Germany after World War II - a tv show review

First, let me desribe Trudy to you, because I feel I must. She was about five feet two, and yes, she had eyes of blue, and medium length straight platinum hair. She spoke with a hoarse low voice, possibly from smoking, and she was about mid thirties. She was my only friend when I lived in Germany rom 1967 yo 1969. After 1969, my then husband was discharged from the US Army and we lived on the road in an Volkswagon Van for a year traveling around 38 different countries.

When I first got to Germany, we lived in a tiny third floor apartment with slanted atttic stye ceilings. It was very cosy and comfortably furnished. Th army post was all filled up with the soldiers returning from Vietnam or on their way there an officers of Wharton Barracks were given the option of living "on the economy" which meant in a local town, Heilbronn, in a civilian apartment.

Trudy lived across the courtyard from me in a 2nd floor apartment with three toddlers. Her means of living as I soon gathered, was as a 'temporary' wife to an American soldier. They would get to live a comfortable life with a wife and family in a local apartment, and Trudy would get her rent paid and child support and PX groceries. I would visit her regularly and we would smoke and chat and she would regale me with her tales of romance and manipulation. For example, once when she needed (or wanted) new furniture, she told her live-in American soldier boyfriend that she was pregnnt and needed seeral hudnred dollars for an abortion. He paid the money, no questions asked and she bought new furniture with it. When one soldier shipped back hoe, she would get 'dolled up' and go to town and attract another. When I knew her, her live-in was a 19 year old boy from Texas. He was crazy about her. And indeed she was a hugely charming and entertaining woman. Eventually, she married him and he took her back to Texas with him, along with her toddlers.

We never ever spoke about the second world war, Trudy and I. We tlked about her boyfriends and her children and her romantic adventures. I was so young and inexperienced that I didn't think anything at all of the new construction of our apartment complex, a aguely Roman style series of concrete structures around a garden center where oldeer women who had known scarcity and hunger, worked every day on their life-giving vegetable pathces. I never thought when I looked at them at the time, that they had lived through the total destruction of their town through artillery bombardment. and street by street, house by house gunfire. Their town had been a Nazi stronghold History wa nowhere in my mind at that time. I was learning how to cook, newly married, and just took things as I found them, no questions asked.

Many years later however, I became very interested and read a book about the Battle of Heilbronn which opened up many questions in my mind about those yers directly after the end of the war when everything was destroyed but the common German civilian population still had to find a way to stay alive. I realized after searching that there was scarcely anything written or filmed about that time. Plenty on the concentration camps, plenty on the battles nd the allied invasion, but almost nothing on the aftermath and how the people who were left alive managed. There was one fine film, The Marriage of Maria Braun, which had a great influence on me and was a mgnificent film depicting the complexities of life for a woman in that aftermath.

Recently I found, to my delight, there is a PBS tv series called "Our Miracle Years" about three sisters, the daughters of an iron magnate and their struggle to make lives for themselves in the debris of the world they have grown up into, and the death of their father. It is beautifully filmed and well acted and if you have amazon prime and pbs you should watch it. This August, of course was the 75th anniversary of the end of the war as I know well since I was born in 1945 - a war baby, to my Philadelphia navy yard worker mother and my US Navy sailor father. Sometimes I feel a great camera light in my soul and as though a film strip were running through me with the vivid, colorful, and entirely rich and plentiful life of the post war years for people like my family - a car, a television, a house, a new house, a big brick barbeque grill in the yard, five children born to happy, deeply in love parents who were bathed in the glow of prosperity and vigor and post World War II boom time. At the same time that it feels like a bright light it eels like a weight, a weight of memory and of years and of love.

Hope you get to watch this series! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

A woman's education/The Taliban/Maisie Dobbs-a book review 8/27/21

After bidding a fond fairewell to my friends in Three Pines, Quebec, who live in th novels of Louise Penny, I looked around for a new set of murder mysteries. I looked up most popular, prize winners, the ten best, and came up with author Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs novels. Maisie Dobbs is the impoverished daughter of a oving and hard working 'costermonger' in London's East End just before the onset of World War I. Her mother has died, and her father, upond delivering produce to one of the great houses' (think Downton Abbey) speaks to the cook and the butler about the possibilities of getting his daughter a 'place' as a servant where at least she will be well looked after, fed and safe. It is arranged and the uncommonly clever young Maisie while doing the usual pre-dawn chores of cleaning out the fireplace grates and starting the fires each morning, finds a lirary. Also uncommon is that Misie Dobs is literate, she can read and write as well as being exceptionally intellectual curious and this is a most important point for the theme of my post here today. Maisie begins to read her way through philosophy in the fancy library in the pre-dawn hours until one day, months into her employment, she is discovered. Fortunately for her, the Lady of the house, in both senses of the word Lady, is a feminist and active suffragette so instead of punishing Maisie she looks for a way to keep her service (which is dutiful and competent) while supporting her desire for knowledge. She also sets her up with a tutor in the persona of a family friend and scholar, Mr. Blanche.

One of the things that struck me immediately was the intellectual hunger of this pre-teen girl because I had the same characteristic, but not until I was much older did I realize how unusual it was. At the time and for most of my life, I took it for granted and if it was commented on at all, it was in disparaging terms as being "odd" and not in the good sense. Mostly it elicited comments such as "Get your nose out of thea book and do something useful." Like Maisie, I happened onto a hidden trove of treasure, in my case it was the shelves of books in my Grandmother's basement, a colection of the greatest novels of European literature, a set of Charles Dickens and a set of Mark Twain, but even more important to me, a couple of novels of THE OUTDOOR GIRLS ON A HIKE! I didn't know at the time that these were a series, all I knew was that here were girls in a book who were like oddball me - adventurous, intelligent, and clever. I didn't know any girls like that, and my main attribute was intellectual curiosity more than a thirst for adventure, but how I loved that book! They introduced me to more enterprising young women such as Cherry Ames, Student Nurse, and Nancy Drew. But, I was also, at a very young age, reading those European classics and imbibing advanced ideas and Victorian vocabulary. I loved those novels, in particular, Guy deMauppassant. What a rich field for th sowing of seeds of interest in human psychology, history, class politics, gender politics, a world of thought.

But, what brought me to this essay today, was about women and education and class. Neither of my parents graduated from high school though both were self educated and both read. My mother subscribed to at least 6 magazines including Saturday Evening Post, Life, Look, Better Homes and Gardens and National Geographic, and my father read all through the years I knew him as my parent. I don't know if he read earlier on in his life. Both of my parents were intelligent and interested in things. We took weekend drives to places of some interest all through the spring, summer and autumn months. We visited caverns, museum, all inds of palces of interest, and in particular, regularly to Skyline Drive, the Blue Ridge Mountains, where my father ha worked in the Civilian Conservation Corps in his youth. They opened my eyes and my mind was already fitted out with a voracious appetite for knowledge by genetic, some mysterious inheritance. I can trace it back on both sides to a teacher a generation back on my mother's side, and a seminarian two generations back on my father's side.

Like Maisie Dobbs in the Winspeare novels, my reading and my active intellectual curiosity fitted me to make the leap to college, and it was a leap from my working class life and world. My high school also helped to prepare me for that world though not through education. Tracking put me into the 'business' program not the college prep program. But through the social interaction, my association with other young people going to college, it appeared on my horizon as a place I might be able to go at some point through some miracle. The miracle turned out to be student riots in th 1960's which opened the college doors to people who had interest and desire if not SAT scores and college prep courses. I started out in extension school programs and when I saw I could easily manage, I was able to switch to day college, then full time, then a Bachelor Arts in English and when I had really learned 'the ropes' I got another Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts, and way leading on to way, as it does, eventually to a Masters in Education. Throughout all of this, I worked as a teacher. Still through most of the peer group I inhabited, from my husband and the couples we spent our free time with, my intellectual pursuits were unusual, even rare. Some of them read, my ex-husband was a reader, but none of them pursued higher education and NONE of the women had any interest in college.

But times were changing, and I met others like myself in college, women who were always intersted in learning more, and figuring out how things were, and how they had got to be how they were and how they could be different and better. I met women interested in class dynamics and gender issues as well as in Art and Literature.

It turns out now that the half dozen or so of my best friens, that is the ones I have seen the most and spent the most time with over the years are all like me in that we came from families where our parents either didn't go to high school or didn't go to college (though some of my friends don't like to admit it) and we struggled to find our own way to the promised land which set us on paths through education to self-systaining careers and financial independence even through retirement. We were a generation, and our education is a generation marker. Not one of my closest friends had a mother who went to college and all of my closest friends have achieved even graduate degrees, many of us on our own. We were working class girls.

This is, in fact, a remarkable thing. And it is equally remarkable that I was born with this unusual trait to seek out knowledge, to love books and learning. I still know very few people of whom this is true. It ha een a saving grace for me.

Which brings me to the Taliban. Patriarchy has always been intent on repressing women and our intellectual capacity. We underestimate the biological imperative of maleness to 1.Dominate females to contro their reproduction, and 2.defend and extend territory to provide resources for the offspring of their reproductive efforts. Many of the state goals of the Taliban, as with many other old and patriarchal relgions has to do with controlling female reproduction through denying education, forced marriage, forced continual childbearing and subservience to male needs. Their suppression of female abilities whether Catholics, Muslim, Mormon, or any of the other religions or cultures that specialize in domination and suppression of wome, denies them a treasure of creativity and innovation - the abiities of half the population to add to the cultural richness. Even in our own culture, in my lifetime and early childhood, women were not encouraged to be educated and oru culture drove women like cattle into a cycle of early marriage, childbearing, childrearing and home-making rather than the pursuit of independence. Dependence was encouraged, and many women were on board with it, thinking the easy life of being supported and required to master only the simpler tasks of the home were enough, until, of course, their breadwinners disappeared through one means or another and they found themselves with no income, no skills, children to provide for and now viable means of adequate support except o find another male meal ticket.

The uneducated and untrained women were forced into employment that was difficult, menial, and low paying with no benefits. The cultures that repress women are forced into backward civilizations that depend on violence against women to keep the status quo. Fundamentalist groups like Boko Haram are forced to kidnap children to rape and subdue in order to continue their biological imperative to reproduce. The cultures of these other fundamentalist societies remain impoverished and so envious of the gifts of the civilizations of modern cultures that they must kill and repress their populations to keep them within their borders. The drug gangs of South and Central America have much in common with the Taliban and Isis, Boko Haram and violent death cults of that sort in that they are like a cancer that kills the host on which they feed and bring about their own demise. The ultra right wing cults of the ignorant, anti-science, and racist states in the South of the US are another example. Their defiance of science and common sense is causing them to kill their own population through the epimeic of Covid 19 and the Delta variant. Sadly many innocent people are caught in the deadly web of this ignorance and will suffer and die. I am often grateful to my ancestors who came to the US and provided me with all the opportunities I have enjoyed and I hope they are pleased that I did get an education and that I worked for the common good for my adult life as a teacher spreding knowledge and struggling against ignorance.

My first and only theft

Sometime during the early hours of the morning, I was dreaming an essay, the main subject of which had been haunting my mind for some time. It was about the only real crime I ever committed, my only theft. When I was a young child, my family lived in Phladelphia, but my grandmother lived in Ocean City, New Jersey. We stayed with her for a week or two ever summer, and visited most Sundays. What struck me most about this memory of my crime was that I, a small child of 6 or 7, was allowed to go out by myself and wander around. One of the things people had then was an alleyway. We had one in Philadelphia behid the yards at the back of our brick row homes, and my Grandmother Mabel had one behind her yard that stretched down the street. I am sure I was probably warned not to leave the yard or go further than the alley behind Grandmom's house when I was allowed to go out and play, but I often wandered far afield. Once, most dangerously, I climbed into a coal car down at the railroad tracks and found myself trapped there for several hours before I managed to jump and slither high enough to get purchase on something to pull my little snowsuit clad self out. But that's another story. My theft ccurred on a day when I was wandering along the main shopping street of Ocean City, Asbury Avenue. My Grandmother's apartment was then at 6th and Asbury, the upstairs of a house owned by her sister. The builidng has since been demolished.

On the day of y Asbury wannder, I walked into Hoyt's five and dime store, and gazed longingly at the eye level counter with the bin of the object of my greatest youthful desire, a set of false teeth with a hinge that you could put on your pinter finger and your thumb and clack up and down. Only the mystery of childhood can explain my overwhelming desire to own that object. It was true, that at that time clacking false teeth seemed to be a common and popular accessory to many television productions, both comedies and mysteries, but I have no idea why I wanted that item as much as I did. On the day of my theft, I remember being particularly cunning and acting with real intent. I was planning to steal the coveted object. I looked around to see if any store clerks were nearby or watching me. I was terrified, which is why, no doubt this old old memory is still with me, the strength of the emotion that it is wrapped in.

Finding myself unobserved, I quickly reached my small nad up and into the bin and grasped the one ich square clear plastic box which housed the little false teeth. Then, quickly, tense with fear, I walked out onto the sidewalk where the sun shone like an interrogation lamp. There was no joy in my successful theft, no sense of triumph, only a bad feeling of fear.

In those days, men and women dressed up when they went shopping down town, and there were many suited men with hats, all of whom looked to me as though they were store detectives and as each one passed me, I imagined him laying a huge man hand on my little shoulder and taking me in to go to jail for theft. The shame to my parents! By the way, I am certain that my father and mother, my Grandmother, my Greatuncle Yock, any of them would have gladly given me the nickle to buy the alse teeth, so I am not sure why I felt compelled to steal them.

Inevitably the weight of the fear and the consequences weighed so heavily I turned and trudged back to the five and dime store and put the false teeth back into the bin. I never stole anything ever again.

By the way, not only children could roam freely in those more innocent or naive days, dogs, too, could roam about at will. People mainly opened the door and let the dog or cat go out and the pet returned in its own good time, its own business having been concluded. Slowly over the 1950's and 1960's, somehow these freedoms eroded and we all, probably correctly, began to see the world as a more dangerous place. Children played under watchful supervision or in their own yards only. Dogs, too, became sequestered into their own yards or walked abroad only on a leash.

One of the many other times I wandered off on my own at the seashore was in Wildwood, NJ, with the other Grandmother, in a rental house with bright forest green wooden trim. That time I was even younger, possibly four years old, and I followed the family dog of my grandparents, an Irish setter named King, who did, indeed have the imperious bearing of royalty. The day I decided to follow him, he was patient for a few blocks but then decided to shake me so he could do his own grown up dog route without the encumbrance of this human slow poke, so he trotted off as I called forlornly and futiley for him to wait. Many hours later, I was hopelessly lost, hot, and tired. Finally, I lost all courage and hope and stood on a corner crying. A police patrol car stopped and picked me up. The officer asked my name but I only knew my first name. I was so awe struck by my situation in the back seat of a patrol car, it is a wonder I could even pull up my first name. To his question about the name of my parents, I could only reply "Mom and Dad." When he asked where I lived, I only knew Philadelphia. Finally he asked if I thought I could recognise the house where I was staying if I saw it and I shook my head to the positive. We drove up and down the streets until I saw the bright green wooden trim of the rental house and my Grandmother and Grandfather standing on the lawn, presumably looking for me. I suppose these are good reasons why chidren should not be allowed to wander freely.

These memories, however, due to my advancing age, come back to me more and more and in surprising detail which, I am told, is what happens when you get old. The distant past comes into focus as the recent fades. We old people soon become aware of the lost world we inhabited, the things that we knew and took for granted like alleyways, hucksters with horse drawn wagons selling vegetables, the ice man, ice boxes, free dogs and childhood adventures wandering, are gone forever, replaced and covered over by the sediment of time.

Happy Trails! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

Lament for a world without photographs

Today, Wednesday, August 11, 2021, I just took pictures with my iphone of some old photographs I came across recently. I was actually looking for something else and I found a forgotten scrapbook of my youth, my 20's, with some photographs I had taken of New York City with my little Pentax 110. What a camera! It was very small, you could fit it in your pocket easily, and very versatile - you could take standard photographs or panoramic. I loved that camera, but, of course, inevitably, it was replaced by a digital camera. I don't know what happened to it, I may have even thrown it away (perish the thought) in a desperate attempt to unclutter my life.

I am a keeper and saver but NOT a HOARDER which seems to be one of the new 10 sins of the modern world. Fat and Hoarding have taken the place of other sins which go unremarked or while criminalized, not scorned by public opinion, such as venality or lust. There are no shows about "My Porno Life" or "my money Grubbing Life" only My 600 Pound Life, and Hoarders.

Anyhow before I go down a rant road, let me get back to the subject of the beauty of old photographs. I thank my mother repeatedly for enriching my childhood with a wide array of magazines which I am sure I have mentioned in my posts many times before. We subscribed to Life, Look, House and Garden, Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic, and other magazines that came and went but didn't have the saying power of those stalwart companions listed above. I grew up in a more reading world. We also had newspapers and both of my parents read the magazines and the newspapers and in fact, as I recall, nearly everyone I can remember read the newspapers. In fact, nearly everyone I remember from my childhood had magazines - they were everywhere!

My first introduction to a WOMAN photographer came about with a LOOK cover by Margaret Bourke White, who was also a War correspondent during WWII. I was thrilled to think that a woman could be a professional photographer though I had no idea, even as an adult, how that could come about. How did those women find their way through the labyrinth that led them to a career in photography. I know at least one found her way through the WPA via the FSA. That stands for the Federal Works Progress Administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ans subsidiary of which was the Farm Secrity Administration. Today you can go on Library of Congress web site in American Memory and see wonderful and beautiful photographs from the 1930's taken by Dorothea Lange and the many photographers eployed by the WPA through the FSA.

One thing circles around to another, and to get back to my topic, I was looking for photographs from my father's time with the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) of the WPA. My daughter had written an essay that was published in the Oxford American. The rights had just been released to her and she was thinking of adapting it. But I couldn't find those photographs, instead I found my own old scrapbook - literally a paper scrapbook with the picturs fastened in with those litle black adhesive triangles. I was 20 when I took those photogaphs, an impossibly long time ago. The photos have faded over time, and blurred. This gives them an even more beautiful and haunting quality I think.

It makes me sad to think so many photos taken today go to the Cloud or SnapChat, only to vanish like lightening bugs, gone forever, not to be gazed down upon every again by fond eyes looking at a world transformed. But maybe that's okay. People don't want clutter and I really get it. Sometimes I fantasize getting a storage shed built in the yard (another storage shed, to be honest) and putting all my stuff in it and making a streamlined existence for myself, one easier to dust and manuever around in now that I am old. But like some poor dragon trapped forever in a cave with its treasure, I could never be parted from my lifetime accumulation of jewels and rare magical objects. I have one entire wall from floor to ceiling of shelves containing photo albums, and a wooden trunk of small albums. The cameras are all gone, but the photos remain until I myself am gone at which time, I guess they will become paper waste as I doubt there is any place you can donate or store a wall full of photo albums and I doubt anyone in my family will want them, though so many are living history.

I fact, I am preparing to make a painting using some small and utterly gorgeous old sepia phtotgraphs that are 100 years old as my models. My cousin was about to discard them but sent them to me, and they are my father, and his two brothers as toddlers. I am calling the painting "Ghosts of the 100 Year Old Babies" and I plan to enter it in an upcoming group show at Eiland Arts, in the old Railroad Station in Merchantville. When I download my New York photos to the computer from my phone, I will post them on here if I can figure out the new format. Haven't done that in awhile!

Happy Trails, out in the world or in your memory - Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

USS New Jersey Battleship Event

Recently I was watching a mystery series set in Germany on the border of Poland. Another one I watched was set in Dresden. Both are part of a subscription to pbs.masterpiece that I took on amazon prime because I watch tv on my laptop not on television. For one thing I cannot tolerate any more commercials, and for another my declining vision and hearing make television difficult. I like amazone prime. Anyhow, I was struck with how it was just my lifetime ago that Dresden was a pile of rubble and ashes after the firebombing of WWII. Also, Poland, the aerial views show a place that looks as though it was never destroyed. Time marches on and like ants who have had a dog step into their anthill, we have repaired our damages, rebuilt and forgotten.

However, on August 14th, we will remember the end of the second World War on the Battleship New Jersey on the Camden Waterfront. There will be re-enactors, and even aerial events. Many if not most of the soldiers and auxiliary helpers who made it possible for us to defeat the Nazi onslaught and the demonic ambitions of the Japanese Empire are now gone. My father was in the navy in both the North Atlantic and the South Pacific. The last book he read before he died was about the Battle of Tassaferona which he witnessed from a US Navy Troop transport at sea. My mother served at the Navy Yard in Philadelphia. I was born in November of 1945, and I once had a film (now deteriorated, sadly) of my mother marching joyfully in August 1945 in a neighborhood Victory Parade, proudly waving a tall American flag and in her final months of pregnancy with me.

Everything started out new for us, my parents new marriage, new house, a little row home on Warnock Street in South Philadelphia, my father's new career as an ironworker, our new little family, my mother, father and me, and a new world full of relief and hope and promise.

I hope I can make it to the USS NJ Battleship Event, but my car is old, my knees are not good, and although I invited my sister and nephew, if they don't go, I won't be able to go either, so I don't know. I would like to go in memory of my parents and what they lived through.

Twice, in my old 'volunteer' days, I did a one woman re-enactment as a volunteer for the Red Bank Battlefield, as a WWII woman war correspondent. Red Bank Battlefield was the site of a World War Ii river defense emplacement and twice we hosted large and very popular WWII Re-enactments. A new book had just come out about a half dozen of these intrepid journalists, and I had photo of Margaret Bourke White, the photo journalist, and I copied her outfit and hair. By good luck, a 1947 German portable typewriter had been for sale for $25 at a local vintage shop to help with my re-enactment. I had also read a biography of Martha Gellhorn, a World War II war correspondent who had ended her marriage to Ernest Hemingway to go to Europe to cover the allied invasion. The beginning and the development of the careers of women war correspondents is in itself a great subject for a blog post, for anotenother time. Final note, I first learned about Margaret Bourke White through a photo of hers which appeared on the cover of LIFE Magazine when I was a child. My mother was a great suscriber to magazines, we must have had a half dozen that brought the world into a our little home every week and every month. I gobbled them up! The Saturday Evening Post covers by Norman Rockwell inspired my interest in Art.

Happy Trails! >p/> By the way, there will be a bluegrass concert FREE at Proprietor's Park in Gloucester City (which is on the rDelaware River front) on Tuesday the 10th of August from 7 - 9, so bring a chair and enjoy some fun music. The opening act will feature Michael Tearson - do you remember him from WMMR? He is a living rock and roll encyclopedia!