Just was reading some on this recently, and wondered if anyone had any personal or family anecdotes to share.
WWII put America back to work. So I’d expect USA-centric thoughts, but I’m certainly open to others. Obviously things kicked up after Peal Harbor, but even before that, the increase in industry jobs was significant. And during the course of 1940-1945 so many people moved in pursuit of (often good paying) jobs.
It was obviously a transformative event in the lives of many. Of course, there are so many other things, traumatic ones, with family members away or even killed. But I’m really interested in any stories from those about the sense of economic optimism (though there were very discriminatory practices, too) that I’ve read about from this era.
As an aside, I’m also particularly interested in the migration of American Indians off-reservation during and after the war. I’ve heard it called and exodus, and I’d really love some first-hand accounts there.
My parents were born in about 1910, so experienced the Depression and WWII first-hand. They married in 1935, in the midst of the misery, and my father, hearing of opportunity in Alaska, sailed north, stopping in Juneau. He was able to get work at the Alaska-Juneau gold mine as a blaster. After a couple of trips up to visit him, my mother finally moved there full time. When WWII broke out, she was forced to evacuate back to Oregon with my brother and sister. My father found another job working on the Alcan Highway, building a road called the Canol Cutoff, which was supposed to result in an oil pipeline to supply the government. The war ended before the road was completed and it was abandoned.
My mother found work in Portland. Everything was rationed, so she would hit several shops on the way to work to get her coffee fix. After the war, she moved back to Alaska, and I was born. The Depression lasted well into the 40s, and real economic optimism didn’t happen until the 50s, when the middle class became a reality.
My father was born in 1922, and his father died in 1928, and then came the depression. His mother was unprepared for supporting a family, so she married a paper hanger, who I think never had any work after that. They moved to some kind of cabin in the sticks, had to dig their own well (my father and his brother did that, as young teens). They were very, very poor during the rest of the 30’s, often at least somewhat hungry, and his mother had two more children by the new hubby. He left home near the end of his senior HS year, not waiting for graduation ceremony, “to get one pair of feet out from under the table” (his words, probably supplied by his stepfather.
He hit the road and found some work doing farm labor, but he joined the army in the early fall of 1940 for 3 squares and a cot. He was assigned as a cook; he said he loved helping all those skinny, hungry kids put on some weight. His hitch was one year, so he got out in the early fall of 1941, and somehow (I never learned how) got a good office job at the Bonneville Power Administration, and was earning a good salary (my hazy memory wants to say $125/month, equivalent to $2289 today).
Then came Pearl Harbor. He volunteered for the Merchant Marine rather than get drafted, and spent the next four years in the Pacific, where he studied and became an NCO. He met my mother in 1945 and they were soon married and had two children by 1949. My father studied bookkeeping on his own in about 3 months and got a job as an office manager, (my mother was also working as a secretary) and by 1952 my parents were able to buy a house with VA benefits. That was the house I grew up in.
My stepfather was also someone who had to deal with the Depression. He was the son of a rancher in rural Montana and had little schooling. Even before the Depression hit, he left home and went walkabout, doing odd jobs to survive, and bumming around the American west. When the war came, he was making a living playing poker and the Army gave him pay and benefits. He never rose above his station, becoming a bartender after the war, which he worked at until retirement. There was no economic optimism at work there. They were able to buy a small home, as my mother worked for the state government, and they retired to a comfortable life, if not one filled with excitement or travel.
My grandmother (mom’s mom) worked as a chemist for Alabama Power in Birmingham and had risen to a fairly prominent position, after her husband (grandpa who I never met) went away. She had to do this in order to support her two kids and two older relatives who were living permanently at their house. During the war, she apparently maintained this job, while grandpa worked over at Ingalls shipyard, apparently doing civil engineering type work around dry docks (my vague understanding of his job).
We have a cousin, not directly related to me, rather a “cousin of a cousin” whose WWII adventures in the US Marines are well documented in book, TV shows and documentary. (If you saw “The Pacific” HBO series, kind of the companion to “Band of Brothers,” he was the young guy who went off to Guadalcanal at the start of the US involvement in the war, while his friend stayed home because of health issues.) I finally got to meet him in person at my cousin’s funeral about 10 years ago, down in Mobile.
On my dad’s side, his dad grew up during the great depression, and was finishing up college / enlisting / attending officer’s training school in the busy early war years. Was a lieutenant under General Patton, which of course means he was not hitting the beaches at D-Day but crossed the channel after the allied breakout, when there was enough room for the third army. Survived the war, decorated a few times, never talked about his experiences to his sons, but apparently shared some of the horror during late night talks with my mom (with whom he was apparently a kindred spirit). Many years after his death, I was able to look up his declassified silver star citation, and it read…well…heroically, which I guess is why he wanted to hide it from his two boys. He just wanted to move on from the war, I guess. He earned his PhD through the GI bill, rose to Dean of the Biz School at MTSU, and today there’s a scholarship named in his honor.
My grandfather’s farm was failing and he applied to become a teacher on the Topaz internment camp in central Utah. My mother actually lived there in the camp for a year. After that, her father stayed in the camp while the rest of the family went and lived with my great-grandmother. Later, Grandpa was able to get another farm.
My seventh grade art teacher fought in the war and was able to use the GI bill to go to college, where he got a teaching degree. He would joke that the only reason he was able to stand teaching junior high school kids was that he had been assigned to artillery so he was partially deaf and could ignore people better.
My dad, born in 1908, tried to enlist after Pearl Harbor. He was 33 at the time and a father of 2 children. He was also a welder for the UP Railroad and as such was declared essential for the war effort and spent WWII repairing box cars.
My dad – born in '25 – and three of his siblings grew up in an orphanage. His father was very ill and his mother, being a grifter, visited them a few times but really didn’t want anything to do with them. She wouldn’t even use their given names.
Dad and his brother enlisted in the Navy within a few months of Pearl Harbor. Dad was only 16 and lied about his age. Both used the GI Bill to get chemical engineering degrees from the University of Wisconsin; Dad ended up with the pharmaceutical operations of Armour & Company (as in Armour Hot Dogs, Hormel chili, Dial soap, etc.) in Chicago. He remained with Armour for three decades and a 50-mile move, only departing when a new parent company transferred him between subsidiaries.
My uncle found work in St. Louis, possibly for Monsanto. I never really got to know him, he died as a result of an industrial accident when I was, like, 7.
One of my aunts was old enough to avoid much of orphanage life; 1940 census records show my other aunt as taking care of my grandfather in Michigan. She joined her sister in Kentucky after his death.
Uncle Buddy was a year or two older than Dad but, IIRC, he had yet to officially move out of the orphanage when he enlisted. He was in Kentucky at the time and used his sister’s address on the enlistment form.
My grandparents did a ‘grapes of wrath’ style migration from Ohio to California when there was no more work in their home town. They stopped in Boise, ID to take a break. While there they saw places offering jobs and applied; they ended up living there for most of their lives.
Several of my mother’s siblings got work with the CCC, WPA, or other government programs. Back in the 90s my aunt showed me a retaining wall in her home town that she and two of her brothers had worked on building 60 years earlier. The two brothers went on to join the Army before the War began.
My maternal grandparents and family moved from depression North Dakota in 1938 to Burbank, California. My grandfather had found work with Lockheed building fighter planes.
My dad went to work in 1930 for a fledgling family-owned company in a Midwestern farm town, that was runnning erratically with a few orders for a new-fangled product – rivets. Demand exploded and the company was in place to make virtually every rivet in WWII aircraft. While it didn’t directly impact my family, it was interestingly pivotal in history.
My father was born in 1917. His family was well to do until his father died in 1920 or so. His mother - who knew nothing about money, as was common back then, lost all of it. She worked as a seamstress and they lived in a tenement in lower Manhattan. He managed to finish high school but college was out of the question, even free City College. He worked in lunch counters his uncle owned. When the war started he was able to get better jobs, and he was a security guard when he got drafted in late 1943 or early 1944.
When he got out he got an early job at the UN and managed to get promoted enough for a good middle class life.
My mother’s father was a plumber, and while things were always tight they got along better than some during the Depression.
Right after she graduated from high school in the early 1940s, my maternal grandmother traveled from her home in Wisconsin out to Southern California via trains and buses, and got a job in an airplane factory (I’m not sure which one). She and her friend worked there until they saved enough money for the return trip. So I suppose my story is more of a Rosie the Riveter story.