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73 Years Ago Today
This is my father (far right in tan overcoat). He was in flight training outside Rapid City, SD, in 1945. He and a few members of his B-17 crew were at Mt. Rushmore when they got word that FDR had died. Dad had turned 19 years old less than two months before this.
Published in General
One of the shortest posts, and one of the best. Thanks, Miffed.
My dad tells people he was at Omaha on D-Day. Literally true. He was leaving a movie theater at Omaha, Nebraska when the D-Day landings were announced. He was on a pass. He did not get to Europe for another six months, where he caught the tail end of the Battle of the Bulge, and participated in the Battle of Germany. He was in a Signal Corps unit. His only exchanges with the Germans was over the radio, generally obscene exchanges.
Incidental fun fact.
Dad told me that the army had to put flying near Mt. Rushmore off-limits, because the gunners were shooting at the faces.
And I thought it was acne.
You ‘got’ his smile.
That’s a great picture. It reminds me of the debt we owe the Democratic Party bosses who insisted that Henry Wallace be replaced in 1944. Much as I disagree with Truman over domestic policy, he understood the nature of communism and stood up for the West against Stalin.
Any faces in particular merit especial targetting, I wonder…
Assuming you’re talking about my profile picture, that’s also him. (I have those wings sitting on my desk)
They’re all so skinny!
Is that what people used to look like?
After the Army, my dad went to UW Madison, where he played football on the “Under 150 pound” squad, what is now called “sprint football”.
https://sprintfootball.wordpress.com/
Truman broke with much of the Democrat Party in the immediate post-war era to support the building of single-family subdivisions, with family-owned houses. Many Democrats wanted the government to build rent-subsidized government-owned apartments for working class and lower-middle class families, a la Soviet-style projects. This was not intended as housing for the poor (like the infamous Chicago projects), but rather for factory workers.
Stymied there, with Levittown developments proving popular in the immediate post-war years, the “Progressives” implemented this dream of government-as-landlord/smart living with the urban renewal efforts in the 1950s and 1960s. We saw how those turned out. It could have been all of us without Truman.
The biggest landlord in Europe is the City of Glasgow. I’m told it’s not a fun place to grow up.
that was what I had figured. about the photo, not the wings.
P.S. Congrats on his wings on your desk.
I was thinking about his support for national health insurance. But I’m glad that he was sensible in other areas.
It can be horrifying to read the things that New Deal sympathizers told about New Deal planners and programs. For example, there is Tomorrow a New World: The New Deal Community Program by Paul K. Conklin (1959) which I’ve been reading for background on a program that took a co-operative tractor factory from my home town of Battle Creek, Michigan and tried to make it part of a planned government community in West Virginia, where it failed utterly. The whole thing was a pet project of Eleanor Roosevelt. The tractor business was resurrected again as a private business, but so far I have learned almost nothing about that transition. I suppose the New Dealers lost interest in that part of the story.
I got started on the story after I came across this Co-Op tractor on a bicycle ride near Purdue University in August 2010. When I was there it looked like the event might be a field day run by the university’s Extension program, but I don’t know that it was. I came home and learned that the tractor was first produced in Battle Creek MI, and then learned about the New Deal connections. (Not to mention a connection to the 1832 Black Hawk war, which gave me all the excuse I needed to study further.) I had never heard of this brand of tractor before, but farmers around here have told me there are a lot of them still around; in fact I have had an invitation to go and see some of the originals that were produced here in the mid-1930s, including the frame for Serial No. 1, but haven’t done so yet. When the tractor plant here was closed, the local newspaper was furious about the fact that government tax money was used to take away a plant that provided a few hundred tax-producing jobs here in Battle Creek; nowadays that same newspaper is a leftwing hate screed. Or at least it was the last time I looked at it.