ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, December 25, 1996 TAG: 9612260014
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: AN ESSAY BY KEVIN KITTREDGE/STAFF WRITER
Temperatures were in the 40s. Sirloin steak was 63 cents a pound. And down at the Rialto, Sunset Carson was starring in "The Days of Buffalo Bill."
It was Christmas week, 1946, the year after World War II came to a merciful if ghastly end.
And here in Roanoke as elsewhere, after years of death and doubt and doing without, people were struggling with peace.
"That was the year things began to swing back to normal," said Mondia Eller Dyer of Roanoke.
Dyer, who belonged to the WAVES (the women's branch of the U.S. Navy) during the war, was attending college in New York in 1946, but came home for Christmas. "It was a time of readjustment."
"It was a time to start raising families," said Horace Hood III, who in 1946 was city editor of The Roanoke Times. Hood was a U.S. Navy officer during World War II. Now retired from the newspaper, he lives in Roanoke. "There were a whole lot of weddings," he recalled. "People were starting to get back in battery."
And yet, over all, still, was the blanket of grief.
"I lost a whole lot of friends in that war," Hood said. "I lost a brother. You just don't realize how people felt at that time."
"Some were bitter. Some were very, very bitter," recalled Harold Jennings, a war-time Marine Corps officer and now president of Frank. L. Moose jewelers on First Street. "I think probably there were an awful lot of people still in shock" that Christmas. "Because that's not a lot of time."
Fifty years dulls the edge of grief. And for more and more of the living, World War II is not even memory but history - bloodless pages in a book.
But in December 1946 the cold truth that hundreds of boys and men would not be home that Christmas - or ever - lay over the region like dirty snow.
More than 700 men from the Roanoke Valley and Bedford and Montgomery counties died fighting in World War II. Nineteen Bedford men died in the bloody battle for Omaha Beach alone, on June 6, 1944 - D-Day.
They were mostly young, many of them not even out of high school when they signed up. And they were horribly hard to forget.
"It seems to me that after my two brothers were killed my mom and dad didn't make a big deal out of Christmas," said Lucille Boggess, a Bedford County supervisor whose brothers died on D-Day. "There was an emptiness. There were two people missing at the table. We tried to go on in the same fashion I think sometimes maybe you're so caught up in your loss you miss some of the joys that other families are experiencing."
Life is for the living.
And at the end of 1946, Roanoke and the nation were very much alive. The Great Depression had vanished in a rush of wartime energy and manufacturing that had not stopped with the peace. That holiday season in Roanoke, the streets and streetcars and stores and the City Market were jammed with people, according to newspaper accounts and those who lived here at the time.
Traces of wartime austerity lingered. Sugar was scarce, and black pepper. Glass, too.
Not to mention cars. Horace Hood signed up to buy the next available automobile when he returned from the war in 1945. He got it three years later.
There was also a housing crunch, as veterans returned and married and began looking for homes of their own. "We lived with my wife's mother and father," said Jennings, who married his wife, Frances, a week after his return from the war in 1945. "There was not a place so help me in the city that we could find."
On other fronts, goods were widely available for the first time in years. Manufacturers had returned to making peace-time products - and people were starved to buy.
"Salaries had increased somewhat," said Dyer, the ex-Wave, now a Roanoke substitute schoolteacher.
"Let's face it," she said. "During the war things were in very short supply. They were just getting back to making consumer goods. And there was tremendous demand for it."
Meanwhile, record numbers of people packed the city's bus and train lines that season, rushing to and fro for the holidays.
In the Roanoke World-News of Dec. 23, 1946 - a Monday - a Norfolk and Western Railway spokesman reported the heaviest peacetime passenger load ever for the weekend just gone by.
* * *
1946.
It was the year that skirts went down and the birth rate soared upward, as the first of the baby boomers arrived, including one William Jefferson Clinton.
It was the year of Frank Capra's Christmas classic, "It's a Wonderful Life" (a box-office bomb its first time out). Bogey had left the Nazis and Casablanca behind by 1946, and was starring with Bacall out in Southern California, in "The Big Sleep."
It was the year that Winston Churchill coined the phrase "The Iron Curtain," to describe what the end of the war in Europe had wrought.
What was Roanoke like in 1946? Simpler, surely, and in some ways uglier than today. Some neighborhoods in the Roanoke of 50 years ago excluded not only blacks but Asians, Lebanese and Jews, Dyer recalled. Segregation was practiced here as elsewhere in the South. When blacks made it onto the pages of the World-News, usually in the police briefs, their names were followed by a parenthetical "negro" - as though that made something clearer.
But if there was ugliness, there was also innocence. Think of Joanne Friend Neikirk - voted "Snow Queen" at the Jefferson High School Christmas Dance of Dec. 20, 1946.
Neikirk, now living in North Carolina and a grandmother of five, recently recalled a city of soda fountains and movie theaters - of after-school malteds at Guy's Restaurant and Christmas "open houses" with cookies and fruit punch.
Neikirk had a part-time job at Henebry & Son jewelers on Jefferson Street in December 1946, working in the gift shop. There, the Snow Queen dispensed advice to nervous young men as to which of the evening bags, compacts and inexpensive jewelry their girlfriends might like most.
"It was a good time to grow up," Neikirk said, World War II notwithstanding. "We had a special appreciation for the good things after the war. There was a lot of family. It seemed to me that we were all drawn together because of the common cause."
Neikirk and others remembered the boys who had left for the war returning to high school that year, wearier and wiser, to finish up. Although not all of the troops were back that Christmas of '46, most were home by the following spring.
The war heroes, understandably, seemed to have a certain something that the other boys lacked.
"Oh, to have the veterans back at school was just fantastic," recalled another Jefferson alumna, Anne Rumbley Bailey, class of '47. "It was something. And of course they all had stories. Some could have been the truth."
Bailey, like Neikirk, remembered the Roanoke of half a century ago as a different city. "The only thing to do was go to the theater - and they've torn all of them down," Bailey said. "The American Theater was our favorite. It was pretty, pretty, pretty."
There were others. The Roanoke, the Rialto. Playing at the Grandin & Lee during Christmas week 1946 was "The Return of Rusty" - starring a German shepherd. At the Jefferson it was "Johnny in the Clouds," with Michael Redgrave. At the Park, Barbara Stanwyck in "The Strange Love of Martha Ives."
And the American? A musical - "No Leave, No Love," with Van Johnson, Pat Kirkwood, and Guy Lombardo and his orchestra.
Poor George Bailey was nowhere in sight.
Alas, the Roanoke Christmas Parade that year was a dud. Adult spectators were critical of the loud bands, long spaces between floats and the "tarnished group of grotesque balloon figures," according to the World-News - though it added that most children seemed delighted.
And to some, meanwhile, it must have seemed only too predictable that parade day was marked by death. A street car rammed into a bus amid the gathering crowds before the parade began - killing Jeannette Robertson of Salem on her birthday outing. She had just turned 55.
* * *
In those days, the best Christmas decorations in Roanoke were in the windows of the downtown stores.
"All the stores decorated," Mondia Dyer recalled. "The dress shops in stores like Heironimus really went all out to decorate their windows I'm sure many a family went downtown on a Sunday afternoon and just walked up and down and looked at all the storefronts."
In the Roanoke of 1946, S.H. Heironimus was king, at least so far as department stores went. "They had everything," Dyer said - including wonderful Christmas presents for those on a budget. "You could get the most beautiful handkerchiefs for a quarter."
There were other stores downtown, most of them now long gone: S.H. Kress; F.W. Woolworth; W.T. Grant; Sears, Roebuck; Montgomery Ward. There was a grab bag of ethnic stores and restaurants, Dyer said - spilling out of the business district into the mostly black neighborhoods across the railroad tracks.
And there was a City Market some described as a very different place from the artsy-craftsy remake of today.
James Reynolds Sr., whose family ran a feed store on the market in the 1930s and '40s, said in the old days you could buy the live chicken of your choice on the market. Other vendors sold braids of chewing tobacco, while the current food court building was full of butcher shops. There was even a corner of the market devoted to swapping knives.
Reynolds recalled as a boy watching bootleggers rumbling down the back alleys of the market in their souped-up cars - dropping off loads of whiskey at the little "nip" joints where out-of-town farmers might duck in for a drink.
"It's changed so. Then it was just a working-man's place," Reynolds said of the market. "I don't remember all the decorations and frills you have now. There was more food."
Oh, yes. Food.
Among other things, Christmas 1946 - following years of red meat points and butter rations - marked the return of food. "Plump turkey will be in abundance for Roanoke's first real peacetime Christmas since 1940," the World-News reported on Dec. 21, 1946. Price: 50-60 cents a pound. "The famed eastern Virginia peanut cured ham, however, will be far from plentiful."
Oh, well. At least the legal booze was holding out. The World-News of Dec. 23 reported a line had formed at three city ABC stores that morning before they opened. Some kinds of alcohol still were rationed in December 1946.
Not to worry, the newspaper reported: "Two good brands of bourbon remained on sale this afternoon, as did several creditable blends."
Not that the Roanokers in 1946, any more than the Roanokers of today, spent all of their time queued up for drinks.
In fact, Mondia Dyer said, one of the biggest holiday crowds every year in those days was the one for midnight mass at St. Andrews Catholic Church.
"On Christmas Eve the crowd was overwhelming Catholic, non-Catholic. Catholics who hadn't been to church all year. The buses would run. It was a joyous celebration," Dyer said.
For some in 1946, of course, the joy was muted.
Meanwhile, in the World-News' "In memoriam" columns of that December, the bell tolled on:
"In memory of our dear son and brother, Cleo M. Robertson, who was killed in Germany "
"In memory of our son-in-law, Ulysses B. Weeks, who was lost in the English Channel "
"In loving memory of our darling baby son, Sgt. George A. Zimmerman Jr., who gave his life for his country. Christmas is here again, but oh how our heart aches for you "
In the story of Christmas, 1946, it always will.
LENGTH: Long : 206 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. This advertisement ran in the Roanoke World-News onby CNBDec. 6, 1946. 2. In the Snow Queen pageant (left) of 1946, Jefferson
High School crowned Joanne Friend (standing). 3. Her maid of honor
was Maxine Richards. Among the Roanoke Christmas parade floats
(above) that year was this odd-looking creature. 4. A Heironimus ad
from the season.