Thirty-two? Cripes, I've got grandkids older than that!
I remember kerosene lamps. I remember digging a well by hand and going to the outhouse for relief. I started school in '39 in a one-room school that had 22 students in grades 1 through 8. I remember the REA bringing electricity to us so we could cluster around the radio to listen to Bob Hope, Fibber McGee and a whole host of comediens who didn't have to rely on obscenity to make people laugh.
I remember carefully searching a map of the U.S. to try to find Pearl Harbor. I didn't yet know about Hawaii. I remember seeing a man hanging from a maple tree limb after a group of neighbors lynched him for sexually assaulting his own daughter. The Sheriff, shorthanded after most of his deputies joined the military, wrote it off as a suicide. I remember the old German farmer who lived up the road sending me to the general store on my bicycle for enough dynamite to blow some stumps. He was the same guy who took a shovel down to the Church and dug his wife's grave.
I remember standing alongside the road with a rifle, waiting for the school bus. When I got to school I just put it in my locker until shop class. I remember ration stamps for gasoline, sugar, meat, shoes and tires. I remember all these and a thousand other things we don't even read about any more.
I just wish I could remember where my keys are.
