Untitled - Digitizing America

earming. ln 1938, Walt Disney created Snow
White and Orson Welles unwittingly created a
panic with his radio broadcast War of the Worlds.
"Knock-knock" jokes swept our country; Austria
fell, and Czechoslovakia was dismembered. ln
September of 1939, World War ll started with the
invasion of Poland. Hitler's minions began a
crazed dance across Europe's face that would
leave devastation and the murder of more than
eleven million innocent victims in their wake.
The bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 brought
America into the war and her young men were
sailing off to foreign shores from which many
would not return. Builders of homes were out of
work, but jobs were plentiful in other trades. The
automotive industry retooled to produce tanks and
bombers and weapons, providing employmentfor
hundreds of "Rosies-the-Riveter." Market lines
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grew longer as we waited for rationed butter,
sugar, coffee. Gas rationing proved a boon to
horse-traders-f iguratively and I iterally. A preview
of today's ecological movement, those years saw
parishioners saving basements-full of paper and
old clothes for "the rag man," cotfee cans full of
cooking fat to bring to the grocer, and flattened
vegetable cans to be recycled for weapons. We
had backyard Victory Gardens, Civil Defense air
raid drills, and Kate Smith singing God B/ess
America. Many churches published special bulletins
and newspapers for their parishioners in the
armed services. School children and parish
societies wrapped Christmas gifts for hospitalized
veterans and knitted socks and afghans to send
overseas. And Japanese-Americans of our Pacif ic
Coast were held in detention camps-an action
upheld by the Supreme Court.
The Medal of Honor, highest military decoration of
the United States, was first awarded for CivilWar
Service, but it was not until World War ll that a
chaplain received this honor. Father Joseph
O'Callahan, a Jesuit from Boston, survived the
holocaust of a Japanese attack on his bomber
carrier, Franklin, ministering to the dead and
wounded, directing fire-fighting crews, and assuming
responsibilities far beyond the call of his duties,
in the midst of the siege.
The bloodshed and deprivation, the support and
prayers of Americans everywhere finally led to the
restoration of peace. Masses of Thanksgiving
were joyously celebrated throughout the world on
V-J Day in 1945, only four months after the death
of President Floosevelt who had begun his fourth
term in otfice. With the typicalAmerican elasticity
and ingenuity, people picked up the pieces,
tried their best to recapture a normal mode of life,
and turned to the important task of post-war reconstruction.