Children, Conflict, and Community: Madison, Indiana, and Louisville, Kentucky, during World War II

SPRING 2012 7 Children, Conflict, and Community Madison, Indiana, and Louisville, Kentucky, during World War II Michella M. Marino A lthough most of World War II was fought on foreign soil, the conflict greatly impacted the American homefront. Much of the homefront scholarship outlines the major economic, cultural, and political changes the war forced upon the nation and its citizens and emphasizes the dislocations caused by mobility, rapid development of defense industry, racial conflict, and the trauma of separation from and loss of loved ones. Yet little is really known about how the war affected daily life in small towns and cities, particularly across the Midwest. This article explores the impact of World War II on Ohio River Valley families through the lens of a group that is often overlooked in wartime studies : children, specifically young girls. This case study focuses on the experiences of the cohort of girls born between 1929 and 1936 who resided in Madison, Indiana, and Louisville, Kentucky, two quite different communities in the heart of the Ohio River Valley. It utilizes oral history and other evidence to explore how the war affected children and their community, in particular changes in industry, childhood activities, and daily routines and responsibilities. The girls’ young age and socioeconomic status during wartime ultimately limited their mobility and circumscribed their lives so as to produce a common small-town experience. Living in a small town or relatively secure neighborhood sheltered the young girls from much of the dislocation around them. Thus, while many of the common homefront problems as well as the realities of wartime touched the lives of families in the Ohio Valley, these communities absorbed the changes in ways that preserved a level of normalcy for children.1 Oral history methodology offers a valuable research tool for studying the impact of broader historical events in the lives of individuals and in this case in the lives of children. The oral history Kenneth L. Sullivan leaving his home on Thirty-Eighth Street in west Louisville, Kentucky, June 1941.This was his last photograph; he died in the war. THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY CHILDREN, CONFLICT, AND COMMUNITY 8 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY interview, in the words of Valerie Yow, “offers the benefit of seeing in its full complexity the world of another,” and this is particularly true when trying to understand World War II through the eyes of children. The experiences of children are hard to ascertain from the written record most obviously because they usually do not produce such records, and those they do create rarely make it into the archives. Also, widely used sources such as newspapers and government records can at best only give an outside view of children’s experiences. Qualitative interviews provide details of how as children the women viewed their surroundings and experienced events. Even though interviews take place years and often decades after an event occurred, scholars have demonstrated that their content is both reliable and valid. According to Alice and Howard Hoffman, studies show that “once material has been coded into memory, it may be relatively stable.” Forms of long-term memory can become essentially archival, meaning the memories “are readily recalled, change little, if at all, with the passage of time, and are resistant to enhancement by the presentation of recognition cues.” Thus researchers can use oral history as a means for recovering a view of the past from the grassroots , personal perspective.2 The women interviewed for this study ranged in age from five to twelve as America entered World War II. Difficulties locating women of this age group who wished to participate in the project limited the diversity of the group. Thus, these interviews view the war through the specific lens of six young, white, middle to working class girls growing up fifty miles away from each other in the Ohio River Valley. Mary Jane Sauley Bear was born on June 21, 1931, in Corydon, Indiana, but moved to Madison at age six with her parents and older sister. Nancy Jessup Jones was born in Madison, Indiana, in February 1936, and grew up outside of town on her family’s farm as the youngest of four children by over a decade...