It was a time of destruction and almost unimaginable loss of life. A time when fascist, imperialist foes threatened to rid the world of democracy once and for all. A time for valor and courage in the face of battle overseas, for the same at home.
Yet, when he first heard that the Japanese military attacked a naval base in Pearl Harbor, Joe Strasser’s mind was blank.
“I really didn’t know what to think,” Strasser said. “I was 9 years old, just an old country boy.”
For the American soldiers of World War II and the families they left behind, the attack on Pearl Harbor was a turning point. The time when American lives were on the line for the first time, including their own.
In 2016, many of those veterans are gone. Certainly their parents are. Yet many stories of that period remain to be told, not by those who bravely fought overseas, but by those affected by the war in more indirect ways. Those children of the war years — too young to fight — many of whom are now replacing the generation ahead of them in senior citizen centers and assisted living facilities around the world.
Some of those children sat in the activity room of Morning Pointe of Brentwood on Dec. 7, 2016 a little before 2 p.m., getting ready to watch a Christmas movie.
Strasser, 84, pictured above, was one of them.
Later an industrial engineer for decades at companies like Hayes Garment Company and Genesco, in 1941 Strasser was a kid on a farm in what was then a rural stretch of Davidson County called Tusculum (about a mile north of where Haywood Lane presently meets Nolensville Road, Strasser said).
His family grew tomatoes, bell peppers, cantaloupes and three kinds of squash on his grandfather’s farm. They’d sell to produce companies in the big city.
Strasser remembers going to church on the morning of Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941 and hearing about the Pearl Harbor attack later in the day. His father told him there was going to be a big announcement soon. The next day he remembers Tusculum Elementary’s two teachers gathering all the students in kindergarten through eighth grade together around the radio to listen to President Roosevelt’s “Infamy” speech declaring war on Japan.
Even if Strasser didn’t quite know what to make of it all, he loved listening to FDR.
“I thought he hung the moon,” Strasser said. “He was my hero.”
Rationing is one of the things that stands out to Strasser most about the war years. Food, flour, meat, tires, gasoline and shoes – especially shoes.
“I was going through shoes faster than I could get the shoe stamps,” Strasser said.
He also remembers scrap drives where things like tin cans and old farm equipment were collected for use in the war effort.
Then there was his father’s country store. Kids interpret the world through how it affects them, their immediate family and maybe some other grown-ups around them. The war rationing wreaked havoc on Strasser’s father’s accounts.
“He had a dickens of a time on the food stamp stuff,” Strasser said, recalling all the government paperwork that had to be filled out to restock the shelves.
His memories of local boys who went off to fight are a little fuzzier. He does remember two local brothers who “were a little bit on the wild side” who went to war, one becoming a crew member on a B-17. They both fought and came back alive, and then one of them almost died in a motorcycle crash back home.
Perhaps it’s the nostalgic influence of the passing years, but overall Strasser’s recollections of the war period aren’t of a time of undue hardship or anxiety. Instead, he looks back on them fondly.
“If you didn’t have to go fight, it was a good time to grow up,” he said. “Everything was so interesting. History was being made every day.”
In a different part of the country, Stephany Rogers also gathered with her teachers in class to hear about the Pearl Harbor attack. Eight years old at Cabot Elementary School in Newton, Massachusetts – just outside of Boston – at the time, Rogers was set to experience the war in ways both similar and dissimilar to Strasser.
She, too, didn’t really know what to make of the war, having had no previous familiarity with war. As she puts it, “I was too young to hear about the First World War people coming back.”
And, like Strasser, she has vivid memories of wartime rationing, one item in particular.
“The worst thing they rationed was shoes,” she said with a slight New England accent. “Everyone was in a growing stage and they couldn’t get shoes.”
Living on the coast, however, was different than living in Tennessee during World War II. Coastal cities were seen as ripe targets for German attack, and so extra precautions were taken in many places. Rogers remembers some of them well.
“Men in the neighborhood had to take a course on how to look out for German planes at night,” she said.
During certain times, the windows and doors of homes had to be blacked out, as did headlights on cars.
“Everyone had to change their lifestyle,” Rogers said.
As far as the attack on Pearl Harbor itself, Rogers recalls all too well the anti-Japanese sentiment that followed.
Her father was a businessman who owned a store that stocked many dishes from Japan in the neighboring town of Waltham, Massachusetts, Rogers remembers. After the war started, she said, her father was ordered to break all of the Japanese dishes in the store. She has memories of seeing big barrels of the shattered products afterwards.
Jane Neely, 85, remembers Dec. 7, 1941 as the day she nearly lost her husband, John.
Of course, they weren’t married yet. She was 10 and he was 15, and they both lived in tiny Middleton, Tennessee. Maybe out of a rush of emotion at the news of the attack, Jane thinks, John flipped his old A-model Ford that day into a creek and emerged “white as a sheet.” He reminded her of it Wednesday morning.
When news of the attack hit Middleton, the small town united in its grief, Jane recalls.
“Everybody in town went to the school, just like a prayer meeting,” she said, her eyes welling up.
She can still bring to my mind images of ration stamps for gas and sugar, but more than those she remembers the voluntary sacrifices made by members of her community during wartime, including herself.
Jane’s aunt was a schoolteacher, and Jane lights up at the memory of helping her knit scarves out of “that green Army yarn” for soldiers overseas.
“Everyone who could knitted scarves for soldiers,” Jane said.
Mainly, though, Jane looks at her World War II childhood as a time of innocence in the midst of conflict. She and her friends could run around and play all they wanted. Her parents, who both worked at the bank, knew they would be safe. Not like today.
“I think our kids miss so much now by not being able to grow up in a country town in times like that,” she said.
When the lights dimmed at Morning Point and the Christmas movie started, the residents settled down in their chairs, possibly thinking about the time between that infamous day to now. A lot has changed since Dec. 7, 1941.
Strasser’s wife since 1958, Elena, passed away last year.
“I’ve been blue ever since,” he said, a wistful twinkle in his eyes.
Rogers lost her husband of 60 years, Albert, the year before that.
John and Jane Neely both have had some health problems recently, prompting them to move back to Brentwood to be closer to a daughter after a return of several months to Middleton.
Seventy-five years after Pearl Harbor, “the years are just flying by,” Jane said.
