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Nightly news of brutal war in Europe brings back personal memories of World War II, 1941-1945.
I was born about a year before the war started, a child with everything around me focused on the fighting and dying in Europe and the Pacific, caused by Germany and Japan.
Americans on the home front quickly faced shortages of all sorts. You had to meet with the Ration Board to get approval to buy tires, for example, or gasoline.
Dad was a Methodist preacher, with a generous ration card for buying gas and tires to drive to his three scattered churches and their congregations. His members were not so lucky.
He told me that he and Mom had taken one of his cast-off tires, with an obvious hole worn through it, painted it white and put it in the yard. Lying flat and full of dirt, it was planted full of flowers, a common sight in the country culture of the Piedmont back then.
“Preacher, I need that tire,” one of them said to Dad. “I can put a blow-out shoe cut from another tire into that one, cover the hole and put an inner-tube in it and get back on the road.”
He did.
Toy story
I soon was obsessed with the idea of a little kids’ pedal car.
In my own 4-year-old mind, I wanted to be just like my Dad, so I was assuming if I got a little metal pedal car I could get on the road and go to Gastonia, the closest city.
So I asked for a pedal car, again and again. No, they all said, because of the war there are none being made or sold.
Metal was going into guns and bullets and shrapnel, bombs and tanks and planes and ships and all the rest. No pedal cars, no bicycles, hush and wait for it to end.
Other members brought scrap metal to be gathered into the war effort, a large rusty pile in the yard of the church.
Mom’s brother was a Navy sub commander in the Pacific, in a metal boat. Sadly, I stopped asking for the tiny car.
Cowboy dreams
I played cowboy every day with Forrest and Sondra, two kids my age who lived on the opposite side of the big church from our house.
The parsonage had indoor plumbing and electricity and a phone. Theirs had none.
So every afternoon we listened to the Lone Ranger show on our radio. Little kids, we believed that somehow the Lone Ranger and his companions lived inside the radio. We could see the light inside and hear them talking, it was obvious.
Forrest and I each had shiny cap pistols, carried in single leather holsters slung on our right hip. We both longed to be two-gun men but didn’t know how to do it.
He showed up one morning and proudly showed his new two-pistol outfit. He had rigged a second holster from one of his sister’s pink socks.
I had to shake my head at such foolishness, knowing full well that no real Western gunman would carry a backup weapon in a frilly girl’s sock.
“Quick,” Mom shouted to me one day. “Quick, all y’all go to their house and tell their mama that I just heard on the radio that the war may be over real soon.”
“Can I have a pedal car?”
“Hush and go tell her the news …”
Wally Avett first wrote for the Cherokee Scout as editor in 1969. His books are available as signed copies at the Scout office in Murphy. Call him at 837-5531 or email wallyavett@gmail.com.