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39 Chapter 3 The Nomad Years, 1940–1946 n D uring the interval between 1940 and 1946, I lived for a year with an uncle and aunt in California, a year in Washington, D.C., a half year back in California (but not with relatives), a half year with another aunt in Texas, a year at the Manzanar internment camp (while attending Stanford University), a year at Stanford, and a year in the U.S. Navy. I attended three high schools in three years but never graduated from any of them. To anyone living in the relatively stable world of today, that may seem a pretty chaotic life, and perhaps a traumatic one. But most of those were war years, when everyone’s life was disrupted, and everyone seemed to be on the move. The whole country was mobilized in the war effort as it never has been before or since. Millions went into the armed forces; millions more flocked to the defense industries along the West Coast and in the Great Lakes states; military bases sprang up like mushrooms all over the country, with new towns to service them. Buses and trains were crowded to and beyond capacity, and one sometimes had to ride for hours standing up or sitting on a suitcase in the aisle; air travel was pretty much restricted to those who could get a priority pass. Meanwhile, because of gasoline rationing, highway travel was greatly diminished. Lots of things were in short supply, many were rationed, and some disappeared altogether. We all accepted disruption and displacement and inconvenience as appropriate to the times, and somehow as part of our contribution to the war effort. Any thought of normal life was suspended “for the duration,” in the everlastingly reiterated phrase of the time. C h a p t e r 3 40 Unlike most Americans, my nomadic years began a year and a half before World War II and were precipitated by the need to attend high school. It was then that I went to join my brother in Marin County, California, in the household that we always called simply “the Adamses,” notwithstanding the fact that we were Adamses ourselves. The High School Years Marin County and the Adamses Living with Uncle Jim and Aunt Kay in Marin County was, for Ernie and me, an introduction to yet another world; one that was becoming increasingly common throughout America. It was the world of affluent suburbia, or, to be technically accurate, exurbia. Marin County was, in earlier times, an idyllic land of mostly forested hills and valleys and one small mountain, adjoining the north side of San Francisco Bay. For most of the past century, however, the whole of its southern end has been occupied by a nearly unbroken conglomeration of bedroom exurbs, whose menfolk set forth daily across the Golden Gate Bridge to their jobs in San Francisco. These settlements are not nucleated communities and have no community life of their own. In unique California fashion they consist instead of houses randomly scattered not only along the valleys but up and down the steepest hills as well, in no coherent order. Most of the houses are large, set on wooded acreages with little landscaping, for Marin County was and is very much a place of retreat for the well-to-do. One such household was that of my uncle James D. Adams, my father’s eldest brother, and his wife and five children. He was a senior partner in one of San Francisco’s most prestigious law firms and had moved his family to Marin County in the early days when the daily commute still had to be made by train and ferryboat. But if the Adamses were a typical Marin County household in outward appearance , it was a far cry indeed from the anarchic, “anything-goes” lifestyle that the nation has come to associate with Marin County. Order and discipline ruled. Jim Adams was a smallish man who had inherited in full measure the New England Adams personality. He exuded a quiet dignity and authority, which were all the more effective for being understated. He was the soul of rectitude and did not hesitate to let us children know what was right and wrong, in terms of moral absolutes, when he thought we needed to hear it. Yet there was never any doubt that, under the sometimes daunting exterior, Jim was a warmhearted and [18.222.148.124] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 17:27...

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