that a war does that, but I wonder if I would ever really have left Narragansett and done what I did, which was the best thing I ever did in my life. Table of Contents

Copyright 1995

Wife, Homemaker, and Civil Defense Volunteer BARBARA DREW

Story by Casey Johnson

I sigh and look at my watch. I've been interviewing Mrs. Barbara Drew for over an hour now, and Mrs. Drew has just finished her last sentence. Touched, I comment, thank her, and switch off the tape recorder. Sinking into a chair, I drift into thought, digesting what this woman has just shared with me about her experiences during World War II. In addition to being a wife and homemaker, Mrs. Drew did volunteer work for the Civilian Defense. We started out as a group of women in East Providence, I guess maybe thirty of us. We studied topography. We studied mechanics. We learned how to change tires on big trucks. We met at the Rhode Island Armory and drove trucks. These were army trucks. Old ones. Several nights my friend Lorraine Geissler and I, along with eight or nine other women, drove at night without any lights on the trucks. We were being taught how to evacuate children, the sick, and the elderly from the coastal areas in which we lived into the mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire, where the people would be safer in the event of an emergency. I was fortunate in that my husband was able to help at night to take care of the baby. Then I had a second child and my in-laws helped out a great deal. They wanted me to do what I was doing. My husband Ed -- an orchestra leader -- he led the big bands that played at the Biltmore hotel and almost every week at the Quonset Officers Club, the Newport Officers Club, and various other parties for the men that were in the service. The men were primarily from Newport and they were officers in the U.S. Navy. The Junior League of Providence and other groups of women volunteered their time and they came to these and danced with these Naval officers. I asked Mrs. Drew about the sacrifices she had to make at home during the War. Well, one had to plan very carefully. We were very limited. We could only buy a small amount of sugar. It was very difficult to get butter. That's when margarine started to become popular. It was dreadful. It was white, these lumps like lard, and you were given a little round ball that looked like a cherry. You had to put it in this white lard and let it melt and then you mixed it all up so that it became a rather ugly yellow color. And meat was very hard to get. Very hard to get. You had to have friends in the right places. At that time, during the middle of World War II, markets opened up and sold horse meat. In Olneyville there was a market there that sold nothing but equine meat. I guess everybody tried it and it was pretty hard to take. It was so bloody and disagreeable to look at. I just couldn't eat it or give it to my family. Finding the idea of eating horse meat pretty hard to take myself, I moved on to another topic -- what was happening in her south shore beach community.

At Green Hill, the government built towers across the street from our house. They also built what was supposed to resemble, and did very closely resemble, a normal Rhode Island farmhouse. Actually, it was occupied by the soldiers. And towers were built on the beach. There was communication between the towers. And every night, a truck came from Camp Burlingame loaded with vicious attack dogs. The men that were trained to take care of the dogs patrolled the beach from Moonstone to Charlestown, and back again, all night. No civilian was allowed on the beach after curfew, which was before sunset. The soldiers were looking for ships. They were looking for submarines. They were looking for any signs of life that might be the enemy in the waters between Block Island and the mainland. They on occasion discovered certain things. They found an officer's cap on the beach, right there at Green Hill. There was a place in Charlestown, which at that time was a little community building, where all these things were brought. The men from the United States government decided where they came from and why they were there and so on and so forth. It just wasn't our beach that was selected, it was being done universally, I'm sure. The coastline was a very dangerous spot. Every night was a blackout night. Every night we had to pull down these black shades -- very unattractive shades, so the lights from our house could not be seen from the outside. There was a man named Mr. Holberton who was the warden. He came by every night to make sure everybody was in total, total darkness. And if you insisted on displaying lights, you could be arrested. I considered what she had said. The U.S. government seemed dead serious about keeping America safe. I guess pulling down your shades every night was a small price to pay for the safety of you and your children. Curious about other ways in which the war effort affected her, I asked about how the ration coupon worked. Well, this area was excellent. I never had any problems. I had a ration for my gasoline. I had an "A" coupon and that's all I deserved. My husband had a "B." Doctors, ambulance drivers, and private ambulance drivers had, as I recall, a "C" coupon. Near the end of the interview, I asked her how she personally felt about World War II. I think a lot was covered up. We never really knew what happened. I knew the outline of it, but I never knew exactly what happened at Pearl Harbor until the end of the war. I don't really feel that the war changed my life to any drastic extent, except that it lead me to a, well, little more feeling of independence. wondered if she thought the war era was a better time in comparison to the Great Depression. Her response was immediate. No. I found the war being worse in every way -- no comparison. More distasteful. More devastating. The Depression was money. These were lives. The war was lives.

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Copyright 1995

A School Teacher Minds the Home Front HELEN OSLEY Story by Aileen Keenan

As she eagerly describes the active life she led during World War II, Helen Osley's laugh lines are visible. Her excited manner reveals her story as an elementary school teacher, intimately and cheerfully involved in the war efforts. I graduated from Rhode Island College of Education in 1941, the year the war started. I remember Pearl Harbor very plainly. I had gone somewhere that afternoon with a friend of mine. We were coming back from Wakefield, at the intersection just past the bicycle shop. The car radio was on and the announcement came on. We were just plain excited. That's all anybody talked about. I didn't know much about the war in Europe and Asia. We would discuss it in college in our history courses. I read the papers and magazines. But it still seemed very remote and very removed. Because we were right on the water, everyone did have a feeling that if anything happened, we would probably be one of the first to know, especially when they started building Fort Greene. That was a big fortification down at Point Judith. We were in a bad situation. We had Newport across the bay and Quonset right up the bay. I knew my husband would be going. He probably wouldn't have had to, except he wanted to. Everybody felt it was their duty. The work he was doing at Fort Greene was deemed important enough not to be called. He had a couple of deferments, but he refused the last, and he went in. We were married two months before he went to Officers Training School and soon after he went to Scotland. I taught at Narragansett Elementary School. I hate to tell you what we were paid, $17 a week. So, that's your big pay for teachers in those days. I truly think it was awfully hard for the teachers who boarded in town. By the time they paid board, they didn't have much left.

When I first went to teach, that was in the fall of 1941, I had a list of my students, and there were probably about 25. Soon there were over 40 students. This was because of Fort Greene and Quonset. Quonset was booming. Construction was going on everywhere. Many, many people moved into town. These were children of transient workers, really. I had children from all over the country. Their parents were either in the service, or they were working at Quonset. I think that that was good for the children, too, to meet somebody from outside the community. Because of supplies, food was rationed. You had stamps for everything, clothing, shoes, things like that. It was sort of a job, juggling all this. Also, gasoline was rationed. You had these little books for everything, good for a certain length of time . If you ran out before that, too bad. So it was kind of fun figuring out what you were going to do. Sometimes the store would get a bunch of stuff in, but you were only allowed to take so much. There was a lot of hoarding, and a lot of black market stuff going on. People made some kind of deal under the table and would all of a sudden come up with a few steaks. We never went without. We never starved or anything like that. My mother was a very smart shopper. When rationing was first announced, I worked on the Rationing Board. All the teachers were asked to do this. People had to come and give their names, occupations and addresses to pick up these books. How did people show their patriotism? Mostly by going along with civilian defense protocol, obeying all the different rules and regulations. You had to take some kind of course for any of the civilian defense work. I worked as an air raid warden for quite a while and that was kind of fun. You could go out and stop cars. Order people off the street. It's silly when you think about it. We had a good time. They had air raid drills, like fire drills at school, except this was a total town thing. The siren would go off. We wore helmets and had these belts and a billy club and a flashlight. People were ordered off the streets, to go to a safe place if they possibly could. Cars had to come to a halt. I had to patrol on Narragansett Avenue. Whenever we heard the siren go off, I strapped on my helmet, belt, and billy club and took off. At the old town hall, there was a huge switchboard connected to Newport Civilian Defense, that had to be manned all the time. I put in a couple of hours a week. Every once in a while, a light would flash there and you had to say, "Narragansett Headquarters," and they would say, "Just checking." And then every once in a while they would pull a fake alarm. When this buzzer fell or whatever would go off, I had to get in contact with every person on the Civilian Defense Board to notify them that there was an attack imminent. They would say an attack was within ten minutes and I had to get everything coordinated in that time. I was scared to death!

Blackouts were another thing I did during the war. I would go out one night a week with this woman who lived a couple houses down. We had a certain area that we had to walk to make sure that there were no lights shining on the east and on the south - towards the water. How did you spend your leisure time? I would go back and forth to friend's houses. There was a good bit of that during the war. Somebody would call up and say, "We're going to have a pot luck dinner. Bring something." And all of us would meet over there and everybody would bring something. It was fun. I wasn't particularly happy when my husband went overseas, especially when I found out I was pregnant. He didn't see his first child until she was almost two. I was able to send pictures. He didn't get all of them. We used the V-mail. It was an envelope and the writing paper at the same time. It was very, very thin, and you had to write quite small. Then you could fold it up and down again, and mail that. That was, I think, because there was so much mail going it helped on the weight. Our mail was censored. You had to be careful about what you said, and they had to be extremely careful about what they wrote back. Every other day, we went to pick up mail and to mail our letters to our husbands. At the same time, we would go across the street to the market and say to Bill, "Are there any cigarettes?" He would say, "I saved a pack of these for each one of you." We never knew what it was going to be. There were some pretty weird brands. Stockings were awfully hard to get. Of course, most everybody wore silk stockings. Nylon was just beginning to come out, and you couldn't get them. So, during he spring and fall, I used to paint my legs with leg make-up. We planted a victory garden. I shouldn't really call it a victory garden because my father always had a garden. My father worked for the electric light company, but he was really a farmer at heart. We saved paper and cans, all your cans. After you used them, you rinsed them out, took the label off, took the top and bottom off them, and then flattened them. You could save quite a stack. Looking back on it now, I was fairly young, and the war was exciting. There's no getting away from it. It was an exciting time. But it was a scary time, too. You had so many people that you knew and loved and all of a sudden they weren't there anymore. I had good friends who were living in the same way that I was. We comforted one another. We saw a lot of one another. We shared letters that we got and other things. But when it was over, it was sort of, well, the war is over. Let's get on with our lives. Our real lives now. Table of Contents

Copyright 1995

"What did you do in the war, Grandma?"

KATHERINE O'GRADY Story by Kathy O'Grady

On a sunny Saturday afternoon I climbed the familiar narrow stairway at my Grandma's house. This trip was different than any I had made before; I was going to interview her. At first I was a little nervous, but soon I just relaxed and listened to the familiar voice of my Grandmother Katherine O'Grady. In 1939 I lived in East Providence with my aunt. I had moved from Boston where I was originally from. I worked at Gibson's, a soda fountain at the bus stop on Westminster Street. I was very busy. Servicemen from all over used to come in. I mad $15 for a 48 hour week. I bought my own clothes, paid my own expenses, car-fare, whatever I wanted, and I'd go to the movies. If you had a five dollar bill then you were very wealthy. I met my husband while I was working at Gibson's. He had a construction job building an air base up in Newfoundland. When Pearl Harbor broke out, he came back home and we got married. All the fellows had gone into the service. His brothers were all gone. All the men were leaving. My husband had a deferment because his job was considered important to the defense, and we had a nine month old son. But he wanted to go so badly that he quit the job. They turned his name into the draft board, and he went into the service very happily. He was shipped out to Okinawa. He was a Seabee and worked in the construction battalion which builds bases. The Seabees would go ahead of the Marines to make the landing and do all that. He went from one island to the other across the Pacific.

What did you do in the war, Grandma? After my husband went into the Seabee's I quit my job at Gibson's and went to work in a woolen mill, Lister's, which before the war was just a normal routine job. When the war started they need wool very badly so this was considered a service job. In other words, it was important. At the mill the government used to send out all the Purple Heart soldiers to talk to us and tell us that we couldn't take time off, and pushed all this patriotism on us. One particular day I had the day off and they went to my house. I wasn't home. It would have been embarrassing to have soldier with a Purple Heart on asking why I wasn't at work. What kind of work did you do at the mill? Well, the wool would come in just like they sheer it off the sheep. It was dirty and they'd put it in like, they called it a carding machine, and it would be probably a hundred foot long. They took that and it would be in rolls and would go into a barrel, you know like you'd take cotton and push it into a crack. Those barrels would be brought to my aunt's machine and she would put it through, maybe eight or ten of those barrels. It would make a big ball and a roll almost like you'd have a ball of rope or twine. I think I go $27 a week, so it did pay more. The soldiers needed woolen blankets. At the time all servicemen were issued their clothing, their blanket, their bedroll, the whole bit. The blankets that came home after war had traveled all over the world. The wool was all used for the defense; what they called a defense contract. If the factory fulfilled its contract and did good work it had an "E" for excellence. The mill had an "E" -- it was on a flag that would fly over the plant. We were very proud of it, because it meant that we were doing our part. Who took care of your baby while you were at work? I had a young baby and I had a place to leave him in a nursery. At the mill I worked every day and I had all my evenings off, and Saturdays and Sundays, so that I was home alone with my son. I used to take him to Bristol on the trolley and we'd have picnics on the beach. I was lucky in that there was a Salvation Army day nursery on the street I lived on. They only charged $3 a week. After I moved to my own little apartment in East Providence, I used to have to take my son on the trolley car, bring him over to the nursery, and leave him there, and go back down the street and get on another trolley and get to work, and the same thing at night. If he was sick I either had to stay home with him or take him up to my sister's; maybe his grandmother would take care of him. One time he had scarlet fever, and the doctor put him in the hospital. The doctor figured where I was all by myself and my husband was in

the service, it would have been too much to be at home with him. This way I could come and go to work. Was there a shortage of food? Beef was very short. People ate a lot of chicken, and if you could get fish, eggs. Spam was a basic commodity. Everybody ate it. I remember a place downtown that sold horse meat (See Ration). My sister and I decided we would try it so we bought a couple of pounds of hamburg and a couple of steaks. We cooked the steaks for our husbands and all the while we couldn't eat them because we knew what it was, but the men thought it was great! Did you follow the course of the war? Oh, yes! We would listen to the radio at night and they would tell you. One particular Sunday night the Germans sunk the Wales and the Repulse which were British ships. When you're listening to it on the radio, it was like it was actually happening. It's very profound to think this is actually happening somewhere in the world and you're sitting safe in your house. There was one particular program which made a big impression on me about a woman called the "Beast of Belsen," her name was Elsa Koch. I never forgot that name. She used to make lamp shades out of human skin. How did you keep in touch with your husband? They had what you call a V-mail letter. It went through like a micro-dot, micro-film I guess it was. You wrote these letters and they went through a computer and when your husband opened it, it was like an envelope and a sheet of paper, and if anything was said that wasn't right it was just blocked out. I did get a few letter with the pieces cut out. If there was anything very interesting or important in the back of it that went too, and you couldn't just use one side of the paper because it was a premium, especially for the men overseas. What was it like when you heard the war had ended? They had a big victory parade in East Providence. I allowed my son to go with all his friends and they marched in it, and he was just a toddler. At that time we were all so naive, not only young people, even adults, grandparents, the whole world was naive, until after the war. Do you think the war changed you? After the war things changed because women found out they could go out and they could survive. They could really do it on their own. That's where I think women's lib really started. So the whole world has changed. Everybody's more aware of everything. We were very sheltered up until 1941.

I think it made us more aware. It made me mature. When my husband went in the service, I often used to think if anything happened to him, our baby was my complete responsibility. At 21 that was quite an awesome thing to think that you had a small human life that you were responsible for.