A CHILD'S VIEW OF WAR

I was born in Camas, Washington in 1937 just fourteen months after my brother Keith had come upon the scene.  I spent the first year of my life in Skamania.  Our parents were Ed Yettick, a Columbia River dam construction worker, and Grace Conrad Yettick, a one-room school teacher raised in Touchet.  Mom gave up her job when she married, but she didn't quit teaching.  Our family moved to California when I was three so my dad could work on Shasta Dam.  When my brother started school I got to spent many hours alone with my mom.  She taught me to read by the time I was four years old.  One of the things available to read, besides library books, was the newspaper, which my mother taught me to "sound out."  When Pearl Harbor was bombed, I very soon sounded out the word WAR, and learned from my mother what that meant.

A military training base quickly sprouted at the air field on the outskirts of Redding, the town where we lived when Pearl Harbor was attacked.  Often my dad picked up men in uniform and gave them a ride to town, sometimes even bringing them to our little home for a meal and some conversation. 

There came a day when I realized war was something closer to home than I imagined.  My mom told me there would be a truck coming by that day to collect tires and other used rubber and metal products for the war.  We had very few toys, but my dad had found two rubber dolls in a trash can at work.  They had one dress between them and were pretty well worn, but they were good dolls and made great footballs to toss back and forth with my brother.  My mom told me I should think about giving one of them to the rubber drive to help the war.  I picked the larger of the two, then stood by the street and waited for the rubber truck to come. 

Dad had left a couple of worn tires to donate, so the truck stopped right in front of our house.  After the man threw the tires up on top of the pile he already had accumulated, he looked at me hesitantly.  Slowly I handed him my doll.  He looked at it, then at my mother, who nodded.  He tossed it up on top of the tires.  As the truck drove off I watched my doll bouncing around on top of those dirty old tires and wondered whatever the war needed with my doll.  But, I felt good about doing my part, like my mom had told me everyone had to do.

The Yettick family moved further south in California to Los Altos in the San Francisco Bay Area where my dad took a job working swing shift or graveyard as a hammerhead crane operator.  He loaded magnesium on flat bed rail cars at Permanente Magnesium Defense Plant where they mined and shipped that crucial mineral twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.  I knew magnesium was used to make bombs and often wondered what would happen if my dad dropped a load of that metal. 

I started kindergarten in the fall of 1942.  I remember well the day the radio and papers announced the news that President Roosevelt had died.  And I also remember the day at school when my teacher asked everybody what nationality they were and I announced we were German.  Before I got home from school that day my parents had been visited by two men in uniform from nearby Moffett Field.  They had inquired about our connections to Germany.  Dad told me in no uncertain terms, "Don't EVER tell ANYONE we are German!"

He also told me that when we walked to school we were not to walk on the side of the street where some Japanese people lived.  "We don't know who they are, or anything about them," he warned us.  Well, I had always waved and said hi to an older lady who regularly worked in her garden in the mornings and afternoons.  I continued to wave, but from the other side of the street, wondering why the woman looked so sad all the time.  Then one day the woman wasn't there, the house was still and quiet.  I didn't see anyone there again for a long time and the yard fell into disrepair. 

Not too long after the war was over, I was riding my bike to school, on the "wrong" side of the street, when I saw the older lady at her house again.  At least I thought it was the same lady, but she looked really old.  I stopped and waved and said hi.  The woman recognized me and waved, then she began to cry.  It was many years before I knew about internment camps and how very few Japanese-American people were able to return to their homes.

The war also meant food and gas rationing, and standing in long lines with my mother, hoping to buy one pair of nylons or to get some with runners repaired.  Butter gave way to margarine that came in a plastic bag with a little food dye bubble in it.  I had to take turns with Keith breaking the bubble, then working the color through the white greasy stuff inside the bag.  Air raid drills both at school and at home became part of life, as did the constant threat of air plane bomb attacks.  I can still feel the terror I felt then as I hid under my desk or ran across the street to a house where we all curled up on the floor and remained absolutely still until the all clear siren sounded.  I wondered who it was who would come to my town and drop a bomb on me.

Then came the big day.  I knew we had beaten the Germans, but that day the war was finally over.  I got to go across the street to a church where the minister let all the neighborhood kids grab ahold of the bell rope, one kid at a time, and go flying up into the air as the bells rang out.  Then our family piled in the car with some neighbors, and drove to San Jose where a sight amazing to behold was in progress.  People were kissing anyone they wanted to, throwing confetti all over the place, blowing horns, and drinking a lot.  Dad had a bottle in the car and when he drove past a policeman attempting to direct traffic in a downtown intersection, he poured him a drink, handed it to him, and told him we would go around the block and come back to pick up the glass, which we did.  The glass came back empty and the officer seemed quite happy about the whole thing!  

Things were much better for our family after the war because my dad had worked long, hard hours on the home front and had accumulated enough money to buy a little house.  My brother and I both had Schwinn bikes.  Rationing and shortages were over allowing me to have butter on my popcorn and new shoes when I wanted them.  We soon moved to a bigger house and I had my own room and a closet full of clothes.

The war was over and I very quickly forgot about it.  It was no longer in the headlines, no longer the center of discussions.  I never gave much more than cursory academic thought to it until just this year when we geared up for this writing project.  Now that I have been taught by the masters in the field, the people who were adult participants in the 1940s, my child's view of the war has finally grown up.