December 19, 1942 - Saturday - 80 years ago today

 -- see the previous two posts for the earlier part of the story --

-- this post is two pages, click the Read More link at bottom for second page --

 Mary McLaughlin - Working in Boston, USO

After a year of college and another summer of working in the mountains, Mary's family needed her to go to work, and she found a job in downtown Boston. 

Mary:

My brother, Tommy, was born during my year at Lowell and my parents needed my help to bring in some money so I left school in the fall and went to work at Dun & Bradstreet in Boston.  A former neighbor of ours was the District Manager.  I began as a file clerk.  It was a hard job, but I liked working there.

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I remember December 7, 1941 very clearly.  I was at home wearing an orange corduroy dress.  It was Sunday and I was listening to the radio and heard a news flash that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands.  Sailors were instructed to get back to their ships.

From that time on everything changed.  We had been working our way out of the long Depression years and things were beginning to look encouraging.

On December 8 recruiting offices everywhere were mobbed with young men volunteering to fight.  There had been a draft for young men in which they served for a year.  There had been some complaining about it but now everyone was angry.  They also thought they could finish things up in six months!

Boston was a port, of course, so there had to be a blackout because German submarines had been seen a few miles off the coast.  Imagine the whole shopping district in complete darkness.  We also had blackout in Stoneham where I lived because it was only twelve miles from Boston.

A few days after the Pearl Harbor attack Germany declared war on the United States as Italy also did.  The three countries and their friends were known as the Axis Powers.

Everything went into the war effort.  Canned goods, meat, gasoline, tires, and shoes were some of the things that were rationed.  Everyone had a ration book with stamps to be used when trying to buy any of these things.  I say trying because they were very scarce.

People who had cars had to carry passengers when they drove to work, so they tried to find someone going their way.  I rode with a couple of groups and it was more fun that taking the trolley and the subway.  It was a lot quicker too.

As we have seen, there were only a few victories early in the war.  The home front suffered from the lack of good news.

Mary:

After the war started there were no victories for our side for years.  Every day we heard about ships being sunk and battles lost.  Boston had a  blackout and it was very eerie to try to shop after work.  You could hardly see your way around and all the stores had blackout curtains.  Many things were rationed and we all had ration books.  We were allowed three pairs of shoes per year, and points were used for certain foods, tires, gasoline, etc.

We were completely unprepared for war and it took a long time to get productive.  All women who could went to work in the factories and shipyards which ran twenty four hours a day.  My friends Irene and Colleen were attending college, but in the summer they worked at the GE plan in Lynn.

The men from Stoneham who were in the Army were sent with the 182nd Infantry to fight on the island of Guadalcanal in the South Pacific.  We heard awful stories about the battle.  They did get back at the end of the war, though.

December 15, 1942 - Tuesday - 80 years ago today

-- See previous post for the first part of this story --

Mary McLaughlin - After HS Graduation - Summer Work and College

After high school, Mary learned of a summer job in the New Hampshire mountains, where she worked until attending Lowell Teachers College (now U Mass-Lowell) in the fall.

Mary:

When Colleen and I were seniors, Mr. Davis, our math teacher, told us about the Rosebrook Inn in New Hampshire where we could get summer jobs. We had enrolled in Lowell Teachers College and were to start in the fall.  Irene had enrolled too and already had her job for the summer.  

Colleen and I took the train to Whitefield, N.H. and were met and taken to Rosebrook Inn in Twin Mountain which was a very small town about four miles from Mt. Washington.  Colleen was to be a waitress and I was to be the laundress.  There were five other girls working there.  We all lived in rooms over the garage behind the inn.  We got along well and had fun together.

There was not a lot to do in Twin Mountain.  There was roller skating two nights a week and dancing one night.  So we danced and skated with the Twin Mountain boys, many of whom seemed to be named Monahan.

 

 Mary returned to the Rosebrook Inn the next summer, this time as a waitress rather than a laundress.  Time changes things greatly; when she visited the area in the late 90's, she could no longer locate the inn.  Below is a link to a postcard that shows the inn as it was:

Rosebrook Inn

Here is another image:

 

Mary:

In the fall we entered Lowell Teachers College at Lowell, Mass.  Getting there was not a lot of fun.  I had to walk to Stoneham Square, about a mile, take a bus to Woburn, then take the train to Lowell.  Colleen and Irene rode the bus also, and girls from all the towns around were on the train, so it was fun.  When the train reached Lowell, we walked another mile to school.

Our initiation was quite an experience.  We had to wear a stocking over our hair and carry our books around in a pail.  We couldn't wear makeup and had to bow down to any upperclasswoman we met.  This went on for a week.

One of the things we enjoyed most was our spring dance.  I invited Phil Cody and Irene went with his friend.  Phil knew several of the guys who were there and they did a lot of crazy things that kept us all laughing.  That spring Irene and I were dating some soldiers from the 182nd Infantry who were stationed at Camp Edwards on Cape Cod.  They usually got home on the weekends.

 

NEXT POST: DECEMBER 19TH

December 11, 1942 - Friday - 80 years ago today

-- A new subject, Mary McLaughlin now enters the story. --

Mary McLaughlin - Early Years

Mary McLaughlin was born on April 11, 1922 in Haverhill, MA to Raymond and Helen McLaughlin.  Raymond and Helen were married in 1921, and Mary was the oldest of what would eventually be nine McLaughlin children.

Mary's notes regarding her family:

My parents were Raymond McLaughlin and Helen Deneau who were both born in 1900.  My grandfather, William Patrick McLaughlin, was a shoe manufacturer in Haverhill, Mass., and for a while my father worked for him.  My grandfather Deneau ran a tobacco store at one time.  At one time he was not well enough to work so my grandmother ran a boarding house to help to support the family.

My parents were both of French-Irish descent.  Grandfather Deneau was born in Trois Rivieres, Quebec, but I never heard where Grandmother McLaughlin was born.  Grandfather McLaughlin was said to have been born in Newburyport, Mass.  Grandmother Deneau I think was born somewhere in Ireland and came to Dover, N. H. when she was about 6 years old.

My father had two brothers, William H. and Adrian, who were both older than he and two sisters, Ruth, who was older, and Helen, who was younger. Adrian was in France in World War I as an ambulance driver and died of pneumonia there.

There were also five children in my mother's family: Narcisse (called Jack), and Felix who were older, a sister, Pauline who was older, and a brother Joseph, who died in infancy.  With names like Narcisse and Felix in her family, my mother considered herself lucky to be have been named Helen Adelaide.  My father used to tease her by calling her Adelaide, which she hated.
 

Mary's Grandfather McLaughlin owned a shoe factory and Raymond had worked for him until 1928, when the shoe factory was sold. By this time, Mary had three siblings; sister Helen, brother Dick, and sister Claire. 

Mary:

After my parents were married, my father worked for his father for a while, but in 1928 his father retired and the business was sold so Dad had to do something else.  His parents then invested in theaters for his brother Bill and for him.  Bill's was in Stoneham and Dad's was in Weymouth.  Unfortunately, at just about this time, talking pictures were being developed.  

Grandfather McLaughlin had died and Grandmother didn't feel that she could afford to invest the considerable amount it would take to put in the sound equipment, so Dad lost his theater.

Bill's theater was upgraded for "talkies", but there was not enough to upgrade both theaters; as the silent movies' popularity faded out, theaters without sound could not survive.  Having lost his theater, Raymond got a job at the shipyard nearby, but was injured and lost that job.

Mary:

In 1931 I was nine years old.  It was one of the worst years of the Great Depression.  Dad had been working at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Mass. near Weymouth where we lived then.  He had dropped a pipe on his foot which injured it so he could not work.

I remember the time that my brother Bob was born.  My mother was not doing well and was in bed with the baby.  Two or three of the other kids were sick with the flu.  I had been helping Dad around the house.  One night we were putting supper on the table - Campbell's vegetable soup which we seemed to eat a lot of - and I told him I was sick.  He told me I better go to bed then. I can still remember the sad, sad look on his face.  I guess he had never been more discouraged.

Bob was the fifth child and was born in 1931.  The family was about to move again.

Mary:

In 1931 Dad somehow heard about a projectionist job in Fall River, Mass.  Though he did not belong to the projectionist union, he was hired.  Of course, he was called a scab and threatened, but the union dues were $500 and it might as well have been five million.  He just had no hope of getting it.  One of the favorite tricks of the union was to take a horrid-smelling liquid into the theater and spill it over the floor.  Everyone was driven out.  My mother was there one night when it happened and stepped in the stuff.  She tried and tried to get it off her shoes, but never could.  She had to throw them away.  I still remember that smell!

In Fall River we lived upstairs in a large old house.  There were three bedrooms, a large living room, dining room and kitchen.  Our landlady was a very nice spinster who was, I think, quite dismayed by the number of us, but it was still Depression time and she needed the money badly.  We went to St. Peter and Paul School which was taught by the Sisters of Mercy, who I thought were quite unmerciful.  They had us terrorized.  I must say, the public school teachers were no better.  I guess they had pretty tough kids to deal with, but they really had us scared.  For the first time in my life, I hated to go to school.

Having been forced out of his projectionist job, Raymond decided to move to Stoneham and work for his brother as the projectionist at his theater.  In later years, Mary, who almost always voted Democratic, would nevertheless retain her antipathy toward unions because of the way her father was treated.

Mary:

Since things were so unpleasant and frightening, I was almost glad to  hear that Dad had lost his job.  The theater owner was losing too much money and was afraid of the threats of the union.  Our next move was to Stoneham where Dad was to work for Uncle Bill.

Stoneham was a pretty nice place.  Sometimes we would walk way out to a wooded place where you could catch the trolley to Boston and only have to pay half fare.  We would go to Filene's basement with my mother and look for bargains when we had a little money.

There were picnic areas in the woods and a small zoo which I used to take my brothers and sisters to.  We picked tiny wild blueberries in the woods around the reservation and would have blueberry cake or even pie if we had enough.  It took two pies for us.  I was learning to make desserts by this time.  My specialty was chocolate cake, probably because Dad loved it and raved about it.

I was in fifth grade when we moved to Stoneham.  We went to St. Patrick's School and I liked it pretty well, even though Sister Ernestine would get annoyed with us every once in a while and make us copy pages and pages out of one of our books.  It was better than Fall River.  I joined the 4-H Club and took canning and sewing.  I went to the Park Department's summer activities, learning how to make an aluminum can into a beaded plant, etc.

After graduating from eighth grade, I went to Stoneham High School where Colleen Cronin from St. Pat's became my best friend.  We went everywhere together and took all the same subjects.  We joined the Glee Club and the Dramatic Club, though I would have died if I had had to say anything onstage.  I limited myself to walk-on parts.  Colleen played a teacher in What A Life, and I was chosen to be in a musical number in our spring musical show.

We were always able to see almost every movie the theater showed so we all became movie fans like most of our other relatives.  We knew all the character actors as well as the stars.

As Mary was graduating high school in 1940, the family had grown to seven children.  Times were still hard and the Depression was still on, but was easing somewhat. 

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At least part of the economic improvement came from the US re-arming due to the world situation.  In May, Germany invaded France, and France soon collapsed leaving Britain alone on the Western Front.  The British Army barely managed an escape at Dunkirk.  War drums were no longer in the distance, but were clear and loud; the likelihood of the United States becoming involved was growing quickly.

More Information:

• Official Navy Chronology, pp. 287-289.
  
• The Struggle for Guadalcanal, Samuel Eliot Morison, pp. 283-373.
• Neptune's Inferno, The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal, James D. Hornfischer, pp. 378-429.
• The Darkest Year, The American Home Front, 1941-1942, William K. Klingaman

NEXT POST: DECEMBER 15TH