Some War Years Memories - by Bill

In the early ‘40’s I lived in Cleveland while my father worked for the Cleveland Press as a reporter and war correspondent . While at the Press he became friends with Clarence Judd, Bob’s father, who was a feature article writer who had gained celebrity for his coverage of Eliot Ness, crime fighter . My family spent a part of ’44 in a Boston apartment while my father studied as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. In Boston I remember black-out drills. A siren wailed and you had to turn off your lights and pull curtains and shades. Volunteer monitors would walk the streets to check that all was dark. Boston, being on the coast, was ever wary of a German air attack. We had ration books for food and gas and my mother sometimes bought horse meat which I did not like. I would pretend to eat it and when no one was looking drop it into my lap and later transfer it into my pocket. It ended up in the toilet. In the basement of the apartment there was a hand operated machine for fashioning bullet shells out of metal sheets. A number of citizens did this for the war effort. I would sometimes play with the machine when no one was around.

Back home in Cleveland I remember the day FDR died (April 12, 1945, according to my recent research) because my dog was run over by a streetcar that very morning. I thought that all the sad faces and somber talk related to my dog’s demise.

In ’46 my father was lured to New York and a job at Business Week by Clarence Judd who had started working there a few years earlier. We moved to Chappaqua in the spring of ’47 (also Clarence Judd’s doing) where I joined Miss Hamilton’s 3rd grade. Miss Hamilton later married the town cop, Douglas Hunter. Upon learning of their marriage I shot officer Hunter with a water pistol and caught hell for it. I failed to pass the third grade and was put back into the class of ’57. At home, in our attic, I soon discovered some war souvenirs that my father had brought back from the European Theater. A blood stained German officer’s hat, a bayonet, decorations, and a German Lugar with holster and many bullets in a box. Once I took the pistol into the woods and shot at a target. It made so much noise I immediately ran home and put the pistol back in its hiding place. Another time I took it to school along with a shell to show it off to my coterie ( Johnny Scull, Billy Adelmann, & Jerry Gannon). I hate to think of what would happen if a kid tried that today.

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