A kid's recollections about World War II...

I grew up during World War II. Well... to the extent having some disjointed memories specific to the war constitutes 'growing up'. I was born in 1938 and must have been about 4 years old when a war-related image was embedded in my memory. I clearly recall a small map on the front page of the Stockton Record which depicted the front lines of the European theater in about 1942 or maybe as late as 1943. We Bowmans had somehow managed a trip from Reno to Stockton (close to 200 miles with rationed gas- that was a lot of ration coupons!) to visit my paternal grandparents, John Oscar (JO) and Ida Frances Bowman. 

I also recall on that visit that my grandfather was livid about some employee at the warehouse at Sharpe's Army Depot where he was the supervisor. The driver had come so close that he had damaged my grandfather's shoe with a sharp metal edge on the forklift. Apparently that sharp edge had cut thru the leather essentially destroying that shoe. This at a time when you weren't able to buy shoes readily because everything was rationed for the war effort. My grandfather likely managed to piss off that employee for something he was doing or not doing. As his only grandchild I always saw the nice side of him, but by all reports he could be a tyrant!

JO was supervising that warehouse because there were so many jobs available for men. It wouldn't be a problem in 2023 as any number of women could have done what he did. He had previously managed one or another Safeway grocery store in the area around Stockton in the Central Valley of California until he was suddenly unemployed at the height of the depression. So he was a qualified manager before the war and available during the fighting to manage a warehouse. Draft age men were being siphoned off to feed soldiers to the war machine and that meant non-military jobs went begging. In some cases factory jobs traditionally filled by men during the first half of the 20th centurynwere filled instead with female workers. Google "Rosie the Riveter"; that should take you to a famous Norman Rockwell painting which appeared on the cover of Saturday Evening Post in 1943. But in non-factory positions, those jobs often stayed vacant. 

 

Norman Rockwell's 1943 "Rosie the Riveter"

Back in war-time Reno where we lived, the standard work week at Bell of Nevada during WW-II was 8 hrs/day Monday thru Saturday- a standardized 48 hr work-week was about the minimum at Bell of Nevada. This was largely because communications was so vital to the war effort and they were short staffed. Post war the work week was first reduced to a 44 hr week in about 1946 (?), then eventually changed again to the standard 40-hr work week we have in the US today. Also during WW-II if an employee worked a 'standard' week longer than 40 hrs., all hours were paid as straight-time, i.e. no overtime.

On the bright side having so many unfilled jobs worked great for my just-unemployed father. His job as an office manager and bookkeeper at Johnson Chevrolet (the reason we had moved to Reno) went away when he was drafted- they didn't need anyone to replace him at the dealership as there were no cars being built: all vehicle production at the GM factories was directed to the war effort.

Largely through a recommendation from Jim Dodson (he was my mother's boss at Bell of Nevada), my father was offered a job there as a splicer's helper. He learned to climb telephone poles without falling off, how to connect or repair telephone wires and how to repair lead-sheathed communications cables. 

After the war ended, men being released from the military returned to their old jobs as promised by the government. Luckily my father was transferred from his job as a splicer's helper to plant engineering where he became a 'plant engineer'- one of the many who figured out how to get all of America interconnected via hard-wired telephones. In post-war America, the closest thing to a cell phone was a radio transmitter communicating directly with a Bell System antenna and receiver, then into wired communications. It had a telephone hand-set and was powered by the battery of the car it was installed in... not exactly a prototype for an iPhone!

And GM's Chevrolet division had designed the 1942 Chevrolet and launched production, but only a few vehicles were delivered before the US declared war against Germany then a short while later against Japan. That model continued to be produced, however, though it was painted either olive drab or black and was delivered to the US government. It was used for passenger service when a Willys Jeep just would not do. As I recall, after the war Chevrolet produced more of that 1942 design (though registered as current-year vehicles) till they could get a new post-war model into production.

Of course my recollections of WW-II kinda mush together with similar events associated with the Korean War. I was a little older for that 1951-1953 conflict and recall stories about the war in the Reno Evening Gazette. The fighting in that war ended later in the same year we moved from Reno back to Stockton, California.