HIGH SCHOOL DURING WWII AND ITS END

Thanks to you kind folk who commented on my last blog. The concern and support felt good.

And now this is a segment from my "Riding in the Back Seat." I've tried to keep each section to 1000 words more or less, not counting the title. This one makes it exactly. What you see in it depends on your age, of course. I hope you find something of nostalgia, history, or comedy (how camp!) in it.

CARRYING THE TORCH

In September 1943, when we were bussed in from Forestville to become part of the Bristol High School class of 1947, the heaviness of WWII, the most widespread war in history, accompanied us. Bristol buzzed with activity, especially at New Departure Ball Bearings. Rumors claim that at least one of the clock companies did secret work for the war effort. Anyone who could work was employed, at high wages. Day care centers provided care for employee’s children. Air raid spotters and Wardens did the work I’ve described earlier, most with greater efficiency than Hallie and I demonstrated. When we recited allegiance to the flag, we pledged to “one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Visits to the movies, largely cheerful musicals, began with newsreels of war, horrible but distant except for habitual fear for the guys (sic) fighting overseas, and for the people living there. Isolated in our own freshman building, we concentrated on being teenagers. Miss Jones gave me an A with the comment “Excellent capture of an experience” for an essay I wrote claiming Thelma’s misadventure at People’s Forest as my own. Nothing sufficiently exciting had happened to me. In the spring I phoned Eddie McHugh to ask him if he wanted to go to the dance. His answer was “no.”

As summer vacation began and we anticipated, with some dread, our move to the big high school building in the fall, news came that changed the atmosphere we breathed. On June 6, 1944, as my parents celebrated their twenty-seventh anniversary, D-Day, the bloody but ultimately victorious battle of Normandy, began. Hope, a sweet, shallow-breathing, painful emotion, shaded our fun in the sun.

In 2001 our family visited Omaha beach. Feeling like hallowed ground, row upon row of crosses and Jewish stars brought order out of what had been terrible chaos. A few years ago an offensive e-mail made the circuit focusing on the crosses there, claiming that battle as evidence that we are a Christian nation. Wrong! It took all of us.

In August 1944, just before our sophomore year, tension began to yield as newsreels announced that all of Northern France was under allied control. Sadness, gloom, and dirges prevailed, however, in April when President Franklin D. Roosevelt died on the twelfth of the month. Our class history pointed out, “The President of the United States passed away before being able to rejoice at the end of hostilities in Europe” Harry Truman was sworn in. Who?

The dirges were personal for us as Uncle Everett died of heart failure at just about the same time, leaving Aunt Gerda alone, and the one who finally had to move in with my aging Grandpa Anderson to care for him until the end of his life at age ninety-two.

Close to the end of our sophomore year, on May 8, 1945, Germany’s unconditional surrender was announced and hope became more excitement than dread. Before the newsreels at the movies the bouncing ball led us in singing, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again ..”

That summer I learned to type. My parents insisted I should, but there was no hope of my taking that course in school; kids in the college curriculum were banned as there were only enough typewriters to serve students in the business courses. So I traveled daily that summer to a typing course in a private business school in Bristol. I became sufficiently proficient in QWERTY to make some extra money typing papers in college.

I’ll bet part of my parents’ motivation was the fact of my terrible penmanship. The Palmer method of wide circles and up and down motions in the early grades hadn’t done much for legibility, so I imagine typed papers in themselves might have biased teachers in my favor. On the other hand, I’ve claimed that the reason I got so many As in my bluebook exams was the fact that teachers just threw up their hands in despair for their eyesight with an “Oh what the heck! Call it an A and move on.”

The lack of room in the typing class may also have reflected what was an apparent growing population of Bristol teenagers. My memory is vague, but I recall that our days were divided in two, so that some of us went to school in morning sessions and the others in the afternoon. This isn’t a real memory, but I’ll guess I preferred the afternoon assignment. I still slept well, long, and late in those days.

In the meantime, adults were creating for themselves the perpetual problem of how to deal with teenagers. One solution was Teen Town as reflected in this quote from ‘The Torch,” our yearbook. “… many of our classmates could be found after school or in the evening at Teen Town. This teenager’s haven was something new in our town and attracted many of the students.” I think my attitude was closer to the truth. I resented being labeled as a member of some group that needed containment. I don’t remember that Teen Town lasted very long.

Just before we began our junior year, On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay dropped “Little Boy,” the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT on Hiroshima, Japan, a city of 250,000, 70,000 of whom were killed instantly, another 70,000 of whom died of radiation within the next ten years. The bombing of Nagasaki followed on August 9. We were shocked and even gleeful, having no way to anticipate what it would mean that we had just initiated the atomic age. What we did know was that we started our third year in high school celebrating the Japanese surrender on September 2. Euphoria, an all-body wildness I’m not neurologically wired to experience often, zinged through our personal atomic structures.

The War was over. We would live in peace! Our Glee Club practiced “One World” for our participation in the state chorus: “One world built on a firm foundation; one world no longer cursed by war…