DON AND NONA CAMP

By Daniel Broeckel

Don and Nona Camp lived near the town of LaCrosse when World War II started.  They ran a large farm about six miles out of town.  Don was a hard worker on the farm because there was nobody to help.  It was long hours and hard days.  He farmed three men's jobs by himself.  The harvesting was the hardest.  They sometimes found help in town at the hotel.  People who needed work would go to the hotel and farmers who needed help would go to the hotel to get someone to work for them.  Older men and local teen-agers were recruited to help.

The Camps were very fortunate to be running a farm because Don did not have to go fight since the country needed some men to stay and produce food for the troops.  Don was willing to fight in the war if the chance ever came.  But his father was getting older and there was no way he could farm.   So the Government deferred Don to stay and farm. 

Don rarely came to town because farming took all his time and then some.  But he and Nona sometimes came to town on Saturday night to have fun and talk to other farmers.

Don and Nona Camp had two sons.  One fought in a later war, the Vietnam War.  And the other was in the military stationed in Germany in peace time.

During World War II the community where the Camps lived was very different than it had been.  The families around them changed and did different things.   They had an airplane lookout station that people of the town manned.  They would write down a note if a plane flew over and write down what time it was.  For doing this they got medals and awards for the hours they put in. 

The home front was a very different place compared to the years before.  The farming community was very helpful to the war effort.  They had fund-raisers for the war.  The country had to pull together and that is what they did. 

Don and Nona were one of the many families that made contributions to the war by farming and giving money.  Don was glad that he did not have to go to war, but he was willing to go.  Don and Nona are still in the small farming community they lived in during the war.

NONA AND DON CAMP

By Trisha Goolsby

Don Camp has lived in Whitman County for about eighty-five years.  Don and Nona have been married for sixty-four years.  Together they have two sons, one of whom served in the Vietnam War.  The other son was stationed in Germany.

Farming was hard during the war because a lot of the help had gone off to fight the war.  They had to feed their livestock wheat-hay.  When harvest came around, they would use a pull binder which took four mules to pull.  One day their barn caught fire.  Their neighbors around them rushed over to help Don's family put out the fire.  The wage for harvesting was three-fifty to five dollars a day.  Wheat sold for sixty-one cents a bushel in 1940.

The Camps never served on the war front, but had family and friends who did.  During the war Don and Nona stayed on the home front and farmed.  Don was pardoned from the war to help his father farm and take care of the ranch.  Don and Nona did help fight in their own way.  They would come into town to watch for airplanes passing through the sky.  Don and Nona had to learn all the names of the airplanes and what kind they were.  Once they spotted a plane they had to write it down in a log book and call it in.  They could go for weeks and not see a plane, then one day they would see two or three planes.  People would build shacks to sit in to watch for the planes.

There were shortages of many things and gasoline and sugar were rationed.  The attitude the people had on the home front was this: they had to do what they had to do.  A lot of people would send care packages to friends and family in the war.  The care packages would have cookies, clothing, and other things that would try to make the soldiers feel more at home, or at least somewhat comforted.  The people on the home-front would make up fund-raisers to earn money for the war.  Don's father bought an old school bell for one thousand dollars to help raise money for the war.

During the war LaCrosse was a very busy place.  Nona told me they would have to rush through their chores in the morning,  just so they could get a parking place when they got to town.  Today LaCrosse is only a fourth of what it was in the 1940s.  LaCrosse had a number of stores, theaters, and even a bowling alley.  Also there were meat stores, dance halls, and hotels.  There were three grain outfits in LaCrosse at that time. 

One question I asked was, "Do you think the U.S. did the right thing getting into the war?"  I found their answer interesting.  Nona and Don told me they thought it was not the right thing to do.  But they also said that if we didn't enter the war Japan would have kept coming.  And, they told me, we had to do what we had to do, which meant the United States had to enter the war.