Special Edition

Flashback

“Everyone was so joyous when the war wasfinally over.”Shirley Norwood, page 3

Magazine

FlashbackMagazine

Authors and Editors:

Grace ShomakerLuke walkerRachel KraussHaley Durr

Interviewees:

Shirley NorwoodPhyllis SwindellBill CadwalterMarj CadwalterFrankie WelfeldSkip WelfeldJohn Burress

Puhlished on December 1, 2015

cont

ents

Page 3..................................................................big war in a small town

Page 4....................................A brief chat with Skip and Frankie welfeld

Page 5..................................................................Family through the war

Page 7......................................................An interview with John burress

About this issue...This issue of Flashback is dedicated to World War II. The war was one of the most important events in the history of the world and holds special significance in the United States as well. We felt it was important to speak to individuals who had lived through the war and remembered what it was like to be in our country during such a vital world event. As a news publication, we also felt as thought it was important to discuss the media coverage and reporting that took place during the war. We wanted to know how the individuals that we spoke to got their news and how they found out about things going on so far away. Our reporters have heard stories of saddness, fear, triumph and victory. We would like to share those stories with you in this special edition of Flashback Magazine. For more information please visit www.flashbackmag.com.

In the 1940’s in small town Marce-line, Missouri, radio and newspaper were Shirley Norwood’s lifelines. With the departure of “their boys”, as she called them, a big awareness took over her community.

“The high school parade would come down the blocks with the vets walking with everyone and I was in the band and would march behind them along with the boy scouts,” Shirley reflected.

“I remember when Armistice Day

am ashamed to admit, but I remem-ber my father talking about how we needed to ‘get those japs’ though no one understood the gravity of the situation.”

Shirley mentions how no one in her town could conceive how big the bomb actually was and the amount of destruction it actually caused. She gets emotional again remembering the first time she sympathized with the Japanese.

“Finally we saw a picture. It was a black and white photo of a little girl running away from the bomb and her skin was burned and her clothes had been fried off. It was the first picture I saw that really humanized the enemy.”

Truman didn’t want to bomb, Shirley says, but he knew it had to be done. Her brother Richard wanted to volunteer for the air force and began working with intelligence on the islands off of Japan. She says how her mother was always so fearful that he was caught in the middle of the fighting.

“One day I went to the library to look for a map. The librarian was able to point out to me where Rich-ard was so I could show mother that he wasn’t in the fighting.” Even in the midst of the war ef-fort, she doesn’t recall ever feeling unsafe. She says how their town was sure they were safe from any poten-tial bombings or attacks. That didn’t stop them from preparing for the war in Marceline. “We had a very large victory gar-den in one part of our yard. We had chickens and mother canned; it was very common for all the rural ladies to do that.”

Shirley talks about how she would stand with her mother in line to get rations of butter and sugar with their food stamps. These

Big War in a Small TownGrace Shomaker McLean, VA

was declared. There was such a sense of patriotism in town and everyone felt it. I was in high school when FDR died and I was so moved that I wrote a poem.”

She recalls the first couple lines of the poem and was visibly emotional almost as if she was reliving that day again. She recalls how little was known about how sick the president really was but that he was so im-portant to the American people for being a cheerleader on the radio.

“After the fighting in Germany was over, we anticipated the end of the war in Japan. Once it was over, there wasn’t much more buzz about it in the media because we all anticipated winning.”

Due to the lack of immediate cov-erage available, Shirley remembers how she and no one else knew the day Japan was going to be bombed. Even when the bomb had been dropped, much of the US didn’t get the news until later.

“At this time a huge portion of the country supported the bombing. I

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Rachel Krauss Chicago, IL

food stamps typically lasted them a month before they needed to go back and get another ration.

“We would get a ration of butter and then it was my job to stir in the capsule to make it turn yellow. We learned how to make chocolate cake without any eggs. It wasn’t very good but we didn’t have much of a choice.”

The victory gardens were a signifi-cant war effort in small town Mis-souri as well as all over the country. Many of the farmers in her town were in the service so a family like Shirley’s had to begin victory gar-dens. One of the more prominent memories she has of the media at this time was the recipes they would find in the newspapers. She men-tions how newspapers started pub-lishing different recipes they could make that didn’t involve the foods that were being rationed. Often times these would leave out ingre-dients like sugar, eggs, and butter so the final products were not always delicious.

“Towards the end of the war when I was in high school, two of my friends volunteered for the army and one of them, David, was actually killed.”

Even in the small town of Marceline, the model for Disneyland’s Main Street, USA, Shirley Norwood saw some of the horrors that came with World War II and was directly affect-ed by the war, as were many other Americans. �

A brief chat with Skip and Frankie welfeld

What do you remember about WWII?

Skip: Almost everything. I remember Pearl Harbor day...I was at the Bears/Cardinals football game. December 7, 1941. All the newsboys were outside of the stadium with the special edition of the newspapers. There was an announcement at the stadium that all servicemen had to report back to their bases immediately. Pearl Harbor was the beginning. I remember everything.

Frankie: I remember being outside playing. I was six years old in 1941. I remember the news was blasting out the windows of different apart-ments announcing that we were in war. My father was an air raid war-ren. He would go on top of the building. They had lots and lots of them. They would drop paper bombs so people would know what it’s like to be bombed. That was the one recurring memory that I have. It was a scary time. Being as young as I was, I just didn’t know. The problem was, my birthday was the next day.

Do you remember seeing anything in newspapers? How do you remember it through the media?

Skip: Newspapers covered everything. There were pictures of all the invasions and Germany and D-Day. It was very well covered. They had correspondents that were over there taking pictures and sending them back.

How did you feel with everything going on in America?

Skip: I felt safe. It was a big war going on, but America was safe. Much safer than it is today.

Do you remember anything else?

Skip: I remember D-Day and the Philippines and they dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima. I wasn’t a baby then, I was ten years old, twelve years old. We used to collect all of the insignias on sweaters, we fol-lowed everything. We could identify all the ships. It was very important. I was 14 years old, I wasn’t a baby. My mother’s brother Uncle Jerry was a tank commander, my uncle Tiny was a sculptor and he was in the in-telligence department. He did all these maps and topography and they showed different attacks. You could see it like a toy railroad. �

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Tell me what you can remember from WWII.

P: I can remember going around and collecting even the tiniest scraps of tinfoil or aluminum. We would always keep an eye out for pots and pans. We would save all of our gum wrappers and canned soda or canned vegetables.

B: Everyone would save their grease. From bacon or sausage or ground beef. You could save the grease and sell it to the butcher - three pounds would get you ten cents. They would use it for explosives and gun powder.

M: We also had rations and food stamps. They would ration meat, sugar and canned goods.

What were the food rations like?

P: We would only get sugar once a month.

B: In our family, we would divide the sugar up. Everyone had a jar with their name on it, and my mother would fill it with our allotment of sugar for the month.

P: It was always enough food, but you had to really make it last. It was

B: I was about 12 years old.

p: I was 12 or 13 as well.

Did you have friends or family that fought in the war?

p: Our cousins Fritz and George Aiken.

M: They were both overseas. One was in the armory division, the oth-er was in ordinance or motor pool. They saw some pretty bad stuff. I can remember Aunt Jean calling my mom and telling her everything that the boys were seeing and dealing with during the war. My mom always told us everything. She wanted us to know what was going on.

B: George got banged up pretty bad because he was on the front lines. He got a couple big medals for his bravery in the war. Fritz was back on the lines a little further, a little more protected.

B: I joined the Air Force in the ‘50s during the Korean War. During World War II, the Air Force was part of the Army and was called the Air Corps.

hard sometimes.

What did you have to do during an air raid?

p: When there was one, we had to do the blackout drill. You had to make sure that there wasn’t a bit of light that was shining through the windows in your home when they turned the air raid siren on. Then there would be a man that would come down the street and he would make sure he couldn’t see anything. If he could you had to fix it. It was hard to make it so nothing came out.

M: You just had to sit in the dark. I remember one time during choir practice at a friend’s house, and air raid siren went off and we turned off all the lights. My choir teacher still played the songs and we still sang but it was in the pitch black.

Did your family have any specific role in the war effort?

p: My father was an air warden. He would walk the streets in our neigh-borhood and warn people when there was an air raid practice.

How old were you when the war started?

A Family PerspectiveAn interview with Phyllis Swindell, Marj Cadwalter and Bill Cadwalter, cousins who experienced World War II together.

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Haley Durr Pittsburgh, PA

Was there a lot of fear at home surrounding the war?

p: No not at all.

M: For the most part, everyone was supportive of the war. It wasn’t on our home soil. We didn’t have any-thing to be scared of.

Do you remember where you were when Pearl Harbor hap-pened?

p: I was reading the comics. I had them spread out on the floor in front of me and I heard it come over the radio.

M: I remember in school, we had to sit there and listen to Franklin Roo-sevelt give his declaration of war. He had a great speaking voice, although I didn’t approve of him.

How did you get your news about the war?

B: Primarily radio. And newspapers. Magazines.

M: Television wasn’t around yet.

B: We listened to radio a lot. There were regularly scheduled programs but they would interject bits of news every once in a while, about how the

war was going and if there were any new developments. We got really used to getting the news that way.

M: If you went to the movies there would be a newsreel at the begin-ning of the movie. And they would maybe have a comic like Mickey Mouse or something, and then you would go into the movie. But during the war nobody really went to the movies that much. They couldn’t afford it. It was a very special event to go to the movies.

B: They would print photographs in the newspapers, I remember that. I remember the pictures of the pris-oners in Germany and they always looked like skeletons. Stuff like that was shocking.

M: That was awful.

B: I also remember the posters. A big picture of Uncle Sam saying, “I want YOU for the United States Army.” That was all over the place.

If you listened to mostly radio, what programs were you listening to?

p: News mostly. My mother would turn on the radio for regularly scheduled news programs but she wouldn’t listen to it all the time.

B: I can remember my dad listening to Amos and Andy. He loved that show, he never missed it. But we also religiously listened to the news for information about the war.

M: Gabriel Heatter was a commen-tator that my family liked to listen to. He would always start his pro-grams with, “Ahh, there is good news tonight.” And if there wasn’t good news, he didn’t say anything. But people liked hearing that, they want-ed to hear good news.

B: Once in a while they would pick up a speech by Adolf. And it was in German of course, but his tone would give you the chills. It was evil. You didn’t even want to hear it.

Do you remember which network you listened to most?

p: We always listened to CBS.

B: CBS had the most powerful radio station I think. When I was stationed in England after the war, I could pick them up on my radio sometimes. But you couldn’t pick up anybody else.

Was the news current? Or de-layed?

B: It was current. There was a trans-atlantic cable they had stretched across the ocean and that’s where they would pick up the news.

After the war ended, what can you remember?

B: The economy slowly started to pick back up. The steel mills and stuff like that had to reorganize their businesses so that they were making peace time products instead of war time products. Things slowly started to get brighter, one day at a time. �

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What did you guys have to do back home for the war efforts? Food rations? Air Raid Drills? V FOR VICTORY was a great slogan. All were encouraged to have VICTO-RY gardens, and we did. Raise your own food and the USA could feed more of the world. As children we did exactly that. I raised chickens and sold the eggs, to my mother and others. My mother was head of the Red Cross isn Salem, Va and they took an old school and converted it into a cannery. On Saturday we worked there and helped people use Ball mason jars to pack their beans, peaches, etc and it was a full day. People like our family never complained about giving time, it was just part of the effort. Folks looked for ways to save money and buy VICTORY bonds. I would go to the post office as a eight year old and buy savings stamps, paste them in my savings book, when I got to twenty dollars I converted the book to a bond , worth $25 seven or eight years later. It raised a huge amount of money for the war effort..No air raids in Salem but Ree (wife) was at Morehead in the summer and they had blackouts every night, no lights that whowed , every window cov-ered. The German ships were off the coast very occasionally.

How did you get your news? News, as children we went to the movies on Sat mostly, ten cents and they had news reels, they always showed good news, planes dive bombing , shooting German and Jap-anese planes out of the sky, big noise booms from battle ships. This really inspired us. Newspapers received greatly censored information but we had huge headlines and dramatic reporting. Radio information was limited except President Roosevelt held “ Fireside Chats “ with news reports, maybe every few months. Every person listened to every word. We listened to mystery radio shows, “ Only the Shadow knows “.

Pearl Harbor: Do you recall where you were/what you were during when the attack occured? Do not remember much about Pearl Harbor except seeing the dev-astation in the news reels. The attack of course inflamed the nation and pro-voked an expres-sion “ you Japped me “ This meant you stabbed me in the back. As

children we had more hatred for the Japanese than even the Germans. We could not comprehend why there was a war but we never questioned our obligation to defend the free-dom of the world. I can remember VE Day, ( Victory Europe day when the Germans surrendered , we ran around screaming “ The Germans ( or the Krouts ) surrendered “ WE for course expected everything to return to normal the next day. It took

maybe two years before everything was available.

What was it like being home during the war? we were never afraid, never doubted our country would win and we would always be safe. Unlike Europe, there

“I would go to the post office as a eight year old and buy savings stamps, paste them in my savings book, and when I got to twenty dollars, I converted the book to a bond , worth twenty-five dol-lars seven years later.”

Luke Walker Richmond, Va

An Interview WithJohn Burress

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was much less chance of an invasion. School was regular, people walked and thumbed rides. Gas was ra-tioned and you had a stamp on your car, A would be top priority, unlim-ited purchase available, for govern-ment us etc. B got five or ten gallons per month. Seriously , we walked to school, 1.5 miles in the snow. It was just normal. No one complained, Tires were really hard to get, some-times cars were parked for months. I have seen them taped. Lots of repair patchessold. Speed limit 35. I love to push our car out of the drive way and we could coast a half mile almost to town before we slipped the straight gear shift into second , slipped the clutch and it would start. Great fun. We had no snack food and no one ate between meals, maybe one Dr Pepper every two weeks. We seriously did not know anyone who spent money. Few had it. My dad commuted to Washington DC on the train, left Sunday night and returned Friday in time for dinner. It was the only work available. The govern-ment had camps where men lived and did Civil Defense construction, road work, anything to be able to feed themselves. Lot of good defense jobs available but you needed to be where they were. Soldiers were honored and homes displayed a small service flag or US flag in the window to note they had a member in the service. As head of the local Red Cross my mother had to notify families of a death or serious injury. It was very difficult work and she did not share anything with us. She seemed to know everyone in Salem, population 2,500 at that time. Our phone # was 495 and we knew the

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operator and she knew all of us. Come home from school, house was NEVER locked pick up the home and ask if Mattie knew where Mama was... sometime she would say , she is working Red Cross, home by 5. Like having your on answering ser-vice. If there was an incoming long distance call , the operator would say “ person to person long dis-tance call for Glenna Burress, “ We would run screaming to hurry to the phone. �