Aim
Page 19
THE HOMEFRONT
By 1941, Germany, Italy, and Japan had allied themselves in their various military campaigns against innocent people. Americans who read the news were divided about whether to step in and help. Some felt the problems in Europe, Africa, and Asia belonged to the people who lived in those places and that we should stay out of the war altogether. Others were in favor of sending military equipment, but not our men, to the battlefield. On December 7, 1941, when Japan bombed the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, public opinion immediately shifted. Americans now believed that the “Axis powers”—Japan, Italy, and Germany—were determined to eventually conquer North America.
Americans would not sit by and allow such a thing to happen. Citizens across the nation began to support the war effort, conserving resources, recycling items that could be used to produce armaments, buying war bonds, enlisting in the armed forces, and much more. As America’s men went off to war, women took their places in jobs they would never have imagined. In addition to doing factory work and using heavy equipment, they built airplanes, battleships, and weapons. Many assisted the war effort on the battlefront, serving as army nurses and flying airplanes on non-combat missions.
World War II profoundly changed America. It produced a powerful sense of patriotism, rearranged attitudes toward women and racial minorities, and gave the average American a much greater sense of belonging to a world community.
RESOURCES
BOOKS
The Home Front: USA World War II, by Ronald H. Bailey (Time Life Books, 1977)
My War: From Bismarck to Britain and Back, by Ruth Register Coleman. (Trafford Publishing, 2006)
Yesterday’s Child: Growing Up in a Mill Town during the Great Depression, by Dorothy Sigmon Holbrook (Catawba County Historical Association, 1998)
Brookford Memories, by Dyke Little (Watermark, 2010)
America at War, 1941–1945: The Home Front, by Clark G. Reynolds (Gallery Books, 1990)
Sergeant York: His Own Life Story and War Diary, by Tom Skeyhill (Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1928)
VIDEOS
America Goes to War: The Homefront WWII, by Eric Sevareid. Washington, DC: PBS, Anthony Potter Productions, 1990.
Sergeant York, by Howard Hawks. Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers Pictures, 2006.
The War, by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Washington, DC: PBS, 2007.
WEBSITES OF INTEREST*
baseball-almanac.com/ (Baseball Almanac)
joedimaggio.com/ (Joe DiMaggio’s official website)
acacia.pair.com/Acacia.Vignettes/The.Diary.of.Alvin.York.html (The Diary of Alvin York)
docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/091141.html (Fireside Chat 110, September 11, 1941, “On Maintaining Freedom of the Seas”—President Roosevelt’s address to the nation after the USS Greer exchanged fire with a German U-boat)
docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/tmirhdee.html (December 8, 1941, President Roosevelt asks Congress for a Declaration of War)
docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/120941.html (Fireside Chat 140, December 9, 1941—President Roosevelt’s address to the nation after Congress declares war on Japan)
* Websites current at time of publication
BOOKS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE
Counting on Grace, by Elizabeth Winthrop (Wendy Lamb, 2006)
Early Sunday Morning: The Pearl Harbor Diary of Amber Billows, by Barry Denenberg (Scholastic, 2001)
Flygirl, by Sherri L. Smith (G.P. Putnam Sons Books for Young Readers, 2009)
Joe DiMaggio: Young Sports Hero, by Herb Dunn (Aladdin, 1999)
Kids at Work: Lewis Hine and the Crusade against Child Labor, by Russell Freedman and Lewis Wickes Hine (Clarion, 1994)
Lyddie, by Katherine Paterson (Lodestar, 1991) Mare’s War, by Tanita Davis (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2009)
My Secret War: The World War II Diary of Madeline Beck, by Mary Pope Osborne (Scholastic, 2000)
Sergeant York, by John Perry (Thomas Nelson, 2010)
The Streak, by Barb Rosenstock (Calkins Creek Books, 2014)
The World Wars, by Paul Dowswell, Ruth Brocklehurst, and Henry Brook (Usborne Books, 2007)
World War II: Fighting for Freedom: The Story of the Conflict That Changed the World, 1934–1945, by Peter Chrisp (Scholastic, 2010)
THANK YOU!
I’m grateful to Carolyn Yoder who, more than a decade ago, suggested I research a story in my own backyard. That challenge led to the writing of Blue, which led to Comfort. Eventually, the publisher, Boyds Mills Press/ Calkins Creek Books, asked for a prequel. Aim was born.
Thank you to Larry Mosteller and Ken Moyer for ensuring that my car scenes were accurate, to Andy and Naomi Bivens and Donna Ward for sharing their expertise concerning work in a cotton mill, to Rebecca Huffman for information about Mountain View High School in the 1940s, and to Robin Shelton, Pearl Davis, and Dyke Little for reflections on life in Brookford.
Thank you to Joanne Hunsberger for proofreading and Katya Rice for copyedits and to each person at Boyds Mills Press who helped to bring Aim to publication.
Kudos to my beta readers, Shannon Hitchcock, Wendy Hostetter Davis, Chuck Hostetter, Kay Mosteller, Gail and Abby Hickok, Mel Hager, Carol Baldwin, Judge Avery, and also to my writer friend Rebecka. I love that each of you read Aim while it was rough around the edges and helped me point it in the right direction.
VISIT THE WORLD OF JUNIOR BLEDSOE IN THE TWO SEQUELS TO AIM.
BLUE
HC: 978-1-59078-389-4: $16.95 U.S / $21.99 CAN, PB: 978-1-59078-835-6: $7.95 U.S. / $10.50 CAN e-book: 978-1-62979-268-2: $6.99
COMFORT
PB: 978-1-59078-895-0: $7.95 U.S. / $10.50 CAN e-book: 978-1-62979-292-7: $7.99
An Interview with Joyce Moyer Hostetter
Q: How were Aim and the other books in this series conceived?
A: I wrote Blue first—after discovering a 1944 polio epidemic in my hometown’s history. I knew immediately that I wanted to write this piece of human drama. Although Ann Fay Honeycutt was fictional, her experiences were things that happened to real people in the real epidemic. Like so many of them, she sent her father off to war and then polio struck. Like them, Ann Fay persevered to overcome enormous challenges.
After finishing Blue, I wanted to know more about Ann Fay’s life—particularly how war would change her father and threaten their close relationship. Comfort explores the aftereffects of war and polio. It is about the power of community and shared experiences to bring emotional healing.
When my publisher suggested a prequel, Ann Fay’s neighbor, Junior Bledsoe, was the logical protagonist. I liked him a lot. And readers did, too. I decided to set Aim during 1941, the year America was drawn into the war. I wanted to explore the dynamics that shaped Junior into the steady neighbor Ann Fay had relied on in Blue and Comfort.
Q: Why did you decide to write a book about family dysfunction?
A: A few years ago, I attended the funeral of a particularly despicable man and was startled that his eulogy made him sound like a saint. At that point, I began to dream of writing a book that opens with such a funeral and then chapter-by-chapter reveals the true nature of the dead man. When I began writing Aim, I imagined this was how I would tell the story of Junior and his relationship to his father. The first scene I wrote was Pop’s funeral.
However, the format and the vision changed some. In reality Pop didn’t turn out to be entirely wicked. People are complicated and I’m convinced that every difficult adult has a wounded child hiding inside. I knew that hardship had shaped Junior’s pop and also his granddaddy and his great-grandfather. Each had been battered by life. My task was to uncover enough of their lives to share their stories and to shape Junior’s.
I also wanted to explore Junior’s extended family and to contrast this with the steady Honeycutts. In Blue the Honeycutts need Junior. But in Aim, he needs them. For me, this is community—giving to others when they’re struggling, but also accepting help from others when we need it.
Q: How did you decide on the setting for
these stories?
A: With Blue, I accepted a challenge to write a story from my own backyard. I grew up in the same community Ann Fay and Junior lived in. I traveled the roads they did and I also attended Mountain View School. In my community Baker’s Mountain is an ever present landmark.
But my family was actually from Pennsylvania. My parents moved us to North Carolina when I was one. Growing up in the south, I always felt that I lived in two worlds. My southern friends ate pimento cheese, okra, black eyes peas, and liver mush. My family ate pickled beets, shoofly pie, and scrapple. But we learned to eat southern foods too. We loved the south and the people who lived here.
Except for annual visits to relatives in Pennsylvania, life in the rural south was what I knew—a landscape dotted with small farms and simple homes. Furniture factories and cotton mills were prevalent in our area. During the fifties, cotton was still grown and picked here.
I hope my readers feel my attachment to this warm and friendly place—to the rolling hills, the rivers and creeks I played in as a child and to the neighborliness of the families who populate my stories. I want those stories to provide a community of safety and hope for my readers.
Q: What would you like readers to know about you as an author and as a person?
A: My parents raised us on a farmstead with a creek and a pond and plenty of outbuildings for playing in. That farmstead was a shelter for me—a retreat from the larger world.
School brought me in contact with people who were sometimes cruel. It connected me with children and teachers who were different from me and my Mennonite family. I compared myself to other children, certain that I was missing out on all sorts of worldly pleasures. In my mind, other families had more money than we did, their kids had more fun, and they definitely wore more fashionable clothing. In hindsight, we were much more equal than I realized. I doubt that any of my classmates were wealthy. My life was rich with the things I now value most—simple lifestyle, faith, and a large extended family that was amazingly functional.
I think I write to figure out why the world outside my sheltered life is filled with tragedy. I’ll always wonder, why me? Why was I born into humble but safe and happy circumstances? Why is my life flooded with goodness? I hope I never stop asking, because these questions help me to live gratefully. And perhaps they’ll keep me writing, too.
JOYCE MOYER HOSTETTER lives with her husband in Junior Bledsoe’s hometown, Hickory, North Carolina, where she enjoys spending time with her children and grandchildren. Before she wrote historical novels, Joyce taught special education, worked in a camp for at-risk children, and directed a pre-school program. Her novels have won an International Reading Association Children’s Book Award, Parents’ Choice Honor Awards, and a North Carolina Juvenile Literature Award. Visit her at joycemoyerhostetter.com.
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