Pauline Thomas speaks of homelife during WWII

(Pauline Thomas on High School Steps)





(sound file only)

Q. My first question will be, what did you and your family do for entertainment back when you were in high school during the war years?

A. About the only thing that we could do was listen to what was on the radio or maybe go to a movie once in a while, but we really couldn’t afford to do that all that much so we listened a lot to the radio. It was funny because we would be watching the news and we would all be sitting around looking at the radio. Of course we didn’t see anything except just the radio. You see that on some of the comic shows that remind me of those days.

Q. Did you have group activities?

A. Well, we played cards and that was about it but the whole family could do that and we spent a lot of hours doing that. We played checkers. I never was very good at that. My Dad always beat me playing checkers.

Q. How did you get your information about the outside world and how did you communicate with people outside of your home?

A. Well, we got a newspaper and of course we got the news. My Dad especially kept right up on the news on radio and he listened to a lot of news shows, my aggravation at that age. If we needed to get in touch with somebody, and we could not afford a telephone back then, there was a grocery store across from us, across the street from us and they had a telephone and if we really needed to get out to someone we would go over there and use their phone.

Q. Now where did you get your food? What were your food sources?

A. My Dad was always a big garden person, my Mother too. They put out a pretty good size garden that would include corn, too, and all kinds of vegetables. And then of course we went to the store which was, at that time, the one across the street from us but after it closed we had to walk quite a distance to get to the store and of course that meant carrying grocery bags which were rather heavy at times, up the hill at Shawnee to our house, something we wouldn’t think much of doing these days. Back then you didn’t or you didn’t get the groceries.

Q. Now, where did your clothes come from? Did you buy a lot of them off of the rack?

A. I hardly had any clothes bought off the rack. A few maybe, but my Mother was a very good seamstress and she made a lot of my clothes. I got a lot of compliments on the clothes that she made me. When I was a child, she even made me a winter coat and that coat was trimmed with caracal. I don’t know if you know what caracal is, kind of a little curly type fake fur and she put that around the cuffs and the collar. Ohh..It was a beautiful coat. She made my clothes on up to when I went to high school, a lot of them, but then I bought a few.

Q. Now, how did you get back and forth to school? I know that Shawnee was across a rather large bridge, and that the high school was clear up by where they have a senior home now on High Street (Piqua). How did you get there? Did they have a bus come get you?

A. No, I walked everyplace I went. They had school buses that took the kids in rural areas, but it didn’t take any of us, so we walked to school and that was even when I went to high school I had to walk, I don’t know how far it was from our house to the high school but it was a long distance. It didn’t make any difference if it was raining or snowing or sleeting, it didn’t come across the bottom of the radio that there would be no school today so we went to school and walked home again. It was a pretty good distance even when I went to second or third grade but it was even further than that when I went to high school. After I graduated and was working at the high school I still walked all that distance, as we still didn’t have a car in the family. I got a lot of walking in those days.

Thank you very much. You have given us an excellent view of how it was to live back then in the WWII days.

Thank you very much.