Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 5, 1993 TAG: 9307050019
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
\ Casualty reports were common as the Roanoke Valley headed into its second summer of World War II. And the patriotism that had thundered after the attack on Pearl Harbor plainly was being strained.
Nationally, there was a coal strike, and there were smaller slippages in a united home front.
Roanokers who hadn't used up all their meat rations for the specified dates in April and May - they would be no good after these dates - rushed the grocery stores in an unseemly fit of greed.
They were after meat and canned food. The choice cuts of meat were scarce but the meat eaters took anything that was available.
"They were willing to take anything as long as it was meat," one grocer said.
It was legal, but still a bit despicable, given the fact that men were dying far from home.
Until the state Alcoholic Beverage Control Board stopped the practice, drinkers were borrowing nondrinkers' coupon books to buy booze. It would not have been surprising to learn that the dries were selling the coupons to their drinking buddies.
The federal Office of Price Administration - an agency that made such an imprint on American life that it survives as a three-letter crossword puzzle word - found that even the Great American farmer was cheating a little.
The OPA rolled back the price of Irish potatoes in the Roanoke Valley after it learned farmers had been overcharging distributors.
Capt. Charles H. Wonson of Staunton, was killed in action. He was 24.
It was human nature, as usual, in spite of the war, and it was life, as usual, in the town of Bedford. In April, the small town east of Roanoke had tried 55 speeding cases - adding to its reputation as a speed trap.
The Sigma Chi Fraternity at Roanoke College went ahead with its spring formal; and in the Gasoline Alley comic strip, Skeezix was in combat far from home.
The Sigma Chi affair did nothing to add to the disorder of the times - probably because Dr. Charles J. Smith, the college's president, was among the chaperones.
The government seized the mines, many of them in Virginia's far southwestern coalfields. The Roanoke Times ran a front-page picture of a captured German paratrooper. He was smiling and the caption writer suggested he was glad the war was over for him.
But this smiling Nazi didn't mean that the Third Reich was willing to say it was over. That was two bloody, hard years in the future.
If there were lapses of spirit among some, others stepped in to remedy it.
There was Homer Jamison, who paid $3,000 for a ham at a Radford war bond auction.
Emily Post, that stern arbiter of proper human behavior, advised in her column that it was not tasteful to talk too much on the phone. It was war and the idle, pleasant patter of peacetime was not patriotic.
Roanokers bought $5 million worth of war bonds and a reporter invented "Mr. and Mrs. and Miss W.M. (War-Minded) Citizen." The reporter may, or may not, have regretted this invention when it appeared in print that probably will survive forever on microfilm.
Staff Sgt. Owen T. Wilson of Ceres, who looked out of his picture in the newspaper with a touching innocence, was dead in the South Pacific at 21.
But it remained for Roanoke, with its long-standing talent for transforming the grotesque and absurd into the nearly inspiring, to illustrate the proper usage of patriotism.
It worked like this:
Mayor Walter Wood went to a fifth-floor window of the State and City Bank Building where he would buy a war bond. Buy a war bond? At a fifth-floor window?
Simple. A member of the Junior Chamber of Commerce, helped by a firefighter, went up a ladder to sell the bond to the mayor.
While this was going on, four - or perhaps three - military planes flew over at strafing heights. The newspaper varied in the reports as to types and numbers of planes, but they flew low and loud.
The low-flying planes terrified many Roanokers, who were reminded regularly in news stories that they were likely to be bombed one day, and they complained loudly. It turned out the planes' maneuvers broke regulations, but the thing had been done - somewhat magnificently.
Earlier that year, three Army officers had been killed when their light transport plane crashed on Potts Mountain in Craig County.
Harvard quit football for the duration and the allies captured Bizerte and Tunis in North Africa.
Heironimus ran a full-page ad that begged women to be at home when the delivery man called. It showed a delivery man in front of a closed door. A note on the door said: "Sorry, Mrs. Jones is not at home. Waste gas and tires and come back tomorrow - A. Hitler."
In the South Pacific, Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, who had planned the attack on Pearl Harbor, was hunted down by American fliers who shot down his plane. Yamamoto had once said he would dictate peace terms in the White House.
American planes bombed Wake Island, taken by the Japanese after a small garrison of U.S. Marines had given the world a lesson in heroism.
The island-hopping strategy that was to defeat Japan was starting.
There were reports that the Nazis, including Hermann Goering, the grotesque commander of Hitler's Luftwaffe, were becoming nervous about an allied invasion, which was just a year off, as it turned out.
The Armed Forces reported that 17 Virginians had been wounded in action in Tunisia, the Middle East and the South Pacific.
Gasoline was becoming scarcer than ever and the government warned that deliveries of beer, liquor and ice cream would be affected.
The Times reported the wrenching story of a man who lost a gasoline ration book with 240 coupons that would have allowed him to buy 1,000 gallons.
The Fourth of July was on a Sunday in 1943, a cool day. The weather, the Times' man wrote, probably subdued the populace. That and the fact that there was no gas for family excursions.
The fifth-floor bond sale, which would have livened up the day, already had been held.
by CNB