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TO THE MOON AND BACK
​(ARCHIVED BLoG)

The Human and Scientific Legacy of Project Diana

JEEPS AND STOCKINGS: TWO ADDENDA

12/31/2016

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In the spirit of tidying up 2016’s loose ends in time for the New Year, I have a couple of follow-ups to earlier posts based on reader responses. Rather than updating old entries and expecting my long-suffering readers to go back and dredge them up, I decided to do a free-standing post elaborating on a couple of interesting bits of mid-20th century Americana.

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​First, in the essay entitled “Out and About on the Jersey Shore,” dated May 3, 2016, I stated “Our friends the Evers had [a car with a rumble seat, a padded bench where the trunk should have been], and we all vied to be one of the two lucky ducks (three, if we wheedled persuasively enough) who got to ride there…. (The Evers family also had a Willy’s Jeep. They had all the good cars!)”


Picture(Courtesy of the Evers family)
When I recently asked Helen and Bill Evers for some photos of their mother for my essay on Pearl Harbor, Helen sent several of their childhood family, including a couple of pictures of the cars I had mentioned in the May 3 post. This one is almost certainly the car with the rumble seat, though that particular feature is hidden by the Evers paterfamilias, Jim.

The other car photo she sent was of the Willy's jeep! Just seeing that iconic car and those two adorable little kids brought a smile to my face.
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Bill and Barbara Evers, shown with their family's Willy's Jeep in 1949. (Courtesy of the Evers family)
We Americans loved our Willy’s Jeeps. Brainchild of the industrial designer Brooks Stevens, the Willy’s Jeep Station Wagon first rolled off the assembly line in 1946, just in time to join American families in their wholesale move to the suburbs. I was pleased to confirm my childhood memory: Despite its appearance, it was actually a faux woody made of painted steel, a design that was both safer and better-suited to mass-production than contemporary wood-bodied passenger wagons. Production continued in the US until 1965, when the Jeep Wagoneer supplanted it in our fickle affections. Production continued in Brazil and Argentina for several more years.

Thanks, Helen and Bill, for your generosity in sharing these wonderful old family photos. (I always have a hard time using the term "vintage" about photos of my own contemporaries!)

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Second, my daughter Julie, upon reading my most recent entry, “A Jersey Shore Christmas,” dated December 25, 2016, asked me if my mother’s legs were really bare in the home movie clip of her sledding down the driveway with me. “Those weren't white wool stockings?” The same comment could equally well be applied to the women’s legs in the photo of the riverside bonfire.

A little clarification is in order. No, I don't remember my mother's ever owning or wearing white wool stockings. But I probably shouldn’t have used the term “bare-legged” (even though to my way of thinking it’s a distinction without a difference) because she was almost certainly wearing nylon stockings - and therein lies a story.


Nylon was developed in the 1930s in the lab of Wallace Carothers, a polymer scientist with Dupont, and patented in 1938.  Although Dupont’s vision for their invention - the world’s first fully synthetic fiber - extended far beyond hosiery, they cannily decided to start by offering women an affordable and less delicate alternative to silk stockings. The new product was introduced with much hoopla at the New York World’s Fair in 1939 and went on sale to the general public in May of 1940. Four million pairs were sold on the first day alone. Nylon became a household word and “nylons” a synonym for stockings. They were more than just an article of women’s underwear, they offered hope that modern technology would lift a Depression-weary nation into prosperity once again.

Barely had nylons become one of life’s necessities for the American woman when they were snatched away. In December of 1941 the US entered World War II, and all nylon was diverted to the War effort, used for everything from parachutes to rope to aircraft fuel tanks. The only stockings to be had were bought either before the War or on the black market. To give the illusion they were wearing proper nylons, women painted “seams” down the backs of their legs (probably straighter than it was ever possible to get the real thing!). When stockings were reintroduced after the War, consumer demand outstripped supply, leading to mile-long queues and even “nylon riots,” with women getting into fist fights with one another in the heat of competition. Fortunately Dupont soon rose to the occasion and ramped up production of the coveted garment.

Late in the 1940s seamless nylons became available, but surprisingly they never entirely caught on. (For some, apparently the seams were part of the mystique.) Nylons, with or without seams, along with the garter belts that held them up, remained women’s wardrobe mainstays until the introduction of pantyhose in 1959 - ushering in a trend towards higher hemlines and ultimately the micro-miniskirts that shocked us all a few years later. But that is another story.

I should add that little girls did not wear nylons until they reached their teens or at least their tween years. In the firehouse Christmas party photo, the girls truly were bare-legged, though we usually wore leggings when we went outside during the winter. By leggings I don’t mean either the modified tights that are now called leggings or the leg-warmers worn by dancers and dancer wannabes, I’m talking about thick wooly pants held up with suspenders that were companion garments to winter coats. These leggings were only worn outside, so we put them on and took them off again multiple times per day - going to and from school, for recess, at lunchtime, etc. Synthetics had not yet revolutionized cold-weather gear, at least not for civilians, and we spent much of our outdoor recreation time looking and feeling like the Pillsbury Doughboy - unlike our moms, who simply had to grin and bear it.

Thanks, Julie, for asking a good question and for caring about how cold your grandmother must have been!
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A JERSEY SHORE CHRISTMAS

12/24/2016

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When I thought of writing about “A Jersey Shore Christmas,” I realized I’d actually done it several years ago, when my grandson, then age 8, was collecting family history narratives from all his grandparents for his Cub Scout Bear Trail badge. One of the questions was, “What did you do as a child during the holidays?”

​My response started out, “Christmas was the biggie.” The rest of this post is adapted from the essay I wrote for him then.

Our Christmas actually started with Thanksgiving - and anyone who denies that it began so early back in the "old days" or blames Hallmark for rushing the season is mistaken. We usually went to my father’s parents' home in Oakland NJ, a couple of hours' drive from Neptune, along with my uncles Quentin and Sid (my father's brothers), their wives, and Quentin’s three children, who were about our age. Of course we had turkey, stuffing, and all the fixings. My mother made apple and mincemeat pies and to let the steam out, she took a sharp knife and made dotted lines in the crusts that read TA ['tis apple] and TM ['tis mince]. 
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​Once we recovered from the soporific effects of the feast, my grandfather, a concert pianist whose skills had sadly grown rusty from arthritis and disuse, reluctantly succumbed to my grandmother's pleas and sat down at the piano, his ever-present cigar dangling from his lips, and we all sang Christmas carols. Then my sisters and I, having raided our grandmother’s wonderful costume trunk full of scarves and bolts of exotic material, belted out all five verses of "We Three Kings.” I always claimed the role of Balthazar because I loved the dark melodrama of his lines: "Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume, breathes a life of gathering gloom; sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying, sealed in a stone-cold tomb." (Gian Carlo Menotti's opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, also about the gifts of the Magi, was written and first shown on TV in the early 1950's. My sisters and I took to it instantly, probably because we were already devoted fans of the three wise men and felt we had a special connection with them. We spent many happy hours reenacting the songs from Amahl - and thus a new holiday tradition was born.) 

As soon as Thanksgiving was over, the Christmas season began in earnest. My mother made two fruitcakes, one dark and one light - the locus classicus for my own compulsion to bake fruitcake every year whether anyone likes it or not - which she doused liberally with brandy once a week until Christmas. Around the same time, my father scheduled the family Christmas card photoshoot, a ritual he truly adored. He set up lots of spotlights, and some years he also draped the room with sheets to provide a neutral backdrop. Elaborate scenarios were developed (clutching our pets; reading to the younger children; my sister at an easel pretending to paint), and a primitive version of Photoshop was applied to the results. His children didn’t always share his enthusiasm (as unfortunately can be seen from our glum expressions in some of the photos - re-do's weren't as easy as with an iPhone!). We had to sit very still, with our pasted-on smiles, and the spotlights made the room hot as an oven. Today, of course, I am inordinately grateful not only for the memories my father made for all of us by staging this event but also for the photographic record of how we all grew and changed and added to our number over the years. Wish I could tell him so now. 
The cards began in 1943, when I was 10 months old. There was no card for 1944. After that the series remained unbroken; some years there were actually two different versions. The only year my parents appeared was 1950. Note the extra-special gift we received in 1953! Our last Christmas in Neptune was 1955; the cards continued for a few more years at our new home on Long Island. 

​A couple of weeks before The Day, we decorated the house. My mother had a creche that we set up on the mantle, and even though we weren't particularly religious, I loved the baby Jesus and the whole family tableau. (I still do.) Right below them hung the stockings awaiting Santa's attention - an interesting juxtaposition of Christian and pagan symbolism, though not one we thought much about at the time. We also had a little cardboard village with colored cellophane windows and holes for Christmas lights, which she arranged on the piano. A wreath went up on the door.

​My father set up the tree in a semi-finished "game room" in the basement, near the pingpong table. The beloved box of ornaments came down from the attic, and we competed to be allowed to hang our favorites. Another predictable squabble was sparked by the silver foil icicles: I liked to hang them slowly and painstakingly so they would look like real icicles, while my sister preferred taking clumps of the stuff and flinging them at the tree. These mini-crises resolved, we artfully arranged our gifts under the tree - all but the ones from Santa, who didn't visit till Christmas Eve after all of us (including, we supposed, our parents) were sound asleep. (I'll never forget how proud I was when I was deemed old enough to be dropped off at Woolworth’s in Asbury Park to shop on my own, using the money I saved from my allowance by depositing fifty cents per week in a "Christmas Club.")

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My parents always hosted an Open House for all the neighbors (children and adults alike) on Christmas Eve. During the preceding week, we made dozens and dozens of cookies - including sugar cookies, which we decorated with red and green sugar, and Tollhouse cookies, made by following the recipe on the back of the Nestle’s package, which magically and consistently produced the Best. Ever. Chocolate. Chip. Cookies. Out came the two fruitcakes, dark and light, for one last splash of brandy. Just before the party my mother prepared two batches of eggnog, nonalcoholic for the kids and most definitely alcoholic for the adults. We donned our Christmas finery and were allowed to stay up late. Years later, one of the neighborhood girls told me she was so inspired by these parties that as an adult she has always given a Christmas Eve Open House of her own.

After all the guests had gone home, we put on our foot pajamas and snuggled up to listen to "The night before Christmas"; then it was off to bed with us so we wouldn't be too tired the next morning. Not a problem for me; I was almost always the first one up. But we still had to wait for our parents to get up before we were allowed to go down to the basement and start opening our gifts - which seemed like forever but was probably more like half an hour. We had made our Christmas lists and I usually got exactly what I'd requested, plus lots of other stuff. One year I asked for a Nancy Lee doll but stipulated that I wanted her wrapped so I could be surprised when I opened the package. This turned out to be a bad call because she didn’t come in a box, and her gorgeous red hair ended up with a bad case of "wrapping paper head" that never quite went away no matter what I did.

When I was around five, my father bought us an electric train. After we went to bed on Christmas Eve, he stayed up long into the night laying the track so that the train would disappear down a hallway and a couple of minutes later reappear through the dining room. That year he, not I, was the first one out of bed on Christmas day. The train was a big hit with all of us but no one was more excited than my dad. If you want to make an engineer happy, just give him a model train and a whole day with nothing else to do but play with it. 
No portrayal of Christmas in Shark River Hills, or any other holiday for that matter, would be complete without mentioning the firehouse on Brighton Avenue. The firehouse was more than just headquarters for the volunteer fire department, it was the beating heart of the community, serving as a meeting place for scout groups and other organizations and an event center for community parties and celebrations. My mother was a member of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, even though my father was not a firefighter. Here is a photo of the Christmas party in 1953, at which 73 children were in attendance, including both my sisters (#27 and #57), my BFF Joyce (#36), and practically everyone else I knew (plus a few I didn’t). Where was I? I guess I must have been ill that evening; surely I didn’t have anywhere else to go! (For awhile, identifying the 73 children became a Facebook obsession among the SRH crowd, including a circulating excel file that ended up with about 3/4 of the names filled in.)
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By around Christmas there was usually plenty of snow on the ground, which meant the long, winding Riverside Drive hill would be cordoned off and sledding allowed. Wish I had a photo of that! Instead, I’m including a little home movie, taken by my dad, of my mom sledding down the driveway with me. Notice how my mother was dressed.
The end of the Christmas season was marked by an enormous bonfire at the edge of the Shark River, fueled by dozens of spent, dried-up Christmas trees. Both my sisters are in this photo, taken in 1951. (Where was I, I wonder?) On the right, in the background, you can see the mothers - again, barelegged, in skirts. Thanks to my sister Sherry for reminding me about this event. 
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THE DAY EVERYTHING CHANGED: PEARL HARBOR AND ITS AFTERMATH IN THE CAMP EVANS COMMUNITY

12/7/2016

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Today marks a grim milestone in American history - the 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, “a day which will live in infamy,” as FDR famously referred to it in his call for a declaration of war. Early that morning, a Sunday, the Japanese launched a surprise attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, sinking or damaging 18 ships and destroying 188 aircraft. In all, 2,403 were killed - mostly service personnel but also including 68 civilians - and 1,178 wounded. Since the US was not at war, all the victims were noncombatants.
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Congress quickly heeded Roosevelt’s call for a declaration of war. Four days later, unhappy about Japan’s unilateral, unannounced initiation of hostilities but realizing American participation in World War II was now inevitable, Germany and Italy declared war on the US, which immediately reciprocated. 

Although the US had kept a wary eye on developments in Europe (Asia not so much), until now it had maintained a staunch neutrality, its populace deeply divided on whether America should be involved in the war effort in any way. All that changed with Pearl Harbor. Within hours America was on a wartime footing. Soon films about military life and lovers separated by war would crowd out Citizen Caine and Dumbo in the movie theaters. Soon “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and “I’ll be Home for Christmas” would dominate the airwaves, along with revivals of World War I hits like “Over There.” Soon deprivation and shortages of building materials and consumer goods would become the norm. Soon admonitions like “Remember Pearl Harbor!” and “Loose lips sink ships” would become part of our daily conversation.

Much has been made of the parallels between Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Both were unexpected attacks on iconic homeland targets, both inflicted a shocking amount of damage, both resulted in thousands of casualties, and both brought a sudden reveille to those who thought the world outside our borders could simply be ignored. Both drew the US into many years of armed combat. Whether the long-term ramifications of 9/11 can possibly match the political, economic, sociological, and cultural dislocations that followed World War II - the decades-long dominance of the US on the world stage, the Cold War, the increasing pressure for gender and racial equality - remains to be seen. But the analogy is useful in giving those too young to remember Pearl Harbor at least a hint of its transformative effect on life in America.
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For both the men and women of the Camp Evans community, the impact of Pearl Harbor was, if anything, magnified by the circumstances in which they found themselves - that is, in a new, ad hoc community, with nothing in the way of roots or shared traditions; and with all the men suddenly on high alert, aware that if the Axis powers knew what was going on at Camp Evans it too could become a prime target.
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My father’s story was perhaps typical. His first job after graduating from the Cooper Union in 1936 with a shiny new degree in electrical engineering was as a “student engineer” for Pan American Airways, where his chief duty was painting antenna poles. After a series of “starter” jobs with gradually increasing responsibilities, he eventually landed in Washington DC in a Civil Service position in the Signal Corps, in which he advanced from Junior Engineer at $2,000/year to Assistant Engineer at $2,600/year. As the new decade dawned, my father, finding his job too long on administrative duties and too short on research (in a word, he was bored), sought a more stimulating position, one that would draw more extensively on his hard-won electronics skills. He was just on the verge of accepting a job at the Bureau of Standards in Washington in early 1941 when the Signal Corps countered by offering a promotion to Associate Radio Engineer at their radar laboratories at Fort Monmouth in NJ. He jumped at the chance.

Much of what I know about this era of my father’s life was gleaned from an oral history interview I conducted with him in 1979. He told me his initial assignment was at Fort Hancock, “an isolated peninsula up near New York City; but we were eventually transferred to the old Marconi Radio Building down at Belmar [which the Army had only recently acquired].” To minimize his commute and allow him to ride his bike to work sometimes (they only had one car), my parents moved at around the same time from Long Branch, their first NJ home, to Shark River Hills. 

If my dad was looking for excitement, he almost certainly found more than he’d bargained for. My parents and their friends were of course keenly aware of the war in Europe - how could they not be, given my father’s line of work? - but it was someone else’s war, not theirs. Preoccupied with unpacking their boxes, adapting to their new life, thinking about having children (a question of when, not if), they were as oblivious as most other Americans were to the fact that war was about to lap up to our own shores, and even more surprisingly, at the hands not of Hitler but of the Japanese: “Pearl Harbor...was a tremendous shock to us. I guess if we really stopped to think of it, we would have realized that something like this was inevitable, because Hitler's intentions were very clear - dominate the world! - and he would form whatever alliances and whatever he needed to do it. But when the shoe dropped, as it were, it was a great shock. It was a Sunday morning, and we were madly telephoning - how can we get out and man those radar sets and do something about it? - a panic, pretty much of a panic.”

My father added, “[It turned out] there was no attack on the East Coast, at least not at that time - although there was some later.” I didn’t pursue this almost offhand observation at the time and neither did he. It now appears that U-boat attacks on shipping along the East Coast were more extensive than was ever officially revealed, and I can’t help wondering if my father knew more than he was letting on. 

Several workplace changes resulted almost immediately from the attack on Pearl Harbor. Security, already tight, was strengthened even further. My father's work took on a laser-like focus on the military applications of radar: “I eventually wound up heading what was called the Special Developments section with about 15 or 20 people in it and we did some very interesting work in radar [including the Army’s first moving target search radar].... I think some of it was very original.” Another dramatic change was in their work schedules: “Overtime became the rule rather than the exception - in fact, we worked pretty much a six-day week.” 
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When the Camp Evans wives were parachuted into the unfamiliar Jersey Shore culture, they found themselves quite isolated, their social circle largely defined by their husbands’ work ties. After the sky fell on December 7, 1941 and their husbands started spending more and more time at work, they clung to each other all the more tightly for solace and companionship.

My mother’s closest friend from that era was Mary Jane Evers, an outgoing woman with a wry sense of humor. (Decades later I named my black cat after her black cat, “Rasputin.”) Mary Jane had a way with words and for many years wrote an amusing column in the Asbury Park Press called “We Took to the Hills” that went well beyond the demands of the genre (which tended to focus on who had tea with whom or presided at the ladies’ auxiliary meeting). In 1996, when I asked her to contribute to a “collective memoir” on my mother, she responded with a charming, breezy essay, scrawled in longhand, portraying both the impact of Pearl Harbor and her evolving friendship with my mother.

Although she was still living in West Long Branch at the time of Pearl Harbor, she was obviously already very tuned into life in “the Hills” and the Evans Lab community: “You must remember we were all ‘strangers in a strange land,’ so to speak.  Our husbands had been assembled from all over to nurse the infant Radar labs and then the electronics labs.  None of us had family nearby; shortly after we met, the attack on Pearl Harbor [occurred]; we each had 4 gallons of gas a week for the family car, and meat and sugar rationing.  We lived in a summer development, in homes not equipped for year-round living, and about 3 macadamed roads which the Army had done to get to their own properties in the Hills and to allow the personnel to get to work.”

My mom and Mary Jane didn’t formally meet until sometime in 1944, when each of them had a toddler daughter and Mary Jane was pregnant with her second child. By late fall, Mary Jane was going through a very rough patch. Her new baby had recently died at the age of three months, and her husband Jim, who like my father had joined the Radar Division at Evans shortly before Pearl Harbor in 1941, was away on “travel duty.” Impulsively, my mother phoned and invited her to join them for Thanksgiving dinner. Their friendship was cemented with that gesture.

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Mary Jane with Sally (Courtesy of the Evers family)
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Elsa with Cindy
Mary Jane was keenly aware of how unlikely, in many ways, their friendship was: “We were very different people and from different backgrounds, but I believe that being thrown together in need, we grew to respect each others’ views and to treat our children a bit differently [than we might otherwise have done].  She was very loving (almost doting with you!); I saw children as little beings who would grow, hopefully, into individuals I would like. I have certainly achieved that!” (To be honest, I have no idea what those differences might have been - from my child's-eye point of view, the two women were a perfectly matched pair of moms. Politics? Whatever the differences were, clearly they were apparent to Mary Jane and presumably to my mother as well.)

Aside from their children, the other perennial conversation topic was money, or more accurately, the lack of it. According to Mary Jane, the pay was not generous even by wartime standards: “Civil Service personnel were not among those getting raises in Congress. The general public, from what I have learned, figured they had had money all thru the Depression when everyone else was broke, so they could just wait.” 

“Budget problems were ever on our minds," she went on to say. "Your [parents] would have some ‘interesting’ discussions when the bills came in. My daughter Barbara vividly remembers hearing Elsa say, “There’s always too much month at the end of the money!” The women raided their kids’ piggy banks (we all had piggy banks, which were supposed to teach us to save our money), and as my mother commented to Mary Jane, “By the time I pay the children back, I’m broke again!” Elsa and Mary Jane bartered babysitting time by deliberately joining organizations with different meeting schedules: “She was in the AAUW and I was in the League of Women Voters; she was a member of the local Fire Auxiliary and I was a member of the Hospital Auxiliary.“ 

At the end of this litany, Mary Jane worried she might have left me with the impression that the lives of the Evans wives were all about “money-grubbing.” Of course, none of us was suffering from malnutrition or doing without the basics of food, clothing, and shelter. The point was that money was needed not only to provide the necessities of life but, in a world filled with bad news and uncertainty, to allow for the comfort of a few extras - “a spot left over for simple parties, cheap beer and soda and birthday cakes.” Making things come out right, making ends meet, making it possible to have birthday cakes as well as Spam - that was a job that fell to the women. It was part of their contribution to the war effort, and they took it seriously. 

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How did the children of the Camp Evans community fare during Pearl Harbor and its aftermath? I was born just over a year after Pearl Harbor and have only fleeting memories - if indeed they are authentic memories at all - of the War years. Many of the facts of wartime life were part of the air we breathed. Yes, we ate Spam for dinner. Yes, we observed blackouts and dim-outs to avoid bringing unwanted attention from the German U-boats to American supply ships. Yes, we shared in the American love affair with the radio and tracked the terrifying narratives it brought into our homes. Yes, a chronic state of low-level deprivation was a part of our daily existence.


But in some important respects we were sheltered. The men - whether they were in the military or, like my father, civilians employed by the military - were doing work deemed critical to the War effort and therefore spent the War years on the homefront. They may have left for work early in the morning and arrived home late at night, but at least they were there, not thousands of miles away like my father-in-law, who spent four years on the Italian front as an Army surgeon. Our uncles and cousins may have been in uniform overseas, but not our fathers. 
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Jim with Sally (Courtesy of the Evers family)
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King with Cindy
And perhaps partly for that reason, our moms were stay-at-home moms, quite unlike my stepmother Rose, a real life "Rosie the Riveter" who worked as a welder in a Grumman Aircraft plant on Long Island. Although to say the Camp Evans wives bore the brunt of child-rearing responsibilities would be an understatement - and without benefit of Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose revolutionary book on child care wasn’t published until 1946 - at least “Just you wait till your father gets home” was not an empty threat. (Not that my own mother said that, ever, but I certainly knew children whose mothers did.)

So in a way we Camp Evans kids got the jump on the Fifties. At a time when other families were struggling to adjust and create a new normal, we were already there. The Baby Boom was already in progress. Sally, the oldest Evers child, was born on September 11, 1942 - 39 weeks to the day after Pearl Harbor. My mother suffered a miscarriage before I was born; otherwise my parents too would have had a “Pearl Harbor baby.” Perhaps that’s why, whatever arbitrary cutpoints the demographers adopt, I’ve always known in my heart of hearts that I’m a “Boomer.”

Our mothers also didn’t have to be hounded out of their jobs and back to domesticity, they’d been there all along. I’m not sure to what extent, if any, the resurgence of feminism rooted in the wartime increase of women in the workplace ever touched my mother. Much later she took a few education courses in the hopes of translating her college English major into a marketable skill, but by that time her health was starting to fail and her retooling scheme never got off the ground. Her ambition for her three daughters was that we should marry well, so that we too could have the privilege of staying home to care for our children. We all remember her saying, only half-jokingly, “It’s just as easy to love a rich man as a poor man.” Fortunately for us, in light of subsequent economic shifts that made the one-income family a luxury, as well as our own ambitions, we got quite a different message from our father, who presented his women colleagues as role models and urged us to take all the math and science we could cram into our schedules.
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My parents and their friends were part of what Tom Brokaw called the “Greatest Generation” - men and women born between 1901 and 1924, who came of age during the Depression and World War II, who shared a common core of values including honor, service, love of country and family, and personal responsibility, and who more than rose to the occasion when duty called. For better and for worse (don't forget the internment camps for American citizens of Japanese descent, or the abuse my pacifist uncle suffered as a Conscientious Objector during World War II), they shaped America as we know it today.

​As Brokaw observed, it was sometimes difficult to coax their stories from them because of their conviction that they weren’t doing anything special, just honoring their commitments and doing what they were supposed to do. In this context, I feel fortunate to have obtained, without really planning to do so, the two eyewitness accounts on which the above narrative largely rests. And a big shout out to Bill and Helen Evers for sharing their childhood family photos with me. For more about the Evers's and their friendship with the Stodolas, read my post dated February 27, 2016 and elsewhere in passing.
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    CINDY STODOLA POMERLEAU

    I was just shy of 3 years old when the US Army successfully bounced radar waves off the moon - the opening salvo in the Space Race, the birth of radioastronomy, and the first Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) communication. I was born on the Jersey coast for the same reason as Project Diana: my father, as scientific director of the Project, was intimately involved in both events. Like Project Diana, I was named for the goddess of the moon (in my case Cynthia, the Greeks' nickname for Artemis - their version of Diana - who was born on Mt Cynthos). Project Diana is baked into my DNA.

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