The War Years

It was also in third grade that Pearl Harbor happened and once a week I would bring my dime for a war stamp to put in my stamp book. The books held about $18 in stamps which could be turned in for $25 sometime down the road. I do remembering turning in my book years later for cash.

World War II made some changes in our little Branch in Glendive, too.  Some missionaries who were working in Germany came to Glendive to finish their missions and showed us beautiful picture of Germany.  It was sad to hear what was taking place.  They were the last Elders we would have for some time.

On the walls of the school were the posters about the Four Freedoms and we pledged allegiance to the flag every day.  There was the Freedom from Hunger, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, and Freedom from Fear.  The pictures were of a family sitting at a table eating, a man standing up and giving a speech, a family in Church, and parents looking at a child peacefully sleeping.  Originally when we pledged we would start out with our right hand on our heart and then at the word "to the flag" we would salute the flag.  This was soon stopped as it looked too much like the salute of the Nazi's to Hitler.  After that we just kept our hand on our heart.

There were always news reels about the war before our weekend movies.  We would see pictures of the marching Nazi soldiers with their goose step.  I had nightmares about them and dreamed of them coming over the Canadian border to our hometown.  We had black curtains we had to put over our windows when there were blackout drills.  We also grew our Victory Garden, as most everyone did, with lots of vegetables.

Of course, there was the rationing.  Since our Dad owned a store I doubt shoes were our problem but I hated those white margarine bags which we had to squeeze to make the red dye in them turn it all yellow and then it didn't even taste like butter.  Previously the butter came in big grey jars.  I would always put my finger in the butter and mother would slap at my fingers.  We missed the butter the most though I am sure mother missed the sugar for baking. Double Bubble gum also disappeared from the stores.

George's mother shopped at the little store on the South Side and was friends with the owner.  One day she came home with a whole sack of Double Bubble gum and George came and shared it with Berta Mae and I.  I have a memory of sitting in our back yard enjoying the bubble gum and our friendship.

Before Dick
makes Ensign.

Dick went into the Navy after being selected to go on for training as an Ensign in Boston and small craft training in Miami. I remember him eating a lot of carrots before he went so he would pass the eye tests.  He also told me about training the eyes after he was in the service.  They would choose a tree in the distance, then a branch, then a bird on the branch, each time zeroing in on a smaller item to train their eyes to see well.  Mom used to boil Eagle Brand condensed milk for four hours and then send the can to Dick.  It was like a caramel pudding.  He loved that and so did we.  What a treat! Dick was back East for his whole enlistment I believe.  I remember him telling us about the parties where he wore his Ensign uniform and met many pretty girls.

David loved to hunt.

Dave wanted to enlist in the war but he was not accepted because his ankles and feet had been burned when he worked for the Forest Service in Idaho.  Dave always liked to play with matches.  One of his friends in the Quonset Hut was soaking his legs in kerosene and Dave was goofing around with his matches and when the boy saw what he was doing, he screamed to Dave and stood up and the liquid caught fire and spilled all over Dave's ankles and feet.  I drove with my parents to Coeur De Lane, Idaho and we brought him home.  He sat across the back seat and we had to be very careful when we shut the door that his feet were not extending too far out. He was told the scar tissue would cause him serious trouble so he did not get into the war nor go on a mission.

We also made afghans for the wounded soldiers to put over their legs in the wheel chairs.  Each child in our class was to make a square out of yarn.  It could be knitted or weaved.  We had our little weaving loom and even the boys participated.  We were very pleased when the teacher put them together and showed us the finished afghan.

We all had chores to do and one time I was working with Jeanne in the kitchen.  She was four years older and the boss of me, at that moment anyway.  I was evidently trying to get the sink clean and I complained that I just couldn't do it.  She told me to "use a little elbow grease".  I quickly ran to look on the shelf above the basement stair where all the cleaning supplies were kept and told her I couldn't find it.  I can still see that exasperated look on her face, but how was I to know?

Someone once told me it was the English in me that made me take things so literal.  My father's  mother was English.  My other grandparents were all from Sweden.

We had an interesting neighborhood.  There was Mrs. Elliott who would give us candy every time we knocked on her door.  There were so many taking advantage of this that she had to limit it to once a day.  Then there was the man with rock polishing equipment and we could watch him work.  There was greenhouse across the road from our house.  We seemed to freely be able to pick rhubarb stalks to eat with salt.  Rhubarb is still something I love to cook today and eat with sour cream.  I loved visiting inside the greenhouse and seeing all the flowers and plants. Across from our house the other direction was the hospital.  There were always interesting things happening there and it was where we would buy our coke out of the machine when we had a nickel or was it a dime?  We even tried skiing down their grassy slope in the winter.  And of course, we had the football field, softball field, high school, baseball field, ice skating rink and swimming pool down the hill within a couple blocks.  Quite a neat place to live and oh, yes, the creek that ran through it all and the railroad tracks and badlands less than two blocks from our back yard.  Our beds would shake when the train went by.  Yes, Glendive was a wonderful place to live.

The skating rink was made by flooding the baseball field from fire hydrant hoses.  There was an old shed there with a wood burning stove.  We filled it with wood and coal and it would get red hot and it was always toasty warm in there.  I do not remember any adult supervision but there were always older guys to keep it going.  Berta Mae and I tried to skate like Sonja Henie but the boys mostly played tag.  We were all fairly good skaters and it was a big rink.

'Kick the Can' was played with all age groups of the neighborhood joining in.  The boys also collected marbles and played them by drawing a circle in the dirt and shooting them at each other.  I never really understood all the rules of marbles or Mumblety Peg with the jack knives either but I always liked jack knives.  My Dad always had one in his pocket and would pull it out for a variety of reasons. In the last 10 years I would own one myself though it has almost been confiscated a couple times at the airport.  The games we girls spent hours and hours at were Hop Scotch, Jump Rope, Roller Skating, and Jacks.  Berta and I became especially proficient at Jacks and could sit on the kitchen floor below every one's feet and never miss a beat.  It was smoother on the hands to use the floor instead of concrete but we played anywhere we could find a smooth surface.  I tried to introduce Jacks to my own children but it was hard for them and hard for me, too, then.

At some point in time Bob and Warren. I think,  started printing a little newspaper called the Zippy News with little gossip items and they would leave them at our doorstep.  Bob was always so clever, and though not exactly in our neighborhood, where does a neighborhood begin and end in a small town?  I am not sure.  Warren was my sister's age and I never forgot when we were all in a tent in his backyard and he opened an orange and carefully pulled out all the wedges and shared with us.  It was like the time George and his sister Ruth had a huge Hershey bar and broke it all into squares and shared with me.  Now was it the food or the sharing that so impressed me?  I am not sure, but I doubt I ever had a Hershey bar of my own till I was older and oranges were very precious.

Miss Rhodes in fourth grade made us draw and color birds all the time and had a very cranky look on her face. I never did learn how to draw though.  One time she pinched my cheek and shook my face because I had gotten in a fight with some girl on the playground. I think it was Shirley or one of her special friends.

In fifth grade I began to like Curtis but in sixth grade it was back to George again. In sixth grade there was Friday night Recreation Center at the school and there were games to play like checkers and ping pong, pop to drink and dancing. Mr. Moody would actually put the girls and boys together in the middle of the gym and teach us how to dance. George and Bill decided that Berta and I should go on a date with them. Suddenly George and I weren't buddies anymore we were boyfriend and girlfriend--a whole new drama. We had a hard time talking to each other and we held hands in the movie and George sweated so much I felt sorry for him.

One of the beautiful memories I have though is walking home from the movies with George and Bill and there was a new spring snowfall that was sticking to the trees and yet the walks were melted and it was warm. It was truly a winter wonderland. We walked with Berta and I in front and the boys in back but what I remember most was how the town looked so beautiful all decked out in warm, wet snow. Usually when it snowed it was cold and the snow was so dry it blew around and there wasn't a whole lot of it. Luckily it stayed cold so you had enough packed snow for sledding but it was not deep and wet very often.

Miss Livingston also taught us singing and one time Berta and I composed a song but when she played it for us on the piano it didn't sound like a song at all. I was very disappointed.  Berta was a genius and could play the piano well at a young age as well as the violin.  I always liked her to play "Doll Dance" for me and her fingers would go back and forth so fast on the piano.  Once I asked her to play my piano lesson for me.  I couldn't understand why it sounded so different even though we each played the same notes.

Berta Mae had a wonderful imagination and I liked having her tell about our experiences because they sounded even more fun than they were. We had "Poco, Moco, Loco Island” which we had to put on our rubber boots to wade through muck to get there. It was a strip of land along the Yellowstone River and in the summer it would be exposed. We could find really nice mica and agate stones on the island. Unfortunately her brother followed us once and told her mother and that ended our trips. Evidently we were wading in raw sewage to get there.  Montana agates were very plentiful in the area and our neighbor would sometimes polish our rocks for us.

Since our house was very old there were lots of weird creeks and noises.  Sometimes after school, if there was no one home, Berta Mae and I would try to make ourselves scared.  We would sit very quiet and listen and then imagine what the sound could be and get ourselves all agitated.  I specifically remember one time being so scared we climbed on the kitchen table and eventually were brave enough to run outside to get away from "whatever".  We always liked the scary shows, too like "The Hidden Hand".  Using our imagination was a big part of our entertainment in our childhood.



We also liked to play in the canyon below the swimming pool and across the creek from Berta Mae's house. There were dense plants up and down the hillside and we would pretend we were "Nyoka of the Jungle" and be quite hidden from view. Nyoka was a 15 minute continuous serial that played on Saturdays at the Uptown Theater after the main show. It would end each week with Nyoka in a perilous predicament that was very fun to act out.

Across from the swimming pool by the softball field there was a huge, huge tree with lots of good climbing branches.  Someone had tied a very long, huge rope quite high up in the tree.  We would take turns standing on a branch while someone would throw the rope to us.  After we caught the rope we could swing way out and back.  It was so fun, just like Tarzan. 

Of course, we used to hike a lot in elementary school out to the Badlands and we especially liked Sugar Loaf. It was a huge gumbo hill that someone had carved steps in and you could climb up and actually be in a sheltered area to eat your lunch as there were walls all around it. I don't know what grade I was in when on the way back from the hike we stopped to have a fire and eat hot dogs and someone told some jokes about sex. It was the first time I began to get an inkling about that. When Marilyn was about in 7th grade Mom found her panties with blood on them and so had me run to the pool and get her. When she came home we got the sex and menstruation lesson complete with visuals and Marilyn had to start wearing Kotex. Thank heaven my period didn't come till I was almost in high school.

Ellen

In 5th and 6th grade we had a special friend who lived down the hill from us. Her name was Ellen and she was Japanese. She with her family had been moved inland to Glendive from the coast because of Pearl Harbor. Her older brother was a football player and her younger brother was my sister Carole’s special friend. They later moved back to Washington state. One thing she and Berta and I loved doing is acting like entertainers for the army troops. The scoreboard at the football field had a platform behind it and we would pretend it was a stage and sing to the troops. It was always fun and we knew lots of war songs to sing. Ellen was a happy, fun person to be with and everyone liked their family even though we were at war with Japan. The American-Japanese were not treated kindly by the government during WWII.  But Glendive was different.  They were our friends.

When I was on a bus near the white cliffs of Dover in 2000 the bus driver asked if any of us remembered the words to the war song "White Cliffs of Dover".  I, of course, did.  Some of the other war songs we sang were "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree", "Saturday Night", "Over Here", "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again",  "Accent-u-ate the Positive", "I'll be Seeing You", "As Time Goes By", "Don't Get Around Much Anymore", "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy", "Coming In on a Wing and a Prayer", "They're Either to Young or Too Old", "White Christmas", "I'll Walk Alone", "Paper Doll", "Sentimental Journey".  Oh, there were so many.  It was the time of Glenn Miller and other big bands.  There were so many singers and bands doing shows for the troops overseas and probably the greatest love songs of all time were written in that era and we knew them all I think.

In 6th or 7th grade we had the play "The Little White Lie" and we had all learned our parts quite well except there was one part where we were supposed to converse while eating a donut and drinking some tea (water). We couldn't think of anything to say after we had discussed the weather (this was one part we had not rehearsed) and we began to eat our donuts so fast that everyone in the audience began laughing. Anyway I never forgot the message of that play that once you tell a little white lie you have to lie more and more just to cover it up.

Lorraine, Myrna, Janet and Eddy at Methodist Church Camp

The summer before 7th grade I was able to go with the Methodist Sunday School to camp near Livingston, Montana. Lorraine, and Myrna were my closest friends that went. It was boys and girls from 7th and 8th grade. We traveled all across the state in the back of a big truck with very high sides. It was not against the law then.  We had blankets to put around us but it was still cold as evening came on. On the way back I discovered the back of my pants had ripped and so I tied my leather fringe jacket around my waist and acted as if I was so hot. What a phony! Camp was very fun with hikes, lessons, songs, (no dancing--Methodists did not dance) and good food. We also signed Loyal Temperance League cards in which we promised not to drink or smoke. I was probably the only one that kept that pledge. We even put the boy's hair up in pin curls--boys wore their hair long on the top with a special wave like Alan Ladd in the movies.

You can see Lorraine's hair with a bandanna around it.  This was how we curled our hair.  We put pin curls secured with bobby pins all over our head and then tied a bandanna around our head to keep them from falling out.  I don't remember if we wet our hair or not but we did not have hair spray, I know that. The other way we curled our hair was to wrap strands of hair in rags, roll it up and then tie the rags tight.  This was mostly done by our mothers when we were young.  I also wore my hair in pigtails or wore braids that come up over the top of my head like a crown and were secured by bobby pins.  Esther Williams, the swimming star, made this hair-do very popular. 

Music from junior high was the Ink Spots songs and the song "Gypsy" and "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", to name a few. Myrna's favorite was "My Blue Heaven". Miss Cline took me on her lap at one dance and told me how pretty I looked. I was wearing a black velvet jumper with a pink blouse. Miss Pathman had us write poetry and Miss Corbett used to quiz us on history all the time. She would ask a question and you had to stand and answer it. If you got it wrong, she would say, "Check if off". If you had more checks than correct you had to write questions and answers from the lessons. I did not like her class or her tests. I also had some shoes with cleats on the heels. We used to do that with our shoes like taps. This particular pair of shoes slid too much on my feet they made on extra lot of noise on the wood floors. Miss Corbett told me I couldn't wear them anymore. 

Myrna in Ballerina Skirt

Myrna's mother was lots of fun and liked to sit and talk to us girls. She told us a couple of off color jokes that I have never forgotten though they were not very risque. She knew how to make the best divinity and had a good record collection. Lorraine's mother had the cleanest house I had ever seen. I was impressed that she even washed the walls. Berta's mom had a big piano in the living room and Berta's dad was always listening to the radio about the war. Norma Kay did not move to Glendive until junior high but she soon became a best friend, too. We decided to make corduroy jackets and they turned out really good. I don't know if an adult was helping us but I think Kay was our expert. Later we made large circular skirts with waist bands with stiffness in them so they would not bend. Good we had tiny waists.   Myrna had the smallest waist, I think.  The dresses would flair out when we danced around and we would wear peasant blouses with them. Kay became an excellent seamstress and it gave me my start. George began to like Kay though and that didn't make me too happy but she liked so many boys and was so popular it didn't matter too much.

Berta and I always were looking for ways to earn money and would caddy at the golf club or sweep the greens and one day we even vacuumed a ladies house. It was then that my Dad told me there were better ways to earn money than cleaning people's houses. Of course, I baby sat a lot, mostly the Meissner children and then Dr. Aby's children. One thing my Dad used to tell me was "To always be worth more than you were paid." We earned 10 cents an hour and 25 cents after midnight babysitting.

I think it was in junior high when I had my most embarrassing moment. We were swimming with Myrna's brothers and cousins and I had on a two piece bathing suit. We were trying to learn how to dive well and I took a real flop. When I swam to the edge of the pool and stood up my body was still smarting from the flop and I did not know that my top had been pushed up and my breasts were exposed. One of them reminded Myrna of that at our 50 Year High School Reunion! Must have really impressed him. Me, too.   Myrna was a super dancer and her partner was often Eddy.  They were the best at jitterbugging!

Jackets and coats were an important part of our life and having a leather fringe jacket was a must in my life.  I liked to wear cowboy boots, too.  We also went through the phase of the "pea jackets" like the sailors wore and they were nice and warm.  Eventually I was able to get a stadium coat which was belted with fur lining and the stadium boots also were fur lined.  This was great for watching football games.  On our heads we mostly wore wool scarfs tied under our chin.  This was not great for our hair though and we would often weather the night with bare heads or ear muffs.