World War II Interview Project Sally Lane Gould Growing up on the American Home Front By: Christina Kelley Introduction: I am very close with my grandmother, and we talk frequently.  But I had never before heard the story of her childhood during World War II.  My grandmother, Sally Lane Gould, was seven years old when World War II began in Europe in 1939.  Fear and death did come close to her Massachusetts home, but most of her memories of the war involve total awareness of what was going on and reassurance that Hitler would be stopped.  Sally’s parents did not withhold war information from their daughter, but still she was not worried about the outcome of the war.  Her father was convinced that Germany and Japan would be conquered and he passed that reassurance on to his daughter.  Pearl Harbor: Sally vividly remembers December 7th, 1941 as the day that bent but did not break her firm belief that the Axis Powers would be stopped and everything would be okay.  As they did every Sunday, the day that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor Sally and her family had journeyed from their house in Somerville, MA to Sally’s aunt’s house in Newton Upper Falls.  Sally was sitting with her cousins on the front porch when her father ran outside to tell them the news of the attack.  They all went inside, where they listened to President Roosevelt declare war on the Japanese.  America had finally entered World War II.  Knowledge of the War: From the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, entering the United States into the war, until V-E Day on May 8th, 1945, little Sally Lane and her family spent every morning and every evening listening to the events of the war on their radio.  Every morning, during breakfast, the Lane family would listen to Eric Severeid and Edward R. Murrow reporting from London on their tabletop radio.  And similarly, every evening after dinner, Sally would sit and color while she and her mother, father, and older brother listened to H.V. Kaltenborn from New York at 7.  Like most other American families, the Lanes would also listen to President Roosevelt’s fireside chats, and hear Roosevelt tell citizens that, “we must be the great arsenal of democracy,” as he said on December 29th, 1940.   Sally knew more details of the events of the war than many others, which she first realized when she had to explain to her oblivious second grade teacher of the Soviet invasion of Finland.  To Sally, the war was a consuming presence that, in her words, “expanded my view of life beyond my small world”. Edward R. Murrow Rationing: It was not just Sally’s knowledge and views that changed with World War II; her habits and routines were forced to adjust as well.  Sally had to experience shortages of necessities during the war; through rationing her family had to use small amounts of margarine instead of butter, mixing it with a yellow substance to color it.  They also had fuel stickers dictating how much gas they could buy at one time.  All American families had to have ration books, with ration stamps inside to allot them a certain amount of food each week, like 12 ounces of sugar, four ounces of butter, four pounds of cheese, 28 ounces of meat, and smaller than usual portions of coffee, flour, fish, canned goods, and fats.  “Making do with less” became the honorable thing, with the slogan “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without” repeated in households throughout the nation.  To add to the rationing rules, Sally’s father believed in saving and helping the war effort, so her family would keep the heat down and not travel much in the car.  Being a child, shortages of food and other essentials affected Sally, but she knew it was for a good cause.  Helping the War Effort: Besides rationing, there were many other ways that Sally and children and adults alike could help the war effort and boost morale at home.  Since men’s underwear and most other clothing were sent overseas for the soldiers fighting, people at home would repair their clothes rather than buy new ones, and they also helped by repairing and sewing clothes for the soldiers through the Red Cross.  Also, as was common throughout the United States, the Organization of Civil Defense called for blackouts in my grandmother’s town.  These blackouts were not so much to protect against bombings, for neither the Germans nor the Japanese could bomb the U.S., but more of a way to boost morale and get civilians involved with the war effort.  Sally’s father was the warden of the street, and as was his job, every night he would walk up and down the road to make sure the streetlights were out and all windows were covered with black shades, as were the blackout regulations.  Adults held blood drives to raise money for the war, and kids had air raid drills in school.  People also sold war bonds to help raise money for the war and get involved.  Scrap Drives: Scrap drives were a fun way for Sally and her friends to spend the day and help make money for the war.  Her neighbor, Mr. Berman, would get all the neighborhood kids together and have them go “iron picking”, or running around the area’s woods to see who could bring the most scrap metal, iron, and tin foil to the pile they would make on the corner.  It was a big competition between the children.  Sally remembers one time when there was a picture of her in the town paper, standing on a pile of scrap metal with a sign reading “Iron Pills for Hitler”.  Scrap drives ended up being very helpful; at one point they were the source of almost half of the nation’s steel, tin, and paper production.   School: Sally’s school life was only slightly different during the war.  The only two main differences were air raid drills and selling war bonds.  Sally remembers being ten years old and huddling along the basement walls at her elementary school for an air raid drill, where similar to a fire drill, an alarm would sound, but instead of going outside students would rush to the basement until it was over.  Also, every Friday the teacher would sell war stamps, and whichever row of students bought the most won a small prize.  My grandmother and the rest of her class would buy stamps for their war bond books, paying $18.75 for a bond, and later redeeming it for $25.00.  Other than that, however, “schools tried to not overstate the war and there was not much teaching about what was going on,” Sally says. This is an example of a victory bonds poster, which would have been displayed throughout the United States during World War II to encourage citizens to buy victory bonds.   This is a hand-drawn map of Massachusetts, illustrating where Sally lived during the war and where important war-related news came from. The War Hits Close to Home: There are only two instances that Sally can remember people she knew well dying in the war.  One was her upstairs neighbor, 20 year old Frankie Welch, who was killed in the Pacific.  The other death was more traumatic to her.  The son of a family that attended church with the Lane’s was beheaded by the Japanese as a scare tactic, and the picture was put on the front page of the Boston Globe.  Nine-year-old Sally was shocked and scared, but she held on to her certainty that Germany and Japan would be stopped and the war would soon end. The Holocaust: Even Sally, who knew in depth all of the events of World War II, did not learn about the Holocaust until it was over.  Still today she finds this hard to believe, but she realizes, “when I was a little girl following the war so closely, it was either not made public or just not known.” Conclusion: My grandmother, today a wonderful, strong woman, knew even at nine years old of the fall of Paris and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and the Soviet invasion of Finland and that Hitler’s big mistake was opening up the eastern front.  She remembers V-E night as similar to the Red Sox winning the World Series, when her father took her into the city and “Boston exploded”.  “The war was a big part of my life as a child,” my grandmother tells me, and as I talk with her, I realize that you don’t have to be a soldier or a navy pilot to be a hero.  The way that little Sally Lane dealt with rationing, scrap drives, air raid drills, and just growing up during World War II helped shape her into the loving, caring person she is today, and a hero in my eyes.  PRIMARY SOURCES 1.  Gould, Sally.  Personal interview.  2 Dec 2004. 2.  Picture, from Sally Lane Gould SECONDARY SOURCES 1.  PBS. “America’s Home Front During WWII”. World War II: The National Memorial Day Concert. 2004. 14 Nov 2004 <http://www.pbs.org/memorial dayconcert/wwii/guarding.html>. 2.  Kingwood College Library. “1940-1949”. American Cultural History: The Twentieth Century. 1999. 15 Nov 2004 <http://kclibrary.nhmccd.edu/decade40. html>. 3.  Pearson Education. “Map: Massachusetts”. Infoplease. 2004. 10 Jan 2005 <http://www.infoplease.com/atlas/state/massachusetts.html>. 4.  Peduzzi, Kelli. America in the 20th Century: 1940-1949. Tarrytown, NY: Marshall Cavendish, 2003. 5.  Widner, James F. “Edward Roscoe Murrow”. Radio Days. 2003. 10 Jan 2005 <http://www.otr.com/murrow.html>.