The Muse is Loose

Where were you when..?.we ask that about some significant events in our personal and corporate lives. For those old enough to remember, the event of December 7 is etched permanently in the mind.I try to imagine how it would have been if we had had television.We only had radio. It was a Sunday and we had been to church. The news came sometime that afternoon to our house. As a nine year old I had no concept as to the scope of this event. The next day at school my teacher had a small radio she brought to school. That, in itself, was historic. We heard President Roosevelt's speech. He had a marvelous voice. Our teacher explained to us we would soon be at war. It took awhile to grasp the fulness of that. Adults had already seen and heard enough to know who our enemies would be. We kids didn't know, but we would learn. The Japanese became "japs". They always wore glasses in their pics. Their teeth stood out. Germans were represented by Hitler and his "salute". Italians....we had a hard time understanding why they were in the war. Mussolini was their dictator-leader.We would discover little stamp books to help us save $18.75 to buy a war bond. We would save scrap metal and paper. We would see old artillery guns from World War I disappear as the metal would be melted and reshaped into tanks and guns. There would be gasoline rationing and each car had a sticker on the windshield and stamps to give permission for gas. Kids would learn to identify all the enemy planes and anxiously watch the country skies of Arkansas for those planes. They never came. Blue stars appeared on small banners hung in windows. Sometimes the blue one would turn to gold. Our heroes were aces like Colin P. Kelley. (We didn't know much about the ones fighting the wars on land and the sea). Our family moved to California so daddy could work in a war plant. We knew about war but only experienced it by shortages and how it played out in Life Magazine and newspapers, It was a day that would live in infamy. I looked up that word for the first time this morning! "INFAMY 1. Very bad reputation; disgrace. 2. Great wickedness or a wicked act." Pearl Harbor was that. The cross was that.