Isabel
Well, there are things, y'know. Things that I can remember and things that I probably did that would be completely foreign to and probably be very lacking in interest to people of today.
But, if you don't understand what's happened before -- you can't understand what's happening now.
I feel, having lived through the Depression that history is repeating itself in many ways. But, we can't have two wars. And I remember during the wars, people felt that what they needed to do, they did.
And they were easily convinced that The Cause made a demand on them whether they were really much informed about The Cause or not.
I was in high-school during World War I.
My seat-mate in high-school was Isabel Werner.
Her parents were immigrants from Germany.
She didn't have a very good time.
And I wouldn't permit any slighting of her or her parents.
Automatically -- it was sport for some people to blame her for what was going on over there --
The family took an awful beating in the community.
They sort of withdrew to themselves.
Not long ago she and one of her daughters visited.
We talked about high-school days.
She wasn't bitter.
She was bright and she knew how to manage ...
During the War we'd knit stockings for soldiers and I often wondered what poor fellow got my stockings.
Terrible!
I was no good at that sort of thing.
But, it was the thing to do.
I belonged to the Girl's Society at the YWCA and on Friday afternoons stockings were being knit and that was that.
So, I knit my stockings every Friday afternoon 'til I got a pair -- and they were just awful.
But it was part of the apparatus that goes to convincing people.
Now people are looking into things.
Well, after the experience -- Each war that we have had -- And, I'm not talking about the little dustups in between -- Each war that we have had has left behind a desire to look into the causes of things -- People have been worse off because they went from feeling that to kill people was their duty to realizing what they had done and why they had done it.
And they know it's not right.
I remember my father being very disgusted with the folks in the American Legion because they threw their weight around politically and otherwise.
The part that disgusted him was that these people thought that because they had served in the war that entitled them to manage the schools and everything else and he had standards and he knew they weren't capable because he had known them since and he wouldn't have it.
There's some of that going on right now. And has been for some time.
For graduation I wrote the class song and another girl did the music. I found out afterwards that she did not write the music. It was copied from a popular song. It was alright I guess. It went along with it. There was one part that cause quite a sensation at the time:
Tho' in our lives the old school on the hill
Soon a mem'ry will be
And the strange and dramatic part of it was, the summer after we graduated the high-school burned to the ground.
They said, "How did you know??"
Of course, I didn't.
That was the high-school my mother graduated from. So, it was a very old building. It caught fire during the summer and it couldn't be saved.
Nothing so mysterious about that.
But, it was fun to speculate none the less.