by Robert Amedee L’Ecuyer

Early Memories of World Events

I was listening to the radio before going to Sunday school at church on Dec 7, 1941. I heard the announcement that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. The radio was on and I heard the broadcast, so I was the one who told my parents. I don’t remember what happened that day, but it ultimately led to my dad making arrangements for us to move back to the United States.  

Dad was subject to the draft, so he quickly took the personnel director job at Braniff Airways in Dallas, Texas. It was a protected job, essential to the war effort, so he wasn’t drafted. 

Mom, Sally and I went from London Ontario to San Antonio to live with Aunt Pinky, Uncle Matt, and Marcia while my dad found a place in Dallas, close to Love Field. I remember the military flights coming in and out of there. The Air Force was part of the Army at that time, the Army Air Corps. It didn’t become the Air Force until after WWII.  

Each person in the country was issued a certain number of ration stamps. Parents got the ones for the kids. You had to have both stamps and money to buy meat, for example, because the best of the stuff was being sent to the Army, Navy, Air Corps, and Marines.  

After Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt had the Congress declare war immediately. We went to war with Germany and Italy in Europe and Japan in the Pacific. Uncle Max was in the Army Air Corps. He was sent to northern England and was stationed at the same base where Julie and Kerry lived many years later. 

Max was the only man in the family who was in the military. Uncle Matt was teaching economics in Pittsburgh and then went to San Antonio. Uncle Doc continued to practice medicine. My dad was in an exempt job. Uncle Oli worked for Dupont so he was essential, too. Aunt Finamore’s husband was a farmer, so he was exempt. Uncle Max was the only one. He owned a filling station in Kansas City, Missouri, and that was not exempt. He and Aunt Louella had been dating and they got married just before he went overseas.  

I followed what was happening in Europe primarily because that’s where Uncle Max was. He was a chief mechanic on a bomber, and he flew one out of every six missions. That was the way the Air Corps did everything so they could keep airplanes flying.

Aunt Louella would hear from him often. They wrote almost daily back and forth. I stayed some of the summers in Concordia so I was conscious of it then.  I felt excited about the war. A kid doesn’t feel the risk. We didn’t think there was any risk to us. It was going on over England, but not Canada or the United States. Although Hawaii had been attacked, it hadn’t been invaded. They were still trying to conquer various islands in the Pacific and take over China, and Southeast Asia. 

The leaders at the time wanted to keep us from getting involved. That backfired. It caused us to want to be involved.  As a kid I was not conscious of the war as a real threat, it was just a big deal in the radio and the newspaper. 

The radio made me feel involved. It was news, and the cereal broadcasts, and other evening programs and comedy programs. Jack Benny had a half hour radio program on Sunday evening. George Burns and Gracie Allen. Fred Allen. The war was mentioned in all of it. 

They would do routines that included references to Germany or Italy, or make jokes about Japan.  When the war ended, it wasn’t over all at once. The Germans surrendered first and we started pulling troops back from Europe to reposition in the Pacific. But Japan surrendered  before that happened, and the war in the Pacific was over, too.

The next thing I really remember is when the major league baseball players began to come home. Ted Williams, Stan Musial, Joe DiMaggio, and many other baseball players served in the military. There was one station that covered the NY Yankees, and another that covered the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the NY Giants. At the time I was beginning to play, I was listening to baseball, too. 

There were only eight teams in the majors. St Louis, Chicago, and Detroit were as far west as Major League Baseball went. There were no major league teams on the west coast. I followed NY teams when we lived in New Jersey, and the St Louis Cardinals when we moved to Lawrence, Kansas.  

But the country was full of minor league teams and baseball was being played all over the place. Men could play at various level minor leagues teams at three different skill levels, A, AA, AAA. They still played during the war. 

A lot of guys who were too old to be drafted got more years than they bargained for. One was Snuffy Stirnweiss, he was 40 years old and was still playing for one of the NY teams. Probably wouldn’t have gotten that chance were it not for the war.  

When the war was over and baseball heroes came home, then the news changed again. All of a sudden we began to be worried about the Soviet Union. It’s just Russia now, but it was a huge country then. Everything in eastern Europe and all the way to China. It had been run for 20 years by Joseph Stalin. 

After the end of WWII, we became conscious that we were competing with the Soviet Union. That was the anxiety of the day. We didn’t know if they would attack us, or if they would take over the rest of the world.  That became the news on the radio, and eventually television. TV had been invented during WWII, but the stations didn’t develop until after. The wars that came later were all on television.