Tag: newspapers

childhood memories of war, re-posted from September 2016

re-blogged posts, This and That, When I was a kid

This post originally was published here on SOMETIMES in September of 2016. I will re-post it today in keeping with a post by fellow blogger Ginsberg420, also re-blogged today.

SOMETIMES

Perhaps the most vivid memories of nursery tales were not of bunnies or bantering fairies…but of War and its aftermath.     We here in the United States did not suffer the horrors that children in other countries did, the bombings and air raids and worse.   But such accounts were very much vicariously present.    And directly following the Hot War followed the Cold War, with its insidious psychological terror.

I was eleven when World War II ended in 1945.    What I write here are my impressions as a child.

Here in the Cleveland, Ohio area we had three major daily newspapers in Cleveland,
in the 1940s-1950s.    Subtlety was not a virtue to our dueling newspapers, bent on gathering new and worse  predictions and statistics to entertain and scare the heck out of the readership.     Everyone read the papers…there was no television in the vast majority  of our homes, and except for newsreel productions in the movie…

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childhood memories of war

About Me, History, This and That, Writing and Blogging

Perhaps the most vivid memories of nursery tales were not of bunnies or bantering fairies…but of War and its aftermath.     We here in the United States did not suffer the horrors that children in other countries did, the bombings and air raids and worse.   But such accounts were very much vicariously present.    And directly following the Hot War followed the Cold War, with its insidious psychological terror.

I was eleven when World War II ended in 1945.    What I write here are my impressions as a child.

Here in the Cleveland, Ohio area we had three major daily newspapers in Cleveland,
in the 1940s-1950s.    Subtlety was not a virtue to our dueling newspapers, bent on gathering new and worse  predictions and statistics to entertain and scare the heck out of the readership.     Everyone read the papers…there was no television in the vast majority  of our homes, and except for newsreel productions in the movie theaters,  the newspapers were the major source for information about the “doomsday bullseye” which so impressed us as kids!   We lay on the floor with the front page of the paper spread out before us,   especially the issues with the giant bulleye dominating the front page…we traced the maps and figured out the implications for us personally…we lived  roughly 30 miles from the epicenter, which was presumeably down-town Cleveland.      In those days the  Cleveland area was a major producer of steel and—I was very proud to say—the twelfth largest city in the United States.

…tales of missile silos that later became parks
where ducks paddled in glistening ponds
surrounded by Lilies and Begonias
casting their colors in pinwheel flashes

This  was all a  grim and grotesque point of pride for me (for many of us kids) in the knowledge of having—within our own perimeter—huge metal monsters capable of unspeakable destruction.   This perverse, but prevailing situation had the effect of providing bragging points in discussing the relative extent of our living areas from the Bullseye Center at the heart of the city.   The really spooky thing is that my peers and I understood (mostly) the implications.  We discussed it in school, and excitedly and conspiratorially mapped our own possible destruction and theoretical  survival rather matter-of-factly, if not with particular sophistication.

The encouraging news—such as it was— lay in the conjecture that relative safety
existed outside of a radius of thirty miles… outside of the “immediate blast” area.
After that was a series of concentric rings, inside of which various stages of non-annihilation “might” exist.   This included various degrees of exposure to radiation,
and theoretical projected life-expectancy.

But comfort came in the form of experts’ advice on preparing our underground shelters and keeping them stocked with water and food… supplies sufficient for about two years.    Then came the horror of realization of implications that under the category of “supplies” would have to come stores of ammunition to arm the guns that would be necessary to guard our family stores  against neighbors and friends—and planning for continued survival AFTER the theoretical “all-clear” sirens sounded and we could come out of our shelters and return to — What?

Even us children understood that if the GOOD news was that survival from an atomic blast would (or might) be possible—this was also the BAD news.

 

 

 

 

why I keep old notebooks

Sometimes, This and That, Writing and Blogging

This morning, in keeping with my “Sometimes” theme, I spent a couple of hours looking through my records detailing every single thing I ever wrote when I worked at the Chronicle-Telegram between 1968 and 1986.

I know what you’re thinking, and yes it does seem over the top–even for me–and self-gratifying.  But that wasn’t my purpose.   I was looking for something in particular, an article that I wrote in 1976…so far found the date, but not the article itself.

WHY would I have “every single thing I ever wrote” recorded?  Because back at the beginning of my years as a newspaper writer I was a correspondent…which meant that I did exactly the same type of work as when I was a regular beat full-time reporter, except there was a big difference when it came to payroll.    As a correspondent I had to keep all of the clippings of articles that I wrote, and submit them in an envelope with my pay account.   Therefore, it behooved me to keep decent records in my books, and I continued the practice after I went on salary.

Having kept all of this stuff until today, in fact, provided me with a very handy index.   Included is the date, title of the article, how much I got paid for each feature story, photograph, bake-sale announcement, city council and school board meetings for every little town (except for the two major cities) in the County.

The original articles are still intact, although many of them are not in chronological order because I have raided the file over the years for various reasons, and now I want to dig some of the features out to use in blog articles.

The specific article I am looking for now is from January 4, 1976, about the dredging of the Huron River harbor by the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers.   This search involves finding photos from my dozen or more photo albums…which are more or less intact despite the rummaging through the albums every time one of the kids brought home a new friend over the last forty years or more.

Now, here is a real eye-roller… I also have ALL of my notebooks from all of those years, notes from all of those meetings and interviews … half of which are in Gregg Shorthand.   (No, I probably couldn’t read them very easily now.)     Those countless notebooks just languish in a big box down in the basement, and are moved occasionally when needed.

WHY would I save those?    Here’s the thing 🙂 — once upon a time I was a reasonably good stenographer, and could (theoretically) capture everything that anyone said at city council meetings…so that might be a great source of information, although very, very few present day reporters would ever give an owl’s hoot about this stuff.

So that explains why I’m not doing real work on my blogs.