Brother goes off to war in Europe

The war started on a Sunday. It was my brothers birthday, and my dad had had a nice big dinner for him. All of us kids had gone out to play, but none of the adults came out, and I wondered what was going on. And when I went into the house to find out if my brothers could come out and play, they were all sitting around the radio, listening to the President talk. And my brother joined the next day. He was Noel Craven, and was the first one to join the Navy here in Kansas City, to sign up after the war was declared. He enlisted that day and left. .I didn’t get to say goodbye. And I had told my mother the night before I wanted to say goodbye to him, because I knew he was leaving the next day. When I woke up the next day, Noel was gone. I didn’t like it one bit. Then that was the last time I saw him was the day of his birthday.

Then What Happended?

He had joined up and had gone straight to boot camp that very same day. I think he only had six weeks boot camp because they needed the servicemen so fast. That he didn’t even get a chance to sign up for any life insurance. They shipped him right out on a tanker, USS Neosho to the Coral Sea. The Coral Sea battle happened the first of May, around May 6 or 7^th or 8^th, or something around in then. And he was killed. He was a gunner’s mate. He would hand the artillery to the gunner as the gunner fired off the big guns. And he was killed by a plane that they had shot down and it crashed on the ship. And he was buried at sea. He was my father’s first son. I had never seen my father cry until then. He took it hard for years, very much so.

Movies & newsreels

It cost me twelve cents to get into the show, three cents for candy, a nickle for some pop, and a nickle for some popcorn. We saw Frankenstein, Roy Rogers–mostly westerns, though. I loved newsreels. Even today when they come on, they’ll show those old ones like, the "Eyes and the Ears of the World" and I’ll sit down and watch them. The kids in the theater would be all restless, but not me. I loved the newsreels.

Rationing - Sugar is Gold

We lived in a duplex upstairs, and the people lived downstairs from us was a lady and her little girl, Mrs. Kroeger and her daughter Wanda Fay. One day, Mrs. Kroeger came home from the store and she was standing on the porch, holding a little brown sack in her hand. Asked what she had in it, she told me it was gold dust. I said, "Really Gold Dust?" She said, "Well, not really. It’s sugar, and it might as well be gold dust." I always remembered that.

I know we had a rationing book for each one of us. And I was looking at those books the other day, and evidently, our shoes were rationed. I remember mom going to the store and take the ration books and pulling out those stamps to get meat and sugar and butter and stuff. It was skimpy. You lived an awful lot on beans and potatoes then. If it hadn’t been for beans and potatoes, I don’t know how we’d ever made it. And Spam, yes. Mother used to fry it. She would bake it and we had Spam quite often. She would take the Spam and she’d put pineapple on it and cloves on it and bake it and it didn’t taste too bad either. Because I used to do that after I got married, of course my husband didn’t like it. Because he had it in the service. He didn’t like that Spam, but I thought it was pretty good.

War Affect You?

Yes, because of the rationing-- the foods, you know and the clothing. And you couldn’t go anywhere. You couldn’t get gasoline for a car, if you owned a car, or tires or anything. But we were a community. People were closer and kinder, gentle, then during the war.