It speaks about a bleak landscape. And this bleak landscape takes me back to a day when I was in fourth grade out on the edge of town, looking at a snow-covered highway many, many yards away from my window — I should've been paying attention, but I was dreaming.
And then I saw a lone figure walking across on a very, very cold day," he continues, "and you know how it is when the wind blows and you have to turn your back against the wind, and I felt so sorry for that person, and then I realized it was my father. That my father, who was completely out of work, had been the director of his own business as a contractor in the heyday of the migrant stream back in the late '50s, but now that business had died. He was up in the chilly North with family, broke and sick, and he had to get to this very insignificant job in a factory, miles and miles away. A black man with no car, trying to hitchhike, and no one picking him up, and he has to walk that 10 miles to get to the factory. And I'm sitting in this warm classroom, getting educated, not paying attention to the teacher, and suddenly feeling torn between two worlds. And this music, when I hear it, I feel for my father. There's something about art that can be, yes, depressing, but helps us bear the pain through sheer beauty and intensity.
Christmas cookie baking this year in the Kinsey-McCarroll household has been a bit spare. One batch turned out acceptably. That term is used loosely. They were acceptable in that eating just one cookie would fill your tummy for the entire morning...a little too loaded with every dried fruit in the cupboard, with chocolate to boot. So next on the baking agenda are some lighter, fluffier cookies.
The U. S. Navy accepted me as a candidate to be an Aviation Cadet. I was assigned to the Elimination Base at the Naval Air Station at Dallas. I reported on October 1, 1941, and completed primary flight training. I received orders to report to the N. A. S. Corpus Christi and to a pool of future Aviation Cadets.
It was Sunday morning, December 7. 1941, after reveille, I dropped from my top bunk and dressed in khaki for a full day ashore in Corpus Christi. Mother and Dad were visiting the Ward Terrells, friends from Junction. I met them for church services and then we visited with Maurine Motley, a distant cousin from Hollis, OK. She was a teacher. We drove around the city and returned to her apartment. A lady came out a door and told us to turn on the car radio for the NEWS! The announcement and description of the Pearl Harbor attack was a shock to us. The sun was low in the sky in Texas but it was morning in Hawaii.
I returned to the base by bus and was prepared for some drastic changes, but I noticed nothing different. We still drilled, had musters and formations. I remained in the Pool until after Christmas. My orders were to report to Pensacola N.A.S. as an Aviation Cadet.
These men and women came of age in the Great Depression, when economic despair hovered over the land like a plague. They had watched their parents lose their businesses, their farms, their jobs, their hopes. They had learned to accept a future that played out one day at a time Then, just as there was a glimmer of economic recovery, war exploded across Europe and Asia. When Pearl Harbor made it irrefutably clear that America was not a fortress, this generation was summoned to the parade ground and told to train for war. They left their ranches in Sully County, South Dakota, their jobs on the main street of Americus, Georgia, they gave up their place on the assembly lines in Detroit and in the ranks of Wall Street, they quit school or went from cap and gown directly into uniform.
They answered the call to save the world from the two most powerful and ruthless military machines ever assembled, instruments of conquest in the hands of fascist maniacs.
They faced great odds and a late start, but they did not protest. At a time in their lives when their days and nights should have been filled with innocent adventure, love, and the lessons of the workaday world, they were fighting, often hand to hand, in the most primitive conditions possible, across the bloodied landscape of France, Belgium, Italy, Austria. They fought their way up a necklace of South Pacific islands few had ever heard of before and made them a fixed part of American history: islands with names like Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, Okinawa. They were in the air every day, in skies filled with terror, and they went to sea on hostile waters far removed from the shores of their homeland.
When the war was over, the men and women who had been involved, in uniform and in civilian capacities, joined in joyous and short-lived celebrations, then immediately began the task of rebuilding their lives and the world they wanted. They were mature beyond their years, tempered by what they had been through, disciplined by their military training and sacrifices. They married in record numbers and gave birth to another distinctive generation, the Baby Boomers. They stayed true to their values of personal responsibility, duty, honor, and faith.
They were a new kind of army now, moving onto the landscapes of industry, science, art, public policy, all the fields of American life, bringing to them the same passions and discipline that had served them so well during the war.
They were not perfect. They made mistakes. They allowed McCarthy-ism and racism to go unchallenged for too long. Women of the World War II generation, who had demonstrated so convincingly that they had so much more to offer beyond their traditional work, were the under-pinning for the liberation of their gender, even as many of their husbands resisted the idea. When a new war broke out, many of the veterans initially failed to recognize the differences between their war and the one in Vietnam.
It may be historically premature to judge the greatness of a whole generation, but indisputably, there are common traits that cannot be denied. It is a generation that, by and large, made no demands of homage from those who followed and prospered economically, politically, and culturally because of its sacrifices. It is a generation of towering achievement and modest demeanor, a legacy of their formative years when they were participants in and witness to sacrifices of the highest order.
