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C h a p t e r 9 World War II Jack and I learned of the Japanese attack on our naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii as we were coming out of the Tallahassee picture show on the late Sunday afternoon of December 7, 1941, and saw a newsboy hawking newspapers. A hawking newsboy was an unusual sight in Tallahassee, and Jack walked over to see what the fuss was about. He got a paper, and when he had stared at the headline for a few seconds, he passed the paper over to me, and as I read the headline—japanese bomb pearl harbor—my only reaction was, So? So what? Where was Pearl Harbor and why had the Japanese bombed it? Did Jack know? Well, he knew enough to understand it was a big story. We found out afterward just how big it was. When President Roosevelt spoke the next day, when he said, “I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese empire,” I knew that something profoundly big had entered our lives, that Jack was to be a part of it, and that our lives would be changing. What we didn’t know was that our lives would be changed forever. Yes, we were at war, and not only with Japan. Since Germany and Italy were allied with Japan, in what was known as the Axis, to show in what affection they held their Japanese friends, Germany and Italy lickety split declared war on us. * * * After Pearl Harbor, life on campus, strange to say, took a turn toward the optimistic. Suddenly the boys had a desirable option, and it was military 130 World War II service. When I next saw Jack, he had already volunteered for the army air corps and seemed euphoric about it. “Somebody’s asking for me,” he said. “Somebody wants me.” And it was true that for college boys, the exercises in futility were dropped like the useless things they were and replaced with something meaningful, the chance to take an active role in a war. Jack and I Make the Miami Herald We took for granted that the moment had come for all Americans to do their part. Jack wanted to do his, but there were a couple of other reasons for his being so—to use the military expression—gung ho. It was certainly true that Jack hoped for his chance against the Nazis, but there was another compelling reason: he—we—could get married. The air corps promised a seventy-five-dollar monthly stipend, and Jack could finally tell my mother that he had “prospects.” He had achieved a two-fer: in one fell swoop he had landed himself a job and a wife. And I was at last going to be at Jack’s side, to “square [his] blunders and share [his] dreams,” as our song went. We had only to finish our fall semesters, go home, do the deed, and await Jack’s first assignment. When I brought the news to my parents that I was getting married, I found that something new had been added to the family list of rights and wrongs. Was it right, my mother wondered, that her third daughter should get married before her second? I left it to my father to take care of it, to say things like, “There’s a war on, Rebecca. And you’re going to worry about who gets married first?” Jack and I prepared for marriage chiefly by getting our pictures taken for the Miami Herald, and the Herald did its job by running the picture with the whole story underneath: “Mr. and Mrs. Morris A. Kaufman, formerly of Union City, Tennessee, announce the marriage of their daughter Stella (known to her Miami Beach Senior High School friends as Marcella) to Jack Suberman, son of Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Suberman, formerly of New York City. . . .” What the item confirmed, among other things, was that everybody in Miami Beach was from somewhere else and that Jack and I owned almost identical V-necked sweaters. Despite the flurry of getting married, at that moment we had more imminent issues: Jack’s being assigned, Jack’s being trained, Jack’s eventual— yes, it must be considered—going into combat. And that other unvoiced question: what if Jack didn’t come back? And what...

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