Raising the Baton

by Herschensohn, Bruce;

  The weeks ahead held a lot of big things.

  Christopher’s weekends had Saturdays reserved for playing outside with other kids from the neighborhood even if it was very hot or very cold. Then the streetlights would turn on and so he and the other kids would all quickly run home except for Raymond Gerabaldi who would wait for his mother to yell his name with a threat of no dinner if he didn’t get home “in exactly thirty seconds! I’m counting! 1-2-3!” She never seemed to get beyond eleven before seeing his running frame come from over the horizon.

  Christopher’s Sunday mornings were spent reading the Sunday newspaper’s comics while still in bed, then the walk to the Fort Littleton United Methodist Church in “your Sunday best” of dark suit and tie with his parents and then, depending on the weather, his mother and father would go to the movies and Christopher would go with them. After that would come the dinner at home that was always followed by the hushed fifteen minutes as nothing could be said while Walter Winchell was on the radio giving the news followed by Jimmie Fidler telling what was going on in Hollywood. It was permissible to speak while Jimmie Fidler was on but it was still a big thing because Chris’ father would say, “People need some entertainment. Fifteen minutes is not too much for a Fidler show. The world is serious enough and diversion is important. Fifteen minutes is fine for Fidler as long as it isn’t any longer.”

  The following Thursday was going to be a very big day as it was going to be the holiday of Thanksgiving. Although Christopher would miss not seeing Miss Osborn for four days since school would be out for Thursday and Friday and then the weekend; for both public and private reasons this was not going to be a normal Thanksgiving. The public reason was that two years earlier President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared that Thanksgiving would be the fourth Thursday of November rather than always have it be the last Thursday of November. That would affect some years but not most of them since in most cases the fourth Thursday of November would already be the last Thursday of November. Christopher Straw’s parents clung to the old simplicity and called the new rule designated by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as Franksgiving. The private reason for this being unusual was that this year Christopher’s parents were torn between Thanksgiving and Franksgiving even tough this year both the fourth and last Thursday were one and the same. As penalty to FDR his mother was not going to prepare a turkey or the stuffing or sweet potatoes or cranberries or a pumpkin pie as she had in the Thanksgivings that Christopher had known from previous years before FDR messed it all up. This time his mother and father decided to get away from giving thanks or franks, and instead they would take a trip from Thursday through Sunday, going all the way to Lancaster and back, and take Christopher with them.

  Christopher would then have to miss the movies on Sunday where the theater had a succession of Lone Ranger serials that continued each week, and last Sunday the serial ended with the Lone Ranger getting stuck in quicksand and worse than stuck when the quicksand covered him all the way up to near his shoulders. That’s when the serial ended with the wording on the screen that spelled “Continued Next Week!”

  His four-day holiday weekend started very early Thanksgiving morning with Christopher’s father taking out a wide Conoco Oil Company’s book of maps that had the trip outlined for him by someone at Conoco. It was outlined as a one hundred mile sight-seeing ride to Lancaster.

  Much of the fun and newness began in simply getting there with his father driving his old Model A Ford and Christopher’s mother sitting beside his dad in the interior seat while Christopher was allowed to sit in the rumble-seat that was like a trunk of the car that opened from the bottom just above the bumper with nothing but the sky above and the earth’s scenery on both sides. His mother took one picture after another with her square black box-shaped Target Six-16 Brownie Camera with its leather-like aroma.

  It was a magnificent adventure. They passed through Gettysburg and had breakfast there and then saw a lot of cannons on hills and went to Cemetery Hill to the spot where President Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address and Christopher was thrilled particularly because his class had that speech read to them earlier by the beautiful Miss Osborn with her wonderful voice. Then the Model A was driven off to the east where Burma-Shave brushless shaving- cream signs dotted the sides of the highway with their quick-spaced sentences in rhymes that made Christopher laugh:

  “Don’t stick

  “Your elbow

  “Out too far.

  “It might go home

  “In another car.

  “Burma-Shave”

  The most surprising sights of Lancaster to Chris were the Amish people in their traditional clothes; women in their long deep blue dresses with full-sleeves covering their arms along with the black-suited men with beards and top hats riding their horse-drawn black and gray wagons. It was like a movie at school without need of a big kid bringing a projector into the classroom and setting up a beaded screen that smelled so good.

  This was the furthest Christopher had been from home and the furthest from life as he had lived it at this time, and the great adventure was capped off by stopping at a Gulf gasoline station that his father preferred to others because Gulf’s headquarters were in Pennsylvania. At the station they all got out of the car to go to the rest rooms and to get drinks of water, then just stand around while the station attendant filled their car’s gasoline tank; wiped the windshield and the side and back windows; checked the oil with a long rod and then checked the water in the radiator and, finally, checked the pressure in each of the car’s tires. This was living and exciting. “Highway 30!” his father said. “Good straight Highway 30—It’s the old Lincoln Highway you know. Son, while you’re learning about going to the moon but before going there, see this magnificent country; all of it, and then after you’ve seen this magnificent country, see the magnificent world! All of it. Then you can go to the moon. It’s a good schedule. You need to know first of all what there is here in the United States. All of this country first and you’ll learn a lot.”

  Christopher then saw a marvelous sight as the car was leaving the Gulf gasoline station. It was a pretty girl probably in her late teens leaning against a gasoline pump drinking from a Coca-Cola bottle. No one was with her. There was a slight breeze and her clothing gave evidences of that slight breeze just very little above one knee. It would not be forgotten throughout all his years to come, although the sight lasted only seconds.

  The family spent Thanksgiving night in Lancaster at a motel his father chose because they could park right outside the room and there was an American Automobile Association symbol on the sign outside the motel that wrote it as being an AAA endorsed hotel which was considered to be the evidence that it was clean and good. They spent Friday and Saturday driving around and back to the motel each night.

  Even with such a marvelous four days and nights of new adventure, there was to come the even more marvelous welcome not of newness but of familiarity that was felt Sunday night when they arrived back home in Fort Littleton; a return to the security of the known. There were now the familiar sights of the tree in front of the house; the porch made of wood with the rocking bench built by Christopher’s father and where his father normally sat smoking his pipe once a day and twice at night, and there was the scent of all those things. And inside the home there was the soft brown couch with the gray throw-pillow resting on top of the unseen place where the upholstery was slightly ripped. And there was the davenport where guests could sit in a row, and wooden chairs with big backs in the dining area, and there was the tall brown Zenith radio, even taller than Christopher, and it had two knobs and a green gauge that was a station-index that lighted up when the radio was on, and there were shades over the windows with a little rope on the bottom of each shade with a doughnut-shaped wire covered by yellow cloth so you could put your index finger in the center of each rounded cloth to raise or lower the shades, and there was the goodness of all those things. As unique and memorable that trip was that went to fa
r away and then back home, there was the unexpected kind of protective warmth given by so many things—all those things waiting for him.

  “Home Sweet Home!” his mother said as he so often heard her say, but this time Christopher understood what she meant.

  That night was spent with nothing different scheduled other than the normal with which he was so familiar and comfortable and what he now discovered was what he liked best of all. Everything had its independent importance. Even Jimmie Fidler on radio. On this particular Sunday night Christopher and his parents would not talk over Jimmie Fidler’s entertainment news. None of his show was very important to them other than that it was Fidler’s voice that was familiar and harmless and so that was enough to be good to hear on this Sunday night.

  counterpoint

  THEME FOUR

  NEXT CAME MALAHIA KAHALA

  ONE WEEK AFTER the coming home from that trip to Lancaster and back to Fort Littleton, there came a Sunday that was even more abnormal. It began as expected with the reading of comics in bed and Church and going to the movies with his parents.

  Outside the theater there was a poster with a big picture of Greta Garbo and Melvin Douglas in Two-Faced Woman and next to it a sign that read, The New Garbo! Then inside the theater came the parting of the curtains revealing a screen while Christopher ate Milk Duds his father bought for him at the concession stand. The fun of the hand-sized yellow-boxed Milk Duds increased, as usual, when he thought all of the Milk Duds were gone and, happily, there was invariably one or two or maybe more stuck to the wax paper at the bottom of the box. Those last ones tasted best of all since they were like a secretly added gift; the amount unrevealed to the world until his fingers found them. Then there was a Walt Disney cartoon with Donald Duck and his three nephews, Huey, Dewey and Louie. This was followed by a Coming Attraction for Hold Back the Dawn with Charles Boyer and Paulette Goddard, and then there was a Short Subject called We Must Have Music with Judy Garland and it ended with Rise Stevens singing “America the Beautiful” and it was very good. The supplements before the major films were not done yet as there was the continuation of the Lone Ranger serial and Christopher could not figure out how the Lone Ranger got out of the quicksand two weeks back while he was on the trip with his parents. All of this was followed by a “B” feature-film called Marry the Boss’s Daughter with Brenda Joyce. It was okay but it was a little long. Then came the “A” feature, Two-Faced Woman. There was a sequence in it that was filmed in the snows of the High Sierras, and it was good until something unexpected happened in the theater:

  That was when life changed.

  Not a change in the lives portrayed in the film but a change in the lives of everyone in the theater and in the United States and in much of the world.

  Two-Faced Woman was interrupted by a notice that came on the screen that read: “FLASH: ALL U.S. SERVICEMEN REPORT TO THEIR BASES AT ONCE. BY AUTHORITY OF THE FEDRAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION ALL SERVICE PERSONNEL ARE TO REPORT TO THEIR BASES AT ONCE.” Christopher’s mother and dad looked at each other. There were some murmurs between them and throughout the theater. The movie continued and then the notice came on again. And again. And again.

  When the movie was done and the audience left the theater there were Newsies on the sidewalks selling newspapers whose headlines read, “WAR! JAPS BOMB U.S. BASES!” And the Newsies were boys little more than Christopher’s age and they were holding a stack of newspapers under one arm and with their free hand waving one of the newspapers while yelling, “Japs bomb Pearl Harbor! Read all about it! Japs bomb Pearl Harbor!” Christopher had never heard of Pearl Harbor. Probably the Newsies never heard of Pearl Harbor before today either. But it didn’t take long for everyone to learn its importance.

  The rest of the afternoon and night were spent in the living room with his parents and their next-door neighbors, the Frackers; Mr. Fracker and a very pregnant Mrs. Fracker, who Christopher’s parents had invited over to have company on this strange night. All four sat on the davenport so they could stare at the large brown Zenith radio with the green lighted dial that stood center-stage that night. The constantly repeated message coming from its brown-clothed speaker was only a slight change from the notice that had been seen on the screen at the theater: “By authority of the Federal Communication Commission all service personnel are to report to their bases at once! Do not call your radio station. By authority of the Federal Communication Commission all service personnel are to report to their bases at once! Do not call your radio station.” Between the repetitions of that announcement was a very deep voice saying that the Japanese Empire had attacked Hawaii in a sneak attack with an uncounted amount of sailors of the United States killed and U.S. ships destroyed.

  Then it was time for Walter Winchell who did not speak as fast as he usually did. He was solemn. Jimmie Fidler was not on at all.

  The next morning at school, Miss Osborn brought in her own radio. She brought it in because the school didn’t have a radio. The one she brought was unlike the big Zenith Christopher knew at home. This one was a small Philco with a handle on top and the radio was almost as blonde as Miss Osborn except it seemed to be a blonde-tweed-fabric and she wasn’t. The class was excused for lunch earlier than normal so the children in her class could all be in their seats by 12:30 to hear President Roosevelt speak to the nation in a Joint Session of the 77th Congress.

  All the children were back in the classroom in time and Miss Osborn said a loud “Shhhhh!” and she and everyone in the class stared at the radio. Then came the authoritative voice of President Roosevelt as he said, “Mister Vice President, Mister Speaker, members of the Senate and the House of Representatives: Yesterday, December the 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”

  And he announced that the Japanese Empire had also attacked Malaya, Hong Kong, Guam, the Philippine Islands, Wake Island, and Midway Island. He concluded by saying, “As Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense. Always will we remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long it will take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people, in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory...With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounded determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.

  “I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December the 7th, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.”

  He appropriately and accurately said that a “state of war has existed” since the attack on Pearl Harbor. He wanted a formal vote for a declaration but, regardless of the vote, “a state of war has existed.”

  After the speech was done and Miss Osborne turned off the radio, she forced a closed-mouth smile and said, “Children, you are living through something you will remember the rest of your lives.” There was absolute quiet. She knew she had to say something more: “And you will see that we will win. President Roosevelt said ‘Victory’. It will be victory. And that, too, you will remember for the rest of your lives.”

  What Christopher didn’t know was that he and his classmates were to be some of the youngest members of what in years ahead would be called the Greatest Generation (as Tom Brokaw would later coin that phrase to define those World War II Americans and allies.) Even the youngest would be part of it because all citizens of the United States, no matter their age, were to be involved in the every-day events of the War Effort to ensure the United States would win the ultimate victory. For the children of the time, of which Christopher was a member, there was the frequent putting together of stacks of old newspapers along with waste paper and the stacks brought to the playground of school for Paper Drives; and there was the gathering of metal junk to bring onto that playground for Scrap Drives; there was the finding of old tires for Rubber Drives; C
hristopher’s parents would often give him a dime to bring to class for a War Savings Stamp; his mother would give him grease from something she prepared on the stove, the grease to be brought to school for putting in large containers along with other portions of grease from other students; there was the peeling of tin-foil that had been loosely sealed on paper from within the inside of cigarette packs then the rolling of the tin-foil into a ball until it got large and then having the final layer be a piece of gold-colored tinfoil from a pack of Old Gold Cigarettes and then bringing the ball to school. It was another participation in the War Effort of all the students.

  That was when he learned that those events happening in the world could be so massive that not even his parents could control them in their entirety. Only in pieces. His father was soon to be in the U.S. Navy and his mother would be working at a machine shop in Harrisonville that was under contract to the U.S. Department of War.

  The every-day vocabulary of the time became the word “Victory” repeatedly said by President Roosevelt and Great Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Christopher sent letters to his father and received letters from him, always on V-Mail; a thin, almost wispy but crisp piece of paper that folded together in such a way for it to be both a letter and its own envelope. And his mother sent away for a badge for Christopher from Red Ryder’s Victory Patrol of the Red Ryder Radio Show; the badge with a big “V” that, along with the printed words and a picture of Red Ryder on his horse, shined with a blue-white glow in the dark from its luminous paint. Each night, before going to bed Christopher would hold the badge up to a table-lamp’s brilliant light-bulb so the luminous items on his badge would absorb plenty of light and would shine strong and long in the black of the room at night once the lamp was turned off. Importantly, it had arrived in a brown envelope sent all the way from Red Ryder at P.O. Box 2250 in San Francisco with a notification to the Postmaster that the parcel could be opened for postal inspection if necessary. Who could ask for more?