First Monday of the month, various seniors and not yet seniors get together to talk about ancestry, history (South Jersey history, Camden County history, and all kinds of history) and whatever else pops up! If you are reading this, let me say you are invited to join us!
Beginning this month, the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the War, if you count the beginning the invasion of Austria, Czechoslavakia and Poland (not all the same year, of course, but around '39), we are taking a look at World War II with a focus on the home front.
There were five of us and today, and surprise of surprises, one was a 92 year old veteran of World War II, a navy man named Tom Laverty. What a charming, lively, informative man he was and what a memory! I was stunned by his ability to remember ships, ports, dates and other details from so long ago. Tom was the second living World War II vet I had the honor to meet this week. On Sunday, I met Bob Leibrandt, an army vet who had been shot twice during the American assault on Germany by land, captured and interred in a POW camp and survived all that to live to the ripe age of 94! To me, just to make it to 90 is an accomplishment but to survive two gunshot wounds and POW imprisonment is almost a miracle.
The ladies charmed me with their memories of the homefront. One lady, now 90, was 12 when the war began and 16 when it ended. She remembered rationing and making butter with lard and yellow food coloring capsules. She also remembered hearing about the attack on Pearl Harbor on the radio.
Speaking of Pearl Harbor, another lady, Marie, brought us a real treasure, a scrapbook of the headlines from the beginning of the war to the end. There we could see for ourselves the headlines about the attack on Pearl Harbor and the first published photos of the ships on fire.
I have a couple of books that I plan to read before our next meeting, New Jersey Women in World War II, and MY LIFE, by Margaret Bourke White. I had brought a German made portable typewriter a Rheinmetall beauty that I found in a 2nd hand store for $25 once, in perfect shape with all its accessories. It was actually made a couple of years after the war in East Germany and the model serial number says "made in occupied Germany." I had several print outs of photographs of women war correspondence of whom there were at least 120 certified, reporting for magazines and newspapers like Life and Look and Colliers, all over the world, and I don't know how many women photographers.
But I do know one of the women photographers was New Jersey's own Dorothea Lange who documented the imprisonment of Japanese civilians in the West. Margaret Bourke White flew with the air force and journalist Martha Gellhorne, whose biography I am reading, went ashore with the soldiers on the Normandie Beach Invasion after stowing aboard a Red Cross rescue ship. My focus will be on the homefront and the hidden women workers of the war, a subject a little less well known.
I had a fascinating afternoon at the Charles Dougherty Senior Center today and I hope you will join us on the first Monday in August when we continue our look back at World War II. Marie promised to bring her scrapbook back again and I promise to bring my early box brownie camera and my Rheinmetall portable typewriter too!
Happy Trails!
Jo Ann
wrightj45@yahoo.com
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