I WAS not alive when America was attacked on Dec. 7, 1941, nor did my father serve in the armed forces during WW II. While I have no direct memory of the conflict or of the greatest generation, I did see the aftereffects.
Growing up in Denvers Montclair neighborhood in the early 1950s, I noticed much turnover in my early elementary school grades. Roughly half of the class that was in, say, first grade, did not show up for second grade.
These were army brats actually, very nice kids whom you felt sorry for. They made friends one year, only to find themselves living in an entirely different city or state the next year because the Air Force had transferred their Dad.
The same thing occurred in second grade and third, gradually tapering off; although, for years, Montclair was on double session to handle the huge influx of military kids.
You see, so much of American society had been mobilized to fight WW II that it took years to demobilize (not to mention, the early 1950s saw the Korean conflict). These kids parents were still on active duty and subject to reassignment any time.
Lowry was not a nice new neighborhood; it was Lowry Air Force Base. The screech of jet planes flying overhead was a normal part of the background noise of my growing up.
You know that decommissioned B-29 bomber standing outside Wings over the Rockies Air and Space Museum? In my childhood in the 1950s, real B-29s were landing and taking off at Lowry all the time. It was an active Air Force Base and it was also the Air Force Academy before 1956, when the new academy opened in Colorado Springs. Thousands of Air Force personnel and their kids spent a stint in Denver.
There was no stability in these kids lives. I do not remember the name of a single one of them.
The eastern boundary of what is now Birkshire at Lowry was the beginning of Lowry Air Force Base. What stood on the land that is now the Birkshire rental complex was a golf driving range. My Dad loved golf, and we spent many a twilight at the driving range. Mostly, thats when I saw and heard the Air Force jets and the B-29s flying overhead.
But not only then. Americas fascination with the fighter jet was an extension of its recent, massive military involvement in Europe. It was also just a few years after the sound barrier had been broken. So there was this unabashed, proud fascination with the jet fighter. There were periodic jet flyovers that extended way beyond the air space over Lowry.
In fact, we kids were instructed just what the sound barrier was during those flyovers being told that the sonic boom you heard long after the plane had moved beyond the sky above you actually originated when the plane was above you.
Then there was that very large plaque on the wall in the Hebrew School classroom at the old BMH on Gaylord St. That plaque listed the names of all the Jewish boys from the Denver area who had died in WW II fighting the Nazis.
The families of those boys were still active in the synagogue. The pain of that conflict as well as a quiet pride in the boys who had given their lives in it was unstated, but very much present.
In other words, from five to 10 years after the end of WW II, signs and symbols of the conflict were all around us. We did not live through Pearl Harbor Day, but we knew what it was, why our country had gone to war, and the heavy price we paid to win it.
THERE were, of course, Holocaust survivors in our community the lucky ones who were the result of the determined American military action in Europe. They didnt speak about the Holocaust then. I do not remember a single speech by a single one at a single school or public forum.
But somehow, they did speak. You knew. Their accents were funny; their clothing was different. So you asked questions, perhaps quietly, perhaps discreetly, but you inquired usually, of our parents. Sometimes of the survivors kids.
Sometimes a survivor would drop a hint of what had happened to the Jews during the war. Besides which, almost none of these people had any immediate family. So, even though there were no public and publicized Holocaust Remembrance Programs, and certainly no Holocaust memoirs in English, no Holocaust museum in Washington, no TV shows about the Holocaust and, most telling, no casual or common references to it in daily discourse or in the daily newspaper, you knew.
It was a different time then. It was long after Pearl Harbor Day, to be sure. But December 7 was not mere history to us. Ten and 15 years afterward, there were too many daily effects in school and in the skies, in the immigrants and on the walls, that made WW II real.
Maybe we werent alive on Pearl Harbor Day, or even when the war ended, but we knew that WW II still shaped our lives, and had shaped our parents lives even more.
Copyright © 2011 by the Intermountain Jewish News
