Seventy years ago today, my grandmother was a 12-year-old girl living in extremely rural Northwestern Illinois. It was the eve of her 13th birthday. An only child, she was almost half done with the seventh grade.
There are many aspects of my grandmother's childhood with which I have never been able to identify. While I feel a strong familial connection every time I am in or around Elizabeth, Ill., — which has not changed drastically to the untrained eye even in my three decades, let alone her eight — the ways in which her childhood differed from mine are endless. But the biggest has to be her birthday.
Grandma woke up a newly minted 13-year-old on Dec. 7, 1941. Even then, in that year and that sort of the country, becoming a teenager had to be something of a milestone. And though I'm not sure what time the news eventually reached her ears in Elizabeth, I can guarantee she went to bed thinking of the devastation of Pearl Harbor.
I learned this week, by reading the Chicago Tribune, that many Chicagoans first heard of the attack when a WGN radio announcer interrupted a broadcast of a Chicago Bears vs. Chicago Cardinals football game around 1:30 p.m. Central. Most sources report it took days for the full impact to be known across the country. The sinking of the USS Arizona was not reported until Dec. 13 and not confirmed by the Navy until Dec. 15.
Most people reading this today will draw connections between Pearl Harbor and the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and with good reason. In today's mass media culture, plenty of news stories zip around the globe. But none have placed a lockdown on America as did 9/11. Though it made perfect sense at the time, it's still hard to fathom the logistical implications of basically shutting down commercial aviation indefinitely.
If I were a better grandson, I'd have taken time at some point to ask my grandmother to share her memories of Dec. 7, 1941. And, for that matter, the birthdays following. World War II did not end until she was about to start her senior year of high school. As much as she loves history, certainly she had strong personal recollections of the day that lives in infamy and what it meant to be of an age where friends and relatives were being called to military service.
Continue reading "A birthday that lived in infamy"
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