Pittsburgh Remembers World War II

by Dr. Joseph Rishel

  Mr. George Smith, Sally and Lillian’s father, also served on the homefront through his role as an air raid warden. Sally, who was still living at home with her parents, remembers the word “WARDEN” imposingly printed on his hat. As such, he organized meetings with other men to plan disaster responses and practice emergency medical techniques. Cots were stored in their basement in case they might be needed for the wounded or sick in the event of an attack. The heightened state of alert, Sally and Lillian remember, resulted from the importance of the Mon Valley and its production capabilities. Occasional blackouts were ordered to keep the location of such a vital industrial area as cloaked as possible. Among the requirements of Mr. Smith’s job as warden were his neighborhood rounds to ensure the blackout decree was being upheld. One evening, Lillian’s radio wasn’t working, so she watched her neighbors’ house to see when the blackout time would begin. She’d draw her dark green shades, she figured, when they drew theirs. She distinctly remembers the heavy banging on her front door as the warden on watch that night yelled at her for not complying with the blackout drill. She felt like he was insinuating that she was not supporting the war. She explained her radio troubles and then pointed out her neighbors’ house, still clearly illuminated. After he ignored her rationale, and reprimanded her anyway, she “had a good cry.” Lillian was still too naive to realize that some air raid wardens reveled in their newfound sense of power.

  The pace of day-to-day life accelerated dramatically with round-the-clock work shifts and the expectation that everyone take on volunteer hours and community service. Additional time and energy were consumed in adjusting to food and gas rationing and clothing shortages. The war effort required everyone to purchase gas, flour, sugar, meat and butter with coupons received in the mail. This rationing occurred in every household they knew. “It didn’t matter if you were rich or poor,” Lillian recalls. Sally adds, “When the sugar came in, everybody ran to the store with their coupon. You had to get it when it was available.”

  A good-natured clerk at Donahue’s, downtown, waits on anxious but patient customers, each hoping that the limited supply of rationed meat would last until their turn. Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.

  To supplement their diet, all three remember the victory gardens and the sense of purpose gardening gave to many of the “older fellows” who could not fight on the front lines. No space was left idle or unproductive. Empty lots, wooded areas and even places of high grass were turned into gardens. Lillian and Sally’s father tended two gardens. In their estimation, there were victory gardens everywhere, “fields of them.”

  Although these day-to-day life changes were to be expected by a generation used to the demands of World War I and the Great Depression, the cultural changes were decidedly more unexpected. Lillian and Sally remember their mother’s prewar dress as consisting of corsets, stockings, slips and long dresses. During World War II, such customs were not practical, and their ensembles shifted slowly to ones requiring no stockings, as silk stocking production virtually halted. The women painted their legs with makeup, which stained the insides of slips and the fronts of couch cushions. More and more, women were seen in pants. All in all, as John says, “it was a war effort, and everyone supported it.”

  Having a victory garden was one of the ways in which older Americans could aid the war effort. Here a West Run Road resident tends his extensive garden, summer 1945. William J. Gaughan Collection, University of Pittsburgh.

  Certainly, the war and its demands often interfered with lives. John and Sally’s perseverance through such difficult times resulted in a relationship that only grew stronger. Living in the same area and growing up alongside each other, Sally knew they would eventually marry. “We marked each other from day one,” Sally says. “I’ve known him since I was six years old. We’ve played together and gone all through school together.” In high school, John attended the newly opened McKeesport Vocational School as Sally continued at McKeesport High School. They naturally grew apart through this separation but also due to John’s working so much after school, in the evenings and on weekends. In fact, Sally discovered that John had enlisted in the navy through his brother. She asked for John’s address and began writing letters daily, a correspondence that culminated two years later in an unforgettable wedding.

  They both wanted to get married, but family members felt that, at only twenty years old, they were too young. Also, their families did not want them to get married while John was in the service. Despite their objections, and eventually with their approval, Sally and John decided that on Saturday, August 12, 1944, they would tie the knot, while John was stationed in Boston waiting for the completion of the USS Lewis and preparing for his departure to the Pacific. John’s schedule allowed them a small window of opportunity, so, without any family or friends, Sally boarded a train to Boston. She had with her the top layer of the wedding cake that she ate with her family the evening before, a letter from her mother and a wedding outfit picked out by her sisters. Lillian reflects, “What an awful thing that was that nobody went with you!” However, Lillian could not have gone with a young son and a newborn daughter. Besides, she adds with a chuckle, she “probably didn’t have the money anyhow.” Despite the fact that she was going alone, Sally responds, “I didn’t care. I was happy I was going.”

  At the Boston train station, Sally began looking for John in the crowd. A sailor approached and thrust a picture at her asking, “Is that you?” Sally describes the scene with a laugh: “I didn’t know him, and I was expecting Jack to be there.” He explained that he was a shipmate of John’s who had to come instead while John was on duty. Disappointed, she went to the YWCA, where reservations had been made for her. She met John later that evening. The next day, they began to make the necessary marriage arrangements. They met with the chaplain and then the judge. “I didn’t have a diamond ring,” Sally explains, which would have been the case for many betrothed couples in the 1930s and ’40s. Sally and Lillian’s generation had to forego many customary engagement and marriage practices. In Lillian’s case, she married secretly in 1933—in a dress that cost $6.95—in order for her to continue working. In Sally’s case, John had been in the navy for two years and didn’t have the opportunity or the funds to buy a diamond ring on his $21.00 per month salary. The judge asked for proof of her parents’ approval. John and Sally told the judge about their lifelong friendship and their conviction to marry, but as Sally recalls, “that didn’t faze her very much.” Sally offered to show the judge her mother’s letter, but she had left it at the YWCA. She thought to mention their wedding cake but realized that she had left that behind as well. The judge remained firm and would not grant them a license. John and Sally worried that their wedding, planned for 11:00 a.m. the following day, would not occur. After leaving the courtroom, they met an employee who offered his help. In Sally’s words, he said, “If that had been any other judge in the country, you’d have had your license. I’ll tell you what. You go over to the license bureau. I’m going to call them up, and your license will be waiting for you.” Happily, it was. Just what shenanigans he pulled to effect the granting of a license, she will never know.

  The next morning Sally dressed in the outfit her sisters had prepared for her. Although she was marrying in August, Sally’s sisters thoughtfully planned ahead for fall. Lillian insists that they wanted her to be able to “get some wear out of it,” but the gold woolen dress and the brown suede accessories turned out to be too autumnal for the oppressively “110 degrees in the shade” heat that marked the day. Sally also met her bridesmaid, Betty, that morning. Betty, Sally laughs, “looked more like the bride” in her white dress printed with summery flowers. John asked Betty to be there as Sally knew nobody in Boston and they were marrying at the chapel in the Boston Navy Yard. “Fortunately he had made a great choice because she and I got along beautifully,” Sally remembers fondly. John’s reply speaks to the simplicity of his selection: “There was no choice about it. She was the only woman there.”
Regardless of these circumstances, Sally and Betty became friends and even lived together for six weeks while their husbands were on a “shakedown cruise” on the Lewis before departing for the Pacific in November 1944. Once John was deployed, Sally returned to McKeesport and to work.

  Like all the other women whose responsibilities expanded to include outside-the-home employment, Sally worked in the years before and after her marriage to John. She remembers that “life was reshaped to fit [our] working hours,” and John comments on seeing female welders in the navy yard for the first time as “something unheard of!”

  Sally’s first position at U.S. Steel in the employment office required her to ID all the workers in the mill. She created plastic-encased badges that featured each worker’s photo, name and department. In addition, she made a plastic pendant of sorts with a tiny photo of her “Jack” that she wore as a necklace. The identification system was new to the company and to the McKeesport area. “We didn’t know fear growing up,” Sally recalls, but with the attack on Pearl Harbor and the widespread concern it created, security was an issue.

  In a role unimaginable before the war, a female worker welds a beam at the U.S. Steel Homestead Works, January 1945. William J. Gaughan Collection, University of Pittsburgh.

  Both Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation and U.S. Steel Corporation vastly expanded their Pittsburgh facilities in order to meet military demand. The Homestead Works, shown above, was expanded, somewhat controversially, through the demolition of a nearby neighborhood. William J. Gaughan Collection, University of Pittsburgh.

  Not all working hours were dedicated to this task. In addition to preparing IDs, she also had charge of selling war bonds. She was one of the only women allowed in the mill, as she went there to sell the bonds. A $25.00 bond cost $18.75. After the war, she and John used theirs to buy their first home. In her time at the U.S. Steel employment office, she remembers vividly her clear view of the passing troop trains from the second-floor office window. “When we’d hear the train coming, the other girl and I would run to the window…and we’d just hang out there [waving]!”

  A mild Pittsburgh day in January 1944 enabled these women to sell war bonds from an outdoor booth at the U.S. Steel Homestead Works. William J. Gaughan Collection, University of Pittsburgh.

  Sally continued working following her marriage to John. She was hired as the personal secretary to the superintendent of the galvanizing plant in Versailles Borough. In 1946, her position was eliminated due to the postwar industry restructuring. The plant’s production of booms, spars and masts halted, and the facility was sold. She liked her work, but at twenty-three years old, she was happy to leave and was ready to enjoy her role as a wife and soon-to-be mother.

  Family had always been the cornerstone of Lillian and Sally’s lives. During the war, their focus extended to include all of America and its military. Sally wrote V-mail letters to John daily and also to five other soldiers. Lillian invited servicemen to her home for family meals in an effort to make them feel at home. Sally attended USO functions at Renziehausen Park and served coffee and donuts to the troops stationed at Bettis Airport. The family discovered that they had relatives in England who were willing to provide respites for McKeesport neighbors stationed there. Sally explains this family outreach as a charitable act done in hopes that somewhere “somebody [was] doing it for mine.” Certainly, thoughts of family were also on John’s mind as he returned home after sailing to the Pacific. He expected to be one of five million soldiers invading Japan, but the atom bomb changed that. During his nearly three-month journey home, after three years of active duty, John remembers thinking, “My children will never have to go through what I went through.” He returned home on November 29, 1945, too late for Thanksgiving but to a family giving thanks nonetheless.

  In this poignant undated photograph, an exhausted army private awaits his train to return to base. Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.

  MOON TOWNSHIP MEMORIES OF WORLD WAR II

  Dave Price and Jean Klixbull Price,

  As told to Jennifer Welsh

  World War II affected the lives of almost all Americans. Even young school-age children experienced the war in their own way. When the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred, Dave Price was nine years old and Jean Klixbull was eight. Although they did not meet until after the war had ended, they grew up within two miles of each other in Moon Township, at that time a rural suburb five miles west of Pittsburgh. They met in the seventh grade and eventually married.

  David Price was born to Owen and Roberta Price in 1932, the youngest of six children. He grew up on Stoops Ferry Road. Marion Jean Klixbull, born in 1933, was the second-oldest child of Arthur and Mary Klixbull. They lived on Old Thorn Run Road, within walking distance from the Prices. As Jean states, “We lived on one hill, he lived on the other.”

  Neither Dave nor Jean remembers very much of the war prior to Pearl Harbor, but Dave distinctly remembers an incident where his Aunt Frances had a premonition of the coming war. Sometime in 1938 or 1939, his Aunt Frances and her daughter were visiting Dave’s family. From the backyard they saw the aurora borealis in the evening sky. Upon seeing it, he remembers his Aunt Frances commenting that it was a bad omen and a sign that there was going to be a war. Of course, events leading to the war were already underway in Europe by this time and the association of the aurora borealis with the war was merely coincidental. Still, this incident left an indelible impression on Dave.

  Although Dave and Jean do not remember much about the Pearl Harbor attack, they do remember their parents hovering around the radio and that there was a lot of excitement. Dave also remembers subsequent big headlines in the newspaper like “PEARL HARBOR ATTACKED” and “WAR WITH JAPAN.” They recall that many people were initially suspicious of President Roosevelt. “I can remember people trying to point the finger. They blamed the president, claiming he knew about it beforehand and that he should have done more to avoid it,” Jean recollects. With so many isolationists, there was a great deal of suspicion of the president and of Washington. In retrospect, Dave attributes these suspicions to speculation. Conspiracy theories surround many catastrophic events, he muses.

  Like most Americans, Dave’s and Jean’s parents worked in industries that contributed to the war effort. Dave’s father worked as a plate and shear operator for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Dave could not remember if the B&O was involved in any specific war effort, but railroads in general saw a dramatic increase in usage transporting military personnel and other war supplies. Dave remembers his mother staying home at the beginning of the war, but sometime during the war she got a job at Homestead Valve. His sister had moved back home since her husband had been drafted into the service. She watched the children while Dave’s other sister was at work. Dave could not remember precisely what his mother’s job was, but Homestead Valve made ammunition or, as Dave describes them, “large bullet shells” during the war. The company stored the shells in four large caves at the facility. When he worked at Homestead Valve later as an adult, these caves were filled in. Dave’s grandfather also worked at Homestead Valve during the war as a guard at the front gate.

  In December 1941, when the United States entered the war, the Klixbull family had four young children ranging in ages from ten years to three months. Jean’s mother stayed home with her children during the war. Jean’s father, Arthur, worked at the Dravo Corporation on Neville Island, where he was involved in the installation of radar on landing ship tanks (LSTs). LSTs were very large naval vessels used for amphibious operations. LSTs were used throughout the war in a number of invasions and campaigns, including Normandy and throughout the Pacific Theater. Dravo’s Neville Island shipyard produced 150 LSTs during the war years in addition to 20 subchasers and minesweepers, 27 gate vessels, 27 destroyer escorts, 46 lighters and barges and 65 LSMs (landing ship, medium).

  Mrs. Grace Augustus, whose son was killed at Pearl Harbor, inspects a forty-millimeter projectile in a Westinghouse Naval Ordnance Plant. She had prev
iously been a cafeteria manager for thirteen years. Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.

  Though Dave and Jean attended different elementary schools—Dave went to Carnot Elementary and Jean went to Thorn Run Elementary—both remember various ways schools contributed to the war effort. For example, there were defense stamp drives. Students could purchase defense stamps for a dime. They would collect these until they totaled $18.75, and then they would exchange them for a war bond. After ten years, this war bond would be worth $25.00. Dave remembers they would compete in contests among classrooms “to see who had the biggest effort.” He also remembers having scrap iron collections. He recollects, “We would search the neighborhood and get all the scrap iron and steel for making tanks, jeeps, airplanes, whatever.”

  Brentwood High School girls pose for the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph photographer, May 15, 1942, at the scrap collection site established by the local Kiwanis Club. Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.

  As a Boy Scout, Dave remembers gathering milkweed pods. “I remember putting these milk[weed] pods in bags and turning them in to our scout master. They told us that they [the fibers] were used for filling life jackets for the flyers who flew over the waters.” His memories are accurate. The United States had originally used floss from kapok trees in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) as life preserver stuffing. When Japan gained control of this area in 1942, the United States was forced to find a substitute, and milkweed pods were the solution. All over the United States, children were encouraged to gather milkweed pods for the war effort.

  Dave and Jean had a number of relatives who served in the war. Two of Dave’s brothers served in the Pacific. His oldest brother, John, was an ambulance driver in the army. Dave remembers his mother receiving a letter from John relating an experience when he was stationed in the Philippines. He was so tired that he decided to crawl under the ambulance to sleep. Apparently, he slept through a major typhoon that hit the islands. It was a story they laughed about at the time. His other brother, Owen, was in the marines and guarded Japanese prisoners. Fortunately, neither brother was injured during their service. They both returned home safely at the end of the war.