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| Proud parents at Cassidy's graduation from Flight School |
Below: Friday afternoon, at 4:00 pm, we got the word. Cassidy passed her final Checkflight, and has received her Private Pilot's License. (That's her instructor on the right.)
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| Yay, hurray! |
With time running down to a 2-day cruise planned for this weekend, Cassidy's flight instructor flew her to the commercial airport, taxiing her right up to her gate. When boarding her American Airlines flight, Cassidy mentioned that she had just gotten her pilot's license that morning, and lo & behold, they invited her to sit up front!
We're all feeling the heat these days, but maybe not as much as in Las Vegas . . .
THE CHANGES IN MY LIFETIME, Part 2
(including Comments on the State of the World & Hints of Events to Come)
Addendum to Part 1:
Rationing. When mentioning my child's-eye view of WWII, I forgot Gas & Food Rationing. Yes, both. My mother had "coupons" for nearly everything. Meat, in particular, was in short supply. The US was not only feeding a hugely increased military, but we were providing emergency rations for our allies, particularly Russia, with convoys of supplies to Murmansk the most dangerous naval assignment, not just for the Navy but for the merchant sailors on the supply ships they were escorting. (One of them was among the 11 Americans who toured Russia with me a quarter century after WWII. All he had to do, even so long after the war, was mention "Murmansk," and he was an instant friend to every Russian we met!)
A personal note on Gas Rationing. My father had a Master's Degree from Harvard and wanted to get a Doctorate from Yale, so we moved from Massachusetts to Connecticut in the summer of 1941, just months before Pearl Harbor. Since our new home was about a 90-minute drive from New Haven, forgetaboutit. By the time the war was over, my father decided to let his dream of a Yale degree go.
Post-War - Special Note
High school days were about as idyllic as it gets, though I recall a moment in 8th grade that presaged what was to come. (Reminder: throughout WWII the Russians were our allies, attacking the Germans from east as the rest of the Allies attacked from the west. Russia as an ally was the world I had grown up in.) And yet . . .
My father, who had just become Superintendent of Schools after a number of years as Principal of the High School, noticed my interest in a school library book called Timur and His Gang - about a boy in the USSR. I really don't recall my father saying much, but by the next day, the book was gone, never to be seen again. So even directly after a long war with Russia as our allies, my father wanted no hint of Communism in our schools. (I try to remember that "other side of the coin" when being horrified by many censorship attempts down through the years, to which I am adamantly opposed.) [Clearly, this incident was significant to me or I would not have recalled the title of the book after more than 70 years!]
The World, post World War II (1945- ). Most of the world basked in euphoria. Our fighting men were home, anxious to embrace wives, children, and sweethearts, something resulting in a new term—"housing developments," spurred by the need of men who had fought and won a war, while keeping alive to the vision of a home with picket fence all their own. The Russians, who had suffered terribly during the war, were a menace only to those tasked with analyzing potential threats. It should be noted that Germany and Japan, though humiliated by defeat, were not stomped into the earth but swamped with aid to rebuild (US aid, of course.) The UN was born, everyone wanting to believe it would forever end the need for war.
Grace note: although I did not read this story until I was studying history in college, it's a good indication of how primitive conditions were in Russia at that time. It seems that when the Allies stood back and allowed the Russians to take Berlin (as compensation for all their country had suffered)*, naturally, Russian troops ran rampant through the city, many of them with backgrounds so primitive they had no idea what a toilet was and used them to wash their potatoes!
*Russia lost just under 8,700,000 people, military & civilians, in WWII.
Some Local Notes from the Post-War period
As with previous decades, locking doors was still a rarity. Hats and gloves were mandatory for a female when leaving the house. Even after the family moved to the New Haven area in 1952, I recall my mother getting "all dolled up" to take the train into the city to consult with her editor. A trip that always included going "upstairs" for a brief chat with one of the Dell brothers (who clearly had an eye for a good-looking woman).
It should be noted that although rayon had been invented, our clothes were almost exclusively made of natural fibers: wool, silk, cotton, and linen. Every girl learned to iron!
My first job (age 14?) was reading to an elderly shut-in for an hour each week. For which I was paid 10¢. And, oh yes, at our new house there was a large bamboo plant just outside my bedroom window. Every time my teenage temper soared, I seized the loppers and attacked those branches. Believe me, that bamboo was well trimmed!
Wariness of a recovering Russia was rumbling into life, but Nuclear War? After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who would be that insane? It was, after all, the US of A that dropped those bombs, the first perhaps justified as a clearly defeated Japan had refused to negotiate and "the bomb" brought long years of war to a halt within a week. The second bomb, however, (Nagasaki) would be forever to our shame. (Our Intelligence analysis of the total devastation of Hiroshima did not come in until it was too late to call off the second strike.) Nonetheless, the US of A was now king of the world (for WWII couldn't have been won without us), and naturally we set about helping the entire world, enemies as well as friends, recover.
Wow! The war was over, my generation no more than witnesses to the carnage our parents experienced, as they moved almost directly from the Great Depression to World War. They suffered so we could enjoy the halcyon post-war days. (Despite all those Newsreels, we youngsters were so-o-o innocent!)
College. We met new people, were challenged by new ideas, new experiences, still with no credible threats on the horizon. Until . . . somewhere around 1954 a Senator named McCarthy reared his ugly, narrow-minded head. His rabid anti-Communism spread so far, so fast, that colleges that had been independent since their founding were obligated to see that both faculty and students took a "Loyalty Oath" to the country that had been founded on Freedom of Speech. I vividly recall all of us at the Boston University School of Music being herded into an auditorium, where the oath was administered. For college students who had just been doing what college students do, it was bewildering. McCarthy? Who was this weirdo? It would be years before sanity once again ruled, and Senator McCarthy faded into obscurity.
My college years also saw the arrival of TELEVISION. We did not have a set at home because my father refused to have the ugliness of an antenna on his roof. But I recall TV must have arrived sometime during my last two years of college, while I was living in the 7-story BU dorm in Back Bay. Because every Friday night at 9:00, I was among the contingent of upperclassmen descending on the lounge and taking over the TV so we could watch Dragnet. (Loved that show.)
And then, suddenly, our long, wonderful indulgence in Peace was over. Communists were kicking up a fuss in some previously unheard of place called Korea, and since our sterling performance in WWII had somehow made us Policeman to the World, we were plunged back into war, and this time it was my generation being drafted. (Somewhat mitigated by word filtering back from our musician friends at Camp Lejeune. They had all been accepted into the band, and thus were exempt from fighting a war on the other side of the world.)
My First Adult Job.
My first job was a music teacher in Junior High School in New Haven, CT. I am tempted to say the salary was $1500 year, but perhaps my memory is faulty. Let's call it the magnificent sum of $2500/yr. But living at home in East Haven, I still managed to save enough money ($600) to go on a concert tour with the "All-America Chorus" in what was now, in the summer of 1956, being referred to as "Western Europe." I still recall taking the bus to work, sharing the old Tomlinson bridge with locomotives* shunting freight from one side of New Haven harbor to the other, while watching the construction of the new bridge (now also replaced) high above. [Hmm - I really think it was $1500/yr, bumping up to $2500/yr the next year when I moved to teaching in the wealthy suburb of North Haven.]
*That's right - RR tracks ran straight down the center of the bridge. You could be driving over it, look in the rear-view, and discover a giant diesel engine behind your car!
And if the Koren War wasn't enough to burst our euphoric bubble, then came . . . The Sixties.
"Changes" will continue next week.
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This week's blatant promo:
In my fifty-plus novels one character has appeared in more books than any other. When I created Jack Harding for Tarleton's Wife, I never dreamed he would be so long-lasting. I even abandoned him for more than a decade after condemning him to not get the girl. Twice. But he insisted on resurrecting himself, demanding his right to Happily Ever After. And Rogue's Destiny was born. And never doubt that Jack is a rogue, as well as a vigilante, mercenary, genuine hero, and, of course, oh-so-charming. Jack appears in the following: (Until I started counting, even I didn't realize the list was so long.)
WARNING: Although the story in Rogue's Destiny is stand-alone, it contains major spoilers for the previous books in the Regency Warrior series: The Sometime Bride, Tarleton's Wife, and O'Rourke's Heiress.
Congratulations to Cassidy! That's awesome work.
ReplyDeleteFar from looking too small, for a junior high music teacher to earn $1500 seems princely to me. That's what my father, an engineer, made working for General Electric in those days. The salary didn't really matter, he said, because there was very little to spend it on anyway.
ReplyDeleteI like to say that my father saved my husband's father's life -- before my husband and I were conceived. My husband's father was a medic in the Navy. Medics were among the first to "hit the beach" in an assault, and their casualty rate was very high. He was scheduled to be part of what would have been a very fierce and bloody invasion of Japan, except that the atomic bomb made it unnecessary. So how did my father save his life? My dad was, as I said, an engineer. What I didn't learn till much later in life was that he was part of the Manhattan Project. Which might also have saved his own life, so that I could be born, as he never had to worry about the draft. Life is complex.