On Friday March 29, 1996 a number of students from AMST418d interviewed Lee Shields, a longtime resident of the city of Greenbelt. What follows is the transcript from that interview.

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Shields: Well, I appreciate your interest, as younger then all these people, I was born in 1937 and we moved into Greenbelt as a brand new community in 1937, so I was just 3 months old when we moved in. Therefore, I was about 4 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. So it got us into the second world war in a big hurry. So my dad, at that time, already had two kids, so he wasn't drafted right away. He was drafted in 1943 when he already had three kids. The war had gotten too extensive enough that, bad enough, that they just started counting eyes instead of seeing whether you could see or not. And took everybody.

So in the later war years any man who was around town was either old, old, old, or was disabled or handicapped in some way. So it really was a time the men were away at war. Other then that, so my life in the second world war time 4 8 (years old), so it a time that I can certainly remember a lot of things. I brought, up on the front table, a little treatise that my son sent me from somewhere, and it's not annotated at all, but it's for those who were born after 1945 to tell you what life was like, just in general terms, back in that time. Basically, the sheet says: it's before this, it was before that.

We were deprived of e mail, and a lot of other things, but we didn't know it. We were deprived of television, although there was television then, there wasn't anything on it. You might turn on, if you were lucky enough to get to someone's house who had a television set, in between the 2 or 3 programs that were on you would see a lot of test patterns. Most of the times you would turn the TV on you would have a test pattern, so the demand curve wasn't very steep at that point.

But radio was an extremely big part of our life, local news from daily newspapers had a schedule much like the TV schedule you see today, but that was for radio. And it was AM radio. So FM stations were around, but not very many. But we sat around the radio set, and made up what the characters looked like. We had every kind of program that you have today on television, it was just coming over the radio. When the President talked to us, he had this little radio fireside chats.

Now, another thing we had was the movie theater. No crummy VCR's. We went to the theater every Saturday to watch the Buster Crab, and Tarzan shorts before the regular movie came on. But we also had in between the short subjects and the regular movies News Reel. Especially during the war, that's were we got our news in a visual way about how the war was progressing. Walter Winchell and all of the other wartime news correspondents were sending out this news reel footage, which was really quite moving stuff, and they would use that also as a way of presenting some propaganda if you will, from the government as to how things are going. All on a very dramatic style, easy to catch up.

Other then that, we were busy growing up. It was an outgrowth at that time, we were just getting over the depression, we as kids wouldn't think about that. Except we still didn't have very much. My dad, not only went through the great depression as a teenager and a very young man, but basically was in one kind of depression or another his whole life. As agriculture in this country had a bad depression, some sectors of the economy were having troubles.

What I am telling about the war years then was living in Greenbelt, where you had to be a certain lower middle income class level to get in there in the first place, nobody had very much. You didn't have 2 incomes in a family, because if you did then you would be making too much to qualify for that plan of housing. So, as the war came on then we had not been used to having very much in the first place. Suddenly in wartime we were being asked to make due with less, we were being asked to recycle everything possible, including all the cooking grease, tin cans. So as a kid in that time, it was a great joy to pound tin cans, at that time made out of steel, tin cans into submission, and those would be sent forward to the war effort.

At the homefront, everybody in the world had a vegetable garden, which we called a victory garden. In 1st grade we had a class victory garden right out in back of the school. So I spent quite a lot of my time and helping the family in the plot that was part of a larger community garden. And that was really very important to do that. Other activities involved in growing up, as I talk along, we had rationing. Not all that many people had a car, because you couldn't get gas for it, if you did. So gasoline, meat, sugar, bubble gum, were rationed and you could only get so much and you had to get, except for the bubble gum which was rationed by quantity, other things you had to have a little coupon for.

These were issued monthly by a government office. I just found out this morning through my wife, that her mother, as a teacher at the time, all teachers were told by the powers that be they will spend extra time after school once a month distributing ration books in whatever community that they had to teach in. So she and her mother would sit there until 9 PM at the school and families that lived around Edmonston(?) in this case, would come in and get their ration coupons for the next time period. This is without pay, for doing this of course, just part of the job. Doing your part for the war effort. So they would, at 9PM, walk 1/2 mile to the nearest trolley car, which ran between here and Beltsville, ride the trolley car to Berwyn, get off and walk another 1/2 mile up hill, to get to Berwyn Heights. Here again, it's unpaid, extra duties, which women were expected to do to support the troops.

Question: (I could not understand the first question that was asken but I think it was the question relating to people who had to perform extra duties due to the war, namely teachers who were asked to help pass to pass out ration books)

Answer: I guess like all other things there were dangers in over-generalizing. Probably some people resented every minute of it and others really felt an emot ional public tie to this activitiy and were glad to do it.

Question: (Again, it is very tough to here) It had something to do with children that age group knowing exactly what was going on.

Answer: I was probably young enough that it was more fun to stand in line to g et books and all of that. Anything except missing my dad. But otherwise, the major difference was that there was little danger. Maybe it is a kin to some of the neighborhoods where you might have high crime rate now where you have some add ed things you have to worry about. The fact that at that time there was a very real danger living so close to the nation's capital, that enemy planes would could and get us next because nobody had the faintest clue that the Japanese would go all the way across to Hawaii and be able to have a surprise bombing. So not only was there a fear of war but made everybody right here fear, "Oh my gos, if enemy planes come over here this is the first place they'll be bombing."

So people that are a little older than myself, say as fourteen years olds, would spend their evenings, in a way to get out of the house, would be spotters for enemy planes. We had a little box on top of the theater, in Greenbelt, where these spotters on certain schedules would go up and scan the skys for enemy planes. We had practice air raids. We had practice blackouts where even as a very young kid you would pull all the blinds down, turn all of the lights off and just have some candles i n the house. Just practice living your life without any illumination at all and I suppose when some of the time I was scared it was really going to happen but otherwise it was just like a fire drill where we'd get jaded a little bit but think it never really was going to happen.

I certainly remember having to go through those kind of drills as if there is a very real danger that it might happen. If you look at that history it is primarily, once we got into the war, mostly moving forward. And the battles were over there somewhere. It didn't tough really close to having foreign enemy on our soil. If it would have ever gotten to that poi nt that this fire drill kind of sensation would have changed overnight. So as it was there was some fear but not really a sense of (?). It was just something th at we went through.

Question: (?)

Response: I don't really remember when he went away or what he was thinking abou t at the time. But I remember him being gone and I remember, being a smart ass, I used to tell my mom he was coming up the sidewalk. Then one day chicken little said that and he was coming up the sidewalk and she wouldn't believe me and that was when he finaly got home.

Question: How long was he gone?

Answer: He was drafted in 1943 and was out of there, I think, probably sometime in '45

Question: How was it like when he came home? Personally, emotionally? Was it hard for him just coming back?

Answer: Well, let me tell you first a little about his being . . . In Greenbelt, working downtown for the Interior Department, he finished high school after he got married so he actually went down on the trolley car and went to school all day with kinds a little younger than himself. He worked nights at the Interior Department, took the last trolley car home and worked extra jobs here and there to make ends meat.

By the time 1943 rolled around and people were being drafted or enlisting and so on, he just couldn't contemplate doing that because he had kids, and then every once in a while here's another kid. So he didn't really anticipat e it was going to happen and BOOM it did and the letters and so on that he sent h ome wasn't really his thing. One major point though was that he didn't talk much about it, which was a little characteristic of people of that time. But they didn't just open free and easy what was on their minds. We saw primarily what you would now know as post dramatic stress syndrome. Little things the (?) might have been strict authoritarian to start with became even worse later.

I now know that that was because all of the things that were going through his mind from the war experience. He personally did not ever get into combat. But he went through so much hell in the training that he had to live with that part. He's been in the hospital with pneumonia and a person in the same unit got pneumonia at the same time died, but he didn't. Person next to him in training in throwing grenades, the other person that had his grenade rolled back toward him and got blown away. Somebody next to him just freaked out when they were training crowling on their belly underneath real live tracer bullets at night, and his buddy freaked out, stood up and got blown away.

There are enough of those stories out of realistic training that you can have the very same combat psychological problems as anyone. But other than that I have to tell you that in Greenbelt, he loved the place but my mother loved it more because he couldn't stand someone else telling him what to do in a planned community or in the military that's all they want to do is tell you what to do, how to live, what height to cut your hedges. So he always had trouble with therefore he had trouble in the military too. So he wasn't very happy doing that but it was more, what's going to happen to me tomorrow, what's going to happen to my family because I've trained from everything from desert warfare to snow shoes and all of that what am I going to be doing? Because of secruity reasons, the'd never tell him why they're getting on a trip t rain. So it was just a jarring time. Therefore when he got home for the last time, when he got the pieces of paper that said you were free to go he said he was just elated and so glad to be home and appreciated his wife and family more than he ever did. But he said the longer he was home over the next few months or year of so, he began to find out about all of his neighbors and friends that didn't come back then his feeling of elation went south.

So it was a very difficult time then making all of those readjustments again, but at least he was glad to be home. He took it from there. He had, just before he went to the service, went to w ork at the Greenbelt Post Office. So he stayed a postal carrier the rest of his career, so he was right in Greenbelt the rest of his career. Now, at the time he was drafted, if you were a mailman then, therefor you were then, if fact he was able to get a job at the Post Office because the young, strong single guys had been drafted. So he was relatively small and sickly because of his nervous problem in his younger days he was able to get a job at the Post Office, because he had yet been drafted. But that was his career, but the other postal carrier I rememb er was about 75 years old. So as I say if anybody was at home at that time they were likely to be ancient or disabled in some way. Otherwise it was just plain trying to grow up.

I was too young to have my own feelings of am I going to be drafted. Those feelings came to me, but they came much later.

Question: Did you have any brothers or sisters?

Answer: My brother was just a year and a half older than myself so he too was not of that age until we were sort of between wars. We came of age between Korea and Vietnam. So, he was drafted and I wasn't. Basically, I spent between 18 and 26 worrying about it, but because I myself was going to school here, and getting married, and having kids myself, I didn't look forward to that time.

So, they call me up once in awhile just to see what I'm doing. They called me up the first time, they weren't taking people who were married- I'd just gotten married. Next time they called, they were taking married people, but they weren't taking them if they had kids, and I had one on the way. Mu buddy made it about a month or so before his 26th birthday, he got drafted then It was a time where if you didn't just go ahead and sign up and get it over with, if your situation did not allow than, then you spent time worrying about it. It was still fine, it was about like this fire drill thing. We were not in a real combat situation, but I know you have all heard the stories about Vietnam, where there's a really nasty war going on, and its not an easy time.

Question: (difficult to hear) When you were kids... when your dad was gone, did people help you deal with living with a single parent?

Answer: Yeah, I would say, and my wife said this morning, that the men who were around for whatever reason, really felt, and I'm sure that there were cases of men and women taking advantage of people, but many more cases of people taking a paternal attitude towards the spouses that were left at home and toward the kids. My mother ruled the roost, but she fortunately had her father's, oh, my father's brother, my uncle, was in the merchant marines and he was stationed at Baltimore, so if something really needed to be done, like some paper work or something that needed to be done around the house that she just couldn't get done any other way, he would get leave while his shop was in port. He would come down and help out.

In my wife's case, old man Jingle at the local gas station would trade my wife's mother extra gasoline for sugar and meat stamps, and I'm sure that was not quite Kosher to do, but sh could do without the meat and sugars stamps and really as a teacher needed to have gasoline to get around. So there's a lot of that kinda helping each other. It was handy because one of the outgrowths of the Great Depression was that nobody had much of anything and so you survived by helping each other no matter what age you were or what gender you were.

So even as kids, we got used to helping other people. One of my jobs, oh I had to be as early as 7 or 8. I would take my little wagon down too the grocery store and help people take their groceries home- a quarter here a quarter there - and it was my first real job, but the fact was that nobody had a car. Greenbelt was a planned community, but once you got your groceries, it's uphill to get home. So if you have kids dragging behind you, you shop often so you don't have to carry so much. And if somebody's standing outside to help you get it home-oh please. But its just one example of helping each other out. There's a lot of trading of stamps and things and watching each other's kids.

I also wanted to point out that because many men were away at war, it provided the first major opportunity for women to get involved in the work force. You've all heard of Rosie the Riveter, but there are many other jobs that had formerly been mostly open to men were now open to females because not so many of them went to the war effort. My aunt Gloria was one of those that was able to get a management position in a phone company downtown, because everyone else went to war. She thrived in that atmosphere. She was a good manager and a good businesswoman, but when the war ended, back to the salt mines because we promised all those jobs to the men. She never recovered psychologically from that great opportunity followed by disappointment, and it wasn't for that reason exactly she developed pneumonia and a viral condition when I was about 20, and so she didn't make it much past her 30. She was in the business office all of those years and for one brief shining moment there was equal opportunity.

Question: Did you notice if there was a level of racism around the area?

Answer: Not really. At the time, housing was segregated by race, and as a kid , you didn't know any different.

Question: Towards the Japanese?

Answer: Towards the Japanese, you didn't know about the internships out west, or interning, whatever they call it. You didn't know about it. You had enough people around you who were Oriental or whose accent said they were from a Germanic background, but these were e people in the community , and we didn't think twice that these people were part of the enemy.

There was indeed a time when you could look at the enemy and know -ha- this is an oriental face and at a certain time that's pretty much identifiable. When your looking across the fox hole at Germans, that's a little more identifiable, but listening to them, you can tell that pretty much I guess. But although there was a whole lot of racial problems in this country, it is easy to say that it happened over there somewhere, you didn't hear about it until much much much later. If it was in your own community, I don't remember much of that stuff.

There was probably a little more at a later time and when we began looking for communists everywhere. That touched some families that were pretty close to mine. And that really was more of a nasty period because a dreaded Commie could be anywhere, but if there was an Oriental face in the community, there weren't very many of them, but they were part of the community, you would never think of their family being one of them.

Likewise there were so many people in the community who were first generation from Europe, Western Europe, Northern Europe, that there was a lot of Grandma and Grandpa coming from the old country. So there were a lot of people around you, and you had a melting pot right in your own town. So it came time that one of those countries that provided the background happened to be at war, there really wasn't much name calling or any of that other stuff. If you ask somebody else, they might have a different story. Even though we were all going through the same time together, we all had different experiences. In this case, I am glad you brought all of these people, because we are all different ages. Those who were in junior high at the time, that's the period of great socialization and they might have different memories from somebody who is a kid or some one who is old enough to worry about some day, I am going to have to go. Back on racial as applied to African American, the people who were black, primarily lived in.