GROWING UP IN THE 40's

I am tired from all this hard work so let's take a break from it for a while.  

I know that this may come as a surprise to you but, I am not a professional writer.  This part will be a series of stories, lies, and casual observations on my life and times growing up in the 1940's.   We will do the 50's later and there will be a lot more of our family on the wild frontier.

WW II song click here.

One of my earliest memories was of our country being at war.  You may have heard of it.  They called it World War II.  (It was in all the newspapers.)  Daddy was working as a machinist at the Naval Ordinance Plant in Millegeville, GA and everyone else was going in the military so Daddy tried to volunteer for the Navy.  There was a small problem, he was somewhat color blind and failed the Navy exam so he tried the Army.  The Army physical was that they would feel of you and if you were warm, you were in.  His job was making shells for the big naval guns.  Daddy had a necessary job and would not have been drafted anyway and having a small child (me) provided another reason why he would not have had to go.

Daddy left for training and Mom and I moved to Atlanta to live with Mom's Mother and Father.  While living with them I remember helping pull a child's wagon filled with cans mashed flat and used cooking grease and fat down to be turned in at the A&P store to be used in the war effort. 

We think now that the US population was safe in WWII but that was not known then.  An entire bomber plant complex in California was covered with camouflage netting and looked like a suburban subdivision from the air.   The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor with planes from aircraft carriers a long way  from their country and the Germans were sinking our ships just outside of our harbors.  The Germans were also bombing England, so it was not known if they could or would bomb us.

I noticed that they would close curtains at night but hadn't thought why.  The war was far away from us but the people didn't know that it would stay that way.  There was a knock at the door one night and there was a man wearing a World War I steel helmet standing there and he told Granddaddy that he had a light showing.  Granddaddy thanked him and closed the drapes tighter as he explained to me that the man was our air raid warden. 

The old time radio was great.  I remember lying on the floor in front of a radio as big as a chest of drawers with the amber light behind the dial and listening for hours at night.  Of course, nobody had air conditioning back then so everyone had open windows and doors in the summer and you could walk down the street and not miss any of the popular radio shows.  Many of the popular radio shows transferred over to early TV such as "The Loan Ranger", "Gunsmoke", and "The Great Gildersleve" comes to mind.

Early TV was a wonder to me.  TV stations didn't sign on with

programming until late afternoon or evening.  At other times, if they were even broadcasting anything, it was a "Test Pattern".  The patterns would vary, I guess, but I remember the one with an Indian head with feathers and a lot of small ticky marks around the screen.  The reason for this was

you needed to turn the TV on early so it could warm up and you would need to adjust everything so that when programming started you would be ready.

Very few people even had TV's back then and I remember going into a friends house after dark and walking through a  dark living room full of neighbors sitting in folding chairs all around the room who had come over to watch the new TV.  A few small boys, me included, were quite often standing on the sidewalk outside of the hardware store watching whole cowboy movies through the front window.   

Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
Will Rogers