September 10, 2014 (Wednesday)
Yesterday I wrote about our living with our grandparents during the war. We lived in several places in the same general area of town just north of downtown Houston. It was commonly called “Northside” and sometimes known as “5th Ward.” My grandparents lived in rented houses, and this one had been fairly new when we moved into it in 1941. There was another one just like it next door, and one day returning from the store I found the door locked. I banged on the door and demanded entrance. A strange lady came to the door and told me I had the wrong house. I still had a lot to learn about controlling my temper.
My father didn’t make much money as a machinist, but his pay increased, I’m sure, during the war days and he provided our principal financial support. I look back and now I’ve figured that out, but at the time none of that was shared with us kids. Daddy bought our Christmas gifts that year. We all got a pair of skates that clamped onto our shoes and we
all learned to skate on the sidewalk, some of which was not in very good shape. My sister fell and broke her arm. I don’t remember, but I’m sure my sisters got dolls; they always did. 
I also got a repeater air rifle, which I had wanted very much (much like the little boy in the movie, “Christmas Story”). I managed to shoot a tiny hole in a neighbor’s kitchen window, but the lady was very nice about it. Just told me to try and be more careful. The “B-B’s” were not accurate and tended to fly through kitchen windows.
It was not a fancy Christmas, but it was nice. Everyone tried to make it a good day for us kids, since this was the first Christmas since the divorce of our parents. Watching a documentary today, I am seeing how Germany fared on Christmas Day, 1942, one year later than the day I’ve been writing about. Against Hitler’s orders, 92,000 German soldiers surrendered to the Russians at Stalingrad. The hard winter cut off their supplies and dead horses became food. The soldiers were starving. Of those who were taken prisoner by the Russians, 86,000 died. The rest were not released until 1955. European Jews were dying by the millions, and German families were beginning to do without many of the necessities of life, a foretaste, perhaps, of future losses and defeat. The insanity of war, however, would go on for years.
As kids skating around the block, we knew nothing of the awful happenings in the war. I was 10 years old; my sisters were 7. The world was in flames, but we had our own little tests. With our grandparents, we had first lived in a house that was in bad shape, but had moved down the street to a better house. After Christmas, we moved again, this time to a second floor apartment in a building shared with several families. Strange that I remember Daddy raising my allowance to 50¢ (suddenly I was rich). During that year at school, we had been fingerprinted, for identification I suppose, just in case the war made it to our shores and schools were bombed. That summer our mother took custody of us and we lived with her in two different one-room apartments while she worked as a waitress with little pay. Funny that I remember being sunburned so badly one day that I was in the bed for days. That’s when I was introduced to Noxema cream. Today I would have been taken to the ER, but we didn’t do things that way back then. When school started again, our grandparents had moved to another rental house, better than the others, just a few blocks from the school (Sherman Elementary) where I was in the 6th grade and my sisters were in the 3rd grade. The year was 1942.