Reply #8: Just before my eight birthday [View All]

I remember that I did not understand what was going on. My Mother and Father sent me to the store for newspapers.Back then we could trust the newspaper. I remember that since it was a Sunday the bar connected to the general store was full and no one was usually there on Sundays. Odd how you can remember trivial things like that.

My Uncle was the only close family member that went to service. My father was deaf in one ear and was 4F. He also had six children. I did not have any other male relatives, except several cousins and two of them went. All three came back safe. I remember my Uncle telling the family about the Battle of the Bulge. He said he was scared to death. It was so foggy you could not see your gun. And the guys were shooting at shadows. They started to asking the men who approached them about things in the US, ball teams, locations etc to make sure they were American. But the germans could have easily had faked the answers.

I also remember a song called "We're gonna have to slap the dirty little jap". And Uncle's sister used to come to the house and she would drag out the old record player and play it over and over and they would all clap their hands when the slap came up. Like I said I was by that time only eight years old but I knew something was terrible and I did not like the Japanese or Germans. I didn't know why but the grown ups were constantly panning them so I did also.

I also remember we used to have to walk everywhere. My father had to save his tickets as he called them for gas to get to work. We had to pull coupons out of our ration books to buy meat and a lot of other stuff. The women all wore ankle socks, they didn't have many stockings. But one thing I do remember, everyone..every single person my parents would meet on the street or any where were friendly. No yelling at each other because they were different political parties. We had old line republicans and democrats pulling together America was what America should be back then. It is a damn shame that a lot of the younger people around today could not have felt real "patriotism". Sorry to run on so long but old memories kept flooding back.