CHRISTMAS 1944

By

Stephen P. Thomas

The Chicago Literary Club

January 31, 2011

 

But for a chance remark made by my Mother some weeks later, I would have no memory of Christmas 1944, the first I can recall.  Three of us traveled on Friday,  December 22, 1944 from Peoria to Bloomington, Illinois by inter-urban electric train.  I was six, my sister four and my mother, 30.  We owned no automobile.  My father was at work at the Caterpillar Tractor Company where they were busy with War production. 

As the train rattled out of the station in Peoria it soon crossed the Illinois River on a trestle  bridge without sides.  I called my sister to the train window.  “Look !  We’re falling into the river. We’ll drown !”  Her eyes widened with alarm as our mother pulled her back.

“Stop scaring her, Stephen ! .  .  .  Or I’ll tell your father.”  Then, and for about the next ten years,  irritating or embarrassing my sister was a favorite pastime.  It turned out not to be so bad for her since I have now spent more than 50 years making or trying to make amends in one way or another.

The 40 mile ride to Bloomington on the Illinois Terminal Railway took about two hours with stops in East Peoria, Morton, Mackinaw Junction (where the line forked for trains headed south to Springfield and St. Louis) and on to our destination.  The train was powered by an overhead electric line, a real advantage in fuel short war years; it was too early for widespread diesel powered locomotives.  In Bloomington we were met at the downtown station by my Aunt Ellen, 26. four years younger than her sister, our mother.  Aunt Ellen’s husband, Herman, was in the Army somewhere in Europe  She had received no letters from him for more than a week.  She lived with her parents, Peter and Nona Paulsen, our grandparents, on the farm at Funks Grove,  half an hour southwest of Bloomington, and just off  U.S. Route 66 (now Interstate 55).  Route 66 was then a two-lane highway, or “hard road” as it was called after it was first paved in the 1920s.

The usual routine upon our arrival in Bloomington was to gather at the  “Sweet Shop”, located a block or two from the train station where my grandmother would be waiting, visiting with her sister, our maiden “Aunt Kate” who worked at the nearby Soldiers and Sailors Children’s Home, which had housed  orphaned children of war veterans since Civil War times.    Both women were in dresses, with elegant hats.  At length our grandfather would appear.  It was his custom to let the ladies enjoy the delights of the Sweet Shop while he met with fellow farmers and townsmen at a local tavern.  Aunt Kate would then hand my sister and me a bag of candy, and perhaps a quarter.  We then somehow, the six of us, grandparents, two sisters and children, squeezed into the 1939 Chevrolet sedan and headed down Route 66 to Funks Grove, the farm, and to bed. 

Entering the lane leading to the farmhouse we would have stopped at the roadside mailbox to check for mail and the newspapers – a good hearted family cousin in Chicago maintained a subscription to the Chicago Tribune for the Paulsen family.  Most families also subscribed to the Bloomington Pantagraph for local news.  Tribune headlines of that week included:

December 18.  Nazis Pierce Yank Lines!  Enemy Presses Attack on Wide Front

December 19.  Germans Drive 18 Miles Inside Belgium;  Americans Blasted Day and Night

December 20.  German Tanks Try for Breakthru; Battle Rages Along 70 Mile Front

December 21.  Nazi Slaughter of Prisoners near Mulmedy Belgium Stirs Yank Hate

December 22.  Big Nazi Offensive Gains!  Cut Allied Road to Liege

 

I have vivid recollections of the routine in those days surrounding bedtime and waking in the morning.  The farmhouse was heated by a parlor stove which burned coal or wood, and a kitchen cook stove which burned mostly corncobs and wood.  Thus only two rooms were heated, and then only when the stoves were fired up.  The bedrooms upstairs were unheated.  Electric lights had arrived with rural electrification in the late 1930s.  The farmhouse had no running water and no  inside toilet facilities.  Water for drinking came from the deep well outside by the barn; water for washing up came from a cistern also outside.  Kerosene lanterns were nearby, to provide light when the electric service was disrupted.  Corn cobs soaked in kerosene could provide a very hot fire when the cook stove was lit in the morning.  It was cold.  The high temperature on that December 22  in central Illinois was 22, but the low was just three degrees above zero.

We put on our pajamas near the parlor stove and were then escorted up the narrow stairway to the bedrooms upstairs where we slipped under layers of blankets and quilts.  On top was a very heavy cover called a horse blanket.  Across the bedroom was a white bucket with a lid on top, the only choice available if nature should call during the night. My father called it a thunder mug.  We felt secure, and we were.  As children we were completely unaware of all the chaos, suffering  and devastation underway in far off  Europe and the western Pacific.  But everyone in the Paulsen household, except for my sister and I, was fully aware of the peril surrounding those Tribune headlines.

On Christmas morning we found our presents.  I can recall little about what I received, except I am sure there was a little wooden wagon I used for several years.  Wooden box, wooden wheels, wooden axles and a wooden handle.  No metal was available for toys.  Many goods were rationed, especially sugar, butter, meat, gasoline and rubber tires.  My grandfather, Peter, opened a full box of Dutch Masters cigars.  I had no interest in the cigars, but was fascinated by the box and its reproduction of Rembrandt’s 1662 portrait of the  strangely dressed market officials. There was also candy and a tree of sorts without lights in the unheated east parlor adjacent to the center parlor/dining room with the pot-bellied stove.  No central heating, but heat at least in the center of the house.  A wooden telephone hung from the wall in this room, a party line telephone.  One long and two short rings meant the call was for the Paulsen family.  Any other combination of short and long rings was for someone else  Occasionally my mother or her sister would lift the receiver gently, put an index finger to their lips and listen to the conversation of others.  I later learned this was not considered a high crime or even a misdemeanor in those days.   All the neighbors were nosy about each other in one way or another.  However, it was considered very bad form to mention in public a fact which you could only have learned by eavesdropping.

The next mail was on Tuesday, December 26.  Still no letter from Herman, but more Tribune headlines.

December 23.  Nazis Across Luxemburg! 10 Miles to French Border;  Battle Rages; German Spies in Yank Uniforms Behind U.S. Lines

December 25.  Folks at Home With Yanks at Front in Spirit. ------- There Will Be Chairs for Them at Dinner.  Hoods of jeeps, the rubble of smashed buildings, and the rims of foxholes and slit trenches are serving as the tables of Yanks who will eat their Christmas dinners in combat today.

My grandfather had just reached age 66.  Peter had been born in northeast Germany, coming to Illinois with his parents in the early 1880s.  Some said  it was so that Peter and his older brothers could avoid military conscription.  Another story held that his mother was Jewish, his father Catholic, with the result that neither welcome in their German community.  By the end of 1944 my grandfather had spent a lifetime working in farm fields  with horses and two-row equipment.  He was worn out; had suffered one coronary; and had been warned by his doctor that a repeat coronary would probably be his last.  Our grandmother, Nona, was 67, pure Irish, although born in Illinois in the 1880s.  She was, by Christmas 1944, very dispirited.  Her only son, Paul, had died of a ruptured appendix in 1940 leaving two small children.  Paul had been my grandfather’s partner at the farm.  Nona had earlier been a telegraph operator for the Gulf, Mobile and Ohio Railway at its nearby McLean, Illinois mainline station.  She was said to be the first woman in Illinois to be a railway telegraph operator.  She never recovered from the death of her son, and thus could never be remembered by me as she must have been, full of life, energy and intelligence in her earlier years.  She was not well suited to life on the farm --- should have been a school teacher --- but life (and death) intervened.  How do I know this?  My mother told me, much later.  She may well have wondered what life had in store for my sister and me born at the end of a Great Depression, just in time for an all consuming World War.

Further  remembering Christmas day, 1944, I would have been permitted to bundle up and accompany my grandfather to the barn for farm chores as the day progressed.  These involved letting the horses and cattle out to visit the nearby water tank (kept from icing over by a kerosene heater) and then putting fresh hay and some oats or corn in their feeding stations in the barn.  These simple chores unleashed some of the many aromas of the barn, so easy to recall to this day.  The smell of the leather harness hanging overhead, the scent of the field in a freshly broken bale of hay, the smell of the oat dust as the feed descended from an overhead bin into feeding buckets; and the omnipresent odor of the manure.  If pigs were also present, another whole dimension was added to the barn’s aromatic banquet.   Nothing matches the complex redolence of a working Midwestern barn in winter.

I suspect, but cannot be sure, that the centerpiece of our Christmas dinner would have been a mature hen or rooster roasted by our grandmother with the help of her two daughters.  This would likely  have been accompanied by green beans from the prior summer garden put up in quart jars, and peach or apple pie. This much is sure; though she was a woman of refinement and delicacy, only Nona would have selected the fowl from the hen house and dispatched it with a quick twist of the neck, followed by evisceration and a bath in boiling water to loosen feathers.  Among the advantages of subscriptions to two daily newspapers when paper products were in short supply: plenty of paper to start fires, also to spread on the ground outside as chickens were slaughtered, and not least, to place in a neat stack inside the outhouse, at this time a spacious but unheated four-seater.

Back home in early January a neighbor asked my mother about her holiday trip.  She said – “Everything was fine, except my sister Ellen was quite blue.  She had  heard nothing from Herman for quite a while.”  This puzzled me, but I made no inquiry.  I did not recall my aunt being any color other than that of the rest of us, certainly nothing I would think of as blue.  For weeks I reflected on this strange remark.

  “Why did she say she was blue?” 

One day our first grade class had put our Dick and Jane reader aside for some word talk.  Miss Jones spoke:  “Some words and sounds  have more than one meaning.  Can anyone give an example?”

Someone said “Red is a color: and we just read from a book.”

“Very good.  Does anyone else have an example?

I asked:  “Can a person be a color?”

“What do you mean?”

“Can a person be blue?”

“Certainly.  Sometimes we say a person who is sad is blue.”

Now I knew what my mother meant.  My aunt was sad because her husband in the Army did not send letters.  When I got home I asked my mother if our aunt Ellen was still blue and she said:  “She still hasn’t heard from Herman.”

Late in 1944,  with Allied forces nearing both the western and eastern borders of Germany, and German  forces, cities and factories in increasing disarray, Hitler was desperate for a strategy which would permit a negotiated end to the war and preserve Germany from foreign occupation.  He settled on an offensive plan to breach Allied lines in a hilly/mountainous area called the Ardennes in eastern Luxembourg and Belgium.  Allied forces would be encircled and neutralized once cut off from supply lines.  The port of Antwerp to the north, newly opened as an Allied supply link, would be cut off.  Good plan; it almost worked; but the cost to stop it was huge.  This part of the conflict in Europe is now called the Battle of the Bulge.  The German advance was not neutralized until late January, 1945, eventually at a cost of more than 80,000 U.S. soldiers killed, wounded or captured and some 100,000 Germans killed. 

Again, back home in East Peoria, my father came in from work one evening to hear my mother  excitedly say:  “Tom, I heard from Ellen today.  She got a whole packet of 10 or 12 letters from Herman today.  He’s safe.  Thinks he’ll get back this year.”

I asked:  “Is Aunt Ellen still blue.”

“No.  Herman’s safe.  Who told you she was blue.?” 

“Someone.”

“Who?”

“Can’t remember.”

The year 1945 may have been the most tumultuous of the 20th Century.  Consider  ---  the War in Europe was nearing conclusion, culminating in Germany’s unconditional surrender in May.   President Roosevelt was inaugurated for the fourth time in January, traveled to Yalta in February essentially to work out the division of post-War spheres of Allied occupation and influence, and died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage on April 23. 

At home in early June my sister and I were blending into summer as our father one evening was called to a neighbor’s house for a phone call (we had no phone).  He came back with these words:  “Pete died today.”  My mother’s cry of anguish at this news of the death of her father is imprinted forever in my memory.  It was June 5th,  her 31st birthday.  My grandfather’s burial was preceded by a visitation at his home in Funks Grove on the day before and morning of his funeral.  The casket was open to view, my first time to see a person no longer living.  A large procession of neighbors, brothers and sisters of the deceased and cousins came through the house.  Looking back, it sounds strange.  But at the time I had no other experience with death, except the memory of what turmoil and anguish at home, in school and in the neighborhood had resulted from President Roosevelt’s recent death.

These events resulted in my Aunt Ellen, whose 26th birthday nearly coincided with her father’s funeral, being in charge of the farm.  Some fields were still not planted. Neighbors stepped in to help.  We soon heard that Uncle Herman would be coming home, but the details were sketchy.  Servicemen who were needed to take over a family farm left with no one to tend it qualified for expedited discharge.

Meanwhile, as the war in Europe was ending, the war in the Pacific was raging on, getting closer and closer to Japan, but at terrible cost.  First in early 1945 were the Philippines; then in February came Iwo Jima – eight square miles of rock, caves, airstrips and entrenched Japanese; followed by Okinawa in April, May and June.   President Truman and his generals were repositioning their European forces and materials for transfer to the Pacific and the invasion of Japan.

Our little family stayed on the farm at Funks Grove for the summer to help our Aunt Ellen, as best we could, with the work of the farm.  My sister and I soon developed whooping cough from which she readily recovered, but mine lingered for weeks.  I would wander out of the farmhouse after breakfast or lunch and soon be followed by three or four chickens in close formation.  Once I started coughing it was inevitable that the loss of  my lunch or breakfast would benefit  these chickens who would enjoy a free meal at my expense.  This pattern was repeated day after day.  It cost more to feed me, but less to feed the chickens. 

One fine day in early August Uncle Herman returned to the farm.  He had spent several weeks on a beach in southern France, waiting for orders and transport.  Then he returned by air from North Africa to Brazil to Florida and thence by train to Bloomington.  The itinerary was dictated by where planes could be positioned and refueled for cross-oceanic travel.  His return was essentially coincident with events on August 6 and 9 when atomic bombs demolished Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  On the evening of August 14 we were all in Bloomington for the VJ Day festivities.  My uncle wore his Army dress uniform, perhaps for the last time.  He had not yet been able to replenish his civilian clothes.  My sister and I understood simply that these were happy times which had been preceded by unhappy times.  True enough for many but not for all. 

Soon the summer ended, and we returned to home and school in East Peoria.  My aunt and uncle spent the rest of their lives on the farm in Funks Grove.  They had no children.  Uncle Herman died on August 26, 1995 at age 83 doing farm chores. It was just a few days more than 50 years from his return in 1945.  He had very few nights away from the farm; only when compelled by short hospital stays.  He had no further appetite for travel, and never smoked or drank.   Last year we contributed all of his World War II memorabilia, including his purple heart, to the McLean County Historical Society. My aunt remained on the farm until she was relocated to a care facility at the end of 2009.  She died in late 2010 at age 92; there was no disease; no organ failure; she just finally stopped breathing and was gone. As her mind faded in recent years she still spoke often of Herman as if he were still at her side.   Both are in nearby Funks Grove cemetery, charter members of what Tom Brokaw has termed the Greatest Generation.