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Now it’s time to hear about my mother’s war.

As you may remember, she was in the typing pool at Sikorsky Aircraft, which manufactured helicopters. While in the typing pool, my mother sank battleships, destroyers, aircraft carriers and submarines. She played the game Battleship with a friend of hers, on their steno pads. There were government inspectors at Sikorsky’s and they expected everyone to be busy all the time. In a typing pool, either you have work or you don’t. But the government inspectors didn’t appreciate this detail. So my mother and her friend played Battleship. They sat facing each other, each one lookout for half of that large room. If they spotted an inspector, one picked up a typed letter, put it over her steno pad and started reading it, while the other flipped back a page in her steno pad, to some shorthand – they were suddenly ‘proofing’ that typed letter.

My mother was a typical career girl then, with her glamorous outfits and her white gloves. When stockings were hard to come by, she wore leg makeup to look like stockings, including a line up the back of her legs, to look like seams.

While my mother did live with her parents, she sometimes went to the next town, where some of her girl friends had rented a beach house one summer. They had a merry old time on the beach. When it was time to go to work, they all piled into a car with patched tires to ride just to train station in that town. With the gas rationing, they could only buy enough gas to drive to and from the train station. They didn’t have enough gas to drive the 5 miles to and from Bridgeport.

When my mother got home from work each day, the first thing she did was check if the morning or afternoon mail had brought a letter from my father. Sometimes she even got some photos. Here is one that he sent from Luxembourg in January 1945. On the front, my father signed it "Love, Kenny," On the back is the Army censor’s stamp.

As part of the war effort, everyone was supposed to save animal fat and turn it in. My mother never knew what exactly the fat was used for. But her family hoarded bacon fat – a life long habit of my mother’s. There was always a jar of it in the refrigerator. And if my mother wanted to fry up an egg, she used some of the bacon grease to get some of the bacon flavor and smell.

The other thing my mother told me about was the wringer washing machine, with its two semi-automatic washing tubs and the dreaded wringer. She always had to make sure that when she pushed the clothes through the wringer that her fingers didn’t get caught. It sounded to me only a small step above taking the clothes to the edge of the river and pounding them with rocks.

So that was what my mother’s war was like.

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