American Triumph: 1939-1945: 4 STORIES IN 1

by Susan Martins Miller, Norma Jean Lutz, Bonnie Hinman

  Laura tagged along down the hall to Mr. Arnold’s room, now filled with Corrine’s and Margie’s belongings. Mama was hanging up dresses.

  “Can we talk about my homework, Mama?” Laura asked. “I need to find out about our ancestors.”

  “Fine, dear. What do you want to know?” Her muffled voice came from the built-in closet, another of Dad’s improvements to the hotel.

  “I know our ancestors came over on the Mayflower. Was that on your mother’s side or your father’s side or both?”

  “Mother’s side.”

  “What about your father’s side?”

  Mama turned around to face Laura. “It’s too bad Grandpa Knopf died before you were born. You would have liked him. You have a lot in common.”

  “Knopf? That doesn’t sound like an English name.”

  “It’s not. It’s German.”

  No! Laura thought. This can’t be true.

  “My father came from Germany when he was a boy.”

  Laura stepped back. What was her mother saying? That Laura’s grandfather was a German?

  “But Bruce is fighting the Germans,” Laura said.

  “He’s fighting the Nazis,” Mama said. “Honey, haven’t you heard us talk about the way German-Americans were treated during World War I?” She answered her own question. “No, I guess you were pretty young when Ginny and Gary asked so many questions about it before the war.”

  “But, Mama, we can’t be German,” Laura protested.

  “You are part German, and it’s a heritage to be proud of,” Mama said with an edge to her voice. “The Germans are a hardworking people.”

  Laura looked down at her social studies notebook. She had been so proud that her people had come over on the Mayflower. Now she added “German” to the list.

  The next day at school, Laura met Yvonne at recess before Miyoko came outside.

  “My grandfather was German,” Laura blurted out. She’d struggled with the idea of keeping it a secret, but that wouldn’t be fair to Yvonne after she had sort of tricked her into accepting Miyoko as an American. Maude always said, “Face your fear,” and that was exactly what she was doing.

  “What?” Yvonne asked, although Laura was quite sure she’d heard her.

  “I thought you should know that my grandpa Knopf came over from Germany, too.”

  “So we both have ancestors in Germany that we’re fighting against,” Yvonne said.

  “I guess so. I’ll bet there are others in my class who didn’t know they had German ancestors.”

  “But they may not tell it,” Yvonne said.

  “I didn’t want to tell you,” Laura admitted.

  Miyoko joined them, so they dropped the subject and played a game of hopscotch before recess was over.

  “Okay, class, it’s time for social studies,” Mrs. Jamison said when Laura was back in class. “I hope you asked your parents about your ancestors. Who wants to go first? I’ll write the different countries on the blackboard.”

  Keith Rhodes held up his hand. “My dad’s family is from England, and my mom’s is from England, too.”

  “When did they come to America?” Mrs. Jamison asked.

  “A long time ago, but they don’t know when,” Keith said.

  “All right.” She wrote ENGLAND on the board. “Johnny?”

  “Both my parents are from England, but I don’t know when they came here.”

  This wasn’t going according to Laura’s plan. Were all the kids going to say they came from England? As much as she didn’t want to do it, she held up her hand.

  “Laura?”

  “Well, I told everyone yesterday that my ancestors came over on the Mayflower, and they did. But that was just on my mother’s mother’s side. On my dad’s mother’s side, they are Dutch people. On my dad’s father’s side, they came from South Africa.”

  There were low oohs from some students after Laura mentioned that exotic location. She explained about South Africa belonging to England at one time. Then Laura took a deep breath and said, “My mom’s father was from Germany.”

  “Germany!” Keith spat out the name with disgust.

  “He came over when he was a boy,” Laura said defensively. “He was a hardworking German, but he wasn’t a Nazi!” If she could have, she would have busted Keith right in the nose for making this confession so hard.

  “Of course he wasn’t,” Mrs. Jamison said. She wrote THE NETHERLANDS, SOUTH AFRICA, and GERMANY on the board. Turning back to the class, Mrs. Jamison said, “Tony Ricci, where are your ancestors from?”

  “My mama’s family is from England, but I don’t know when they came over. And my papa’s family is from Italy. Papa came over from Italy when he was ten.”

  “Fascist!” Keith exclaimed.

  Tony jumped to his feet with his fists raised.

  “That’s enough, Keith,” Mrs. Jamison said sharply. “Sit down, Tony.” She wrote Italy on the board and then turned around.

  “Isamu?”

  The new student said in a clear voice, “My parents came to this country seventeen years ago. They were from Japan, but I am an American.”

  “Dirty Jap,” Keith muttered.

  This time Laura was on her feet with Tony, and they both went after Keith!

  CHAPTER 10

  Good-Bye to a President

  Laura Edwards, I’m surprised at you,” Mrs. Jamison said. She had taken Laura, Tony, and Keith out into the hall after she gave the students a reading assignment.

  “Me? What about the others?” Laura said, although she was a bit surprised at her own reaction to Keith’s name-calling. She had never hit anyone in her life, except Eddie, and that had been a long time ago. She hadn’t actually hit Keith. Good sense had taken over once Mrs. Jamison had ordered them back to their desks. But Laura had wanted to hit him.

  “You want to start World War III?” Mrs. Jamison asked instead of answering the question. “This assignment was to make things better, not worse. Tony, you must hold your temper. You two boys apologize to each other.”

  Tony looked at Keith and muttered, “I’m sorry,” in a sullen manner. Keith did the same.

  “Go back into the room, Tony, and get out your reading book.”

  Tony walked back inside. Mrs. Jamison took Laura and Keith by the arms and walked them farther down the hall, out of earshot of the students in the classroom.

  “Now, Keith, I want you to straighten up. What’s your problem with Americans who have been here only one or two generations?”

  “I don’t have a problem,” Keith said.

  “I think I’ll have a talk with your parents,” Mrs. Jamison said.

  “No,” Keith said quickly. “They’re real busy working for the war.”

  “I’ll call them tonight,” Mrs. Jamison said, “unless you want to tell me what it is that has you calling people names.”

  “Are you really English on both sides?” Laura asked.

  “Yes,” Keith said so defensively that Laura suspected that he wasn’t. He had straight black hair and a round face, but that didn’t tell her anything about his heritage.

  “That’s not the issue here,” Mrs. Jamison said. “Laura, apologize to Keith. You, too,” she ordered Keith.

  “Sorry,” Laura mumbled in a low voice at the same time that Keith muttered something she couldn’t make out.

  “You may go back in the room,” Mrs. Jamison told Laura.

  Before she slipped into the room, Laura glanced back and saw Mrs. Jamison wagging a finger at Keith. She hoped he got in deep trouble.

  When Mrs. Jamison and Keith came back into the room, the social studies lesson continued. Students gave their information, and the teacher wrote it on the board.

  “We have nineteen countries represented,” Mrs. Jamison said. “Our textbook calls America a ‘melting pot’ of nationalities. Wouldn’t you agree that that’s true?”

  The students nodded. Maybe the lesson had an effect on them, but Laura had thought there would be an instant open
ing of arms to the Japanese boys. There was not. Looking at ancestors had worked for Yvonne, but her family had been in the country the same length of time as Miyoko’s, just from a different country.

  Laura held up her hand. The class seemed subdued, as if no one wanted to cause a stir because of the earlier outburst. Maybe she could lighten the moment.

  “Yes, Laura?”

  “My neighbor Maude,” she explained, “says her ancestors met the Mayflower.“

  Mrs. Jamison chuckled, just as Maude had, but the rest of the class didn’t. Maybe it was grown-up humor.

  “What does she mean by that?” Mrs. Jamison asked the class.

  A boy held up his hand, and the teacher nodded at him. “Indians were here first.”

  “Exactly. Laura’s Maude must have some Indian blood.” Mrs. Jamison cast a sidelong glance at Keith, and Laura figured that he was part Indian and didn’t want to say it. That fit with his straight hair, but his skin wasn’t red. And what was wrong with admitting that he was part Indian if he was?

  “Who exactly is an American?” Mrs. Jamison said. No one answered. “Would all American citizens please stand up?”

  The entire class stood.

  “So we’re all Americans,” she said. “Someday you will all have the right to vote in our democracy. Does your vote count more if your family has lived here longer?”

  “No,” Tony said before a chorus of other voices answered the same thing.

  “Then it’s our duty to be good citizens, which includes respecting other people’s opinions.” At this point she glanced at Laura, who looked down at her desk.

  Her grand idea of making the Japanese be accepted hadn’t really worked. Her classmates had been hammered with anti-Jap sentiments for too long. It would take more than one social studies lesson to undo that, especially when the war went on and on.

  At least the class discussion persuaded Kenny to accept Miyoko—or at least not to object to her when she was in a group with him. He went with Laura, Miyoko, Yvonne, and Eddie that Saturday to see Meet Me in St. Louis.

  Fighting in the Philippines was on the newsreel. Laura mentioned it to Corrine when they got back to the hotel after the movie, and Corrine burst into tears.

  Laura hugged her. “The newsman said we were taking back ground.”

  “I know, but I’m so afraid they will find graves,” Corrine said. “I’m afraid Neil is dead.”

  Laura had known that all along, so she was surprised that Corrine had just now come to that conclusion. “Maude says we should face our fears.” She went through Maude’s reasoning about the worst that could happen. “So we pray that God was with him,” Laura said.

  “Is with him,” Corrine said with a catch in her voice. “I’ll pray that God is with him, that his time on earth isn’t over, and that I’ll see him again. You’re a smart girl, Laura.”

  “Maude’s smart. She’s the one who told me to face my fears,” Laura admitted, although she raised her chin just a little bit higher.

  Soon the news was full of the Russians finding a concentration camp at Auschwitz. Thousands of Jews had been killed, and many were starving to death in the camp.

  “What if Neil is in a horrible death camp like that?” Corrine was beside herself again.

  “You keep praying that God is with him,” Laura said.

  “Yes, you’re right,” Corrine said and fingered the cross on the necklace that Neil had given her before he’d gone into the navy. “I tell Neil’s mother that whenever she calls. I just need to remind myself.”

  The war droned on and on. Letters from Bruce were further apart. He was in Belgium, and Laura figured it was just a matter of time before he’d be in Germany itself. She looked at the atlas whenever a new letter arrived, and she looked at the atlas when she heard a specific town mentioned on the news. Never before had she been aware of the countries of Europe. Now she thought she would never forget them.

  She liked the newsreels. There she could see actual moving pictures of the war and of the leaders. In the newspaper, she saw President Roosevelt sitting with England’s Churchill and Russia’s Stalin when they met at the Yalta Conference, but on the newsreel it looked more real. Laura looked up Yalta in the atlas and had a hard time finding the Crimean port in the Black Sea.

  “Why did they pick this place instead of somewhere in the United States?” Laura asked her dad. Yalta was in Asia, but wasn’t there always a risk of a German airplane dropping a bomb anywhere over there?

  “It’s hard for us to understand everything about politics,” Dad said. “They have more information than we do, and I’m sure President Roosevelt is doing the best he can to end this war.”

  During March the government asked the public not only to conserve paper but also to turn in all scrap paper to collection centers. A special appeal went to the Boy Scouts. The War Production Board would award the General Eisenhower Waste Paper Medal to any Boy Scout who collected at least a thousand pounds of waste paper during the March and April campaign.

  “Why didn’t they ask Girl Scouts?” Laura asked Eddie after he returned from his Scout meeting one afternoon.

  He shrugged. “Don’t ask me. Since the Girl Scouts aren’t doing it, why don’t you girls help Kenny and me collect paper?”

  “Sure,” Laura said, but she’d rather have had a project of her own. In the past, she might have objected to helping Eddie, since they had always been in competition. But since he’d had polio, she looked at him differently. In an odd way, the disease had brought them even closer together.

  Laura, Yvonne, and Miyoko banded together with Eddie and Kenny to collect every scrap they could. Besides the collection site set up in the lobby, where residents could put their old newspapers, the kids went door-to-door, much as they and other students had for the grease drives to get fat for ammunition at the beginning of the war.

  They walked up and down the street, asking the businesses there for waste paper. The cigar store had some stuff. Eddie and Kenny went into the labor union office, where men hung around in front. They came back empty-handed but told the girls what the dark, smoke-filled place was like inside.

  Not to be outdone, Yvonne marched past the closed ticket booth and knocked on the door of the burlesque house, a place Laura had been forbidden to go near. Mama’s exact words were, “Don’t go within ten feet of that place.” Laura stood by the curb, as far away from the door as she could be and still see the action.

  A quite ordinary-looking woman answered the door. Laura had expected a garish woman in an outlandish costume, but the woman seemed nice, and she brought back old programs and gave them to Yvonne.

  “We’re supposed to go by every week, and she’ll have more,” Yvonne said.

  “Let’s put them at the bottom of the pile,” Laura suggested. No need in rousing Mama’s curiosity over something that she hadn’t done wrong. Laura hadn’t gone within ten feet of the place. She’d probably been eleven feet away.

  Their pile of papers grew. Eddie and Kenny took them to the collection center and had them weighed and the poundage added to their accounts.

  One April day as Laura and the others walked home from school, they talked about going back out after supper and collecting again. They were only a half block from the hotel when they met a young woman with tears streaming down her face.

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Laura stepped in front of the woman.

  “What’s wrong? Can we help you?” Laura asked.

  The woman, wiping her tears with a handkerchief, looked down at Laura. “The president is dead,” she whispered with a sob.

  “President Roosevelt?” Eddie said.

  “Yes. What will the country do now? Who will lead us through this war?”

  “President Roosevelt is dead?” Laura asked. Surely the woman was mistaken. Laura had seen pictures of him at that Yalta Conference. “Did someone kill him?”

  “No. The radio said he died of a cerebral hemorrhage.”

  “A what?” Eddie asked.r />
  “Like a stroke,” the woman said and sniffed into her handkerchief.

  “Let’s go,” Laura said. She didn’t really believe this woman. She needed to hear it from the radio.

  The friends ran to the hotel as fast as they could. The radio was on in the lobby, and several residents, including Mr. Benedetto and Mrs. Lind, were sitting around listening to it. Mrs. Wakamutsu sat in the office.

  “Is it true? Is President Roosevelt dead?” Laura asked her.

  “Yes,” she replied.

  Laura ran to the apartment, with the other kids on her heels. Mama, Corrine, Ginny, Gary, and the Wakamutsu boys were crammed in the living room, some sitting, some standing. No one was talking except the announcer on the radio. Laura sat on the floor and listened.

  While the message from the sponsor was on, Mama said, “He was in Warm Springs, Georgia, at the Little White House. That’s the headquarters of the March of Dimes.” She wiped away a tear.

  “Who is Harry Truman?” Eddie asked.

  “The vice president, of course,” Ginny said. “Well, president, now.”

  “What will happen?” Laura asked.

  “Nothing different,” Corrine said. “I suspect President Truman will continue with President Roosevelt’s policies. The war plan will go forward.”

  “I wonder how Mrs. Roosevelt is bearing up,” Mama said.

  The newscaster was back on and repeated the news he had already given. The group sat in silence once again, listening.

  Laura didn’t go out collecting papers. She sat glued to the radio, listening, hoping the announcer would say there had been a bad mistake. She went to bed hoping to wake up the next day and learn this had all been a nightmare. She had liked the president. He’d had polio, like Eddie, which made her feel a special bond with him.

  The next morning the nightmare didn’t go away. The newspaper headline screamed that President Roosevelt was dead. War news went on for pages. The American army had pushed beyond the Elbe River. At one point, only seventy-five miles separated the Russian and American troops, with Berlin in between. Laura should have looked it up on the map, but she didn’t feel like it. Another article said more than four hundred B-29 Superfortresses had bombed Tokyo for two hours. That plane had been designed at the Boeing plant. Laura should have felt proud, but all she felt was numb.