It was the Greatest Generation’s greatest hour — 70 years ago Friday.
On Tuesday, Aug. 14, 1945, these sturdy sufferers who had survived the Great Depression finally had achieved victory over undisputed international evil in World War II. And as photographer Ferris Moorhouse snapped away laboriously with his trusty Speed Graphic camera, a mob of overjoyed people jammed downtown Elgin starting at about 8 p.m. in a riotous celebration of VJ (“Victory Over Japan”) Day.
Blown-up (in some cases to life-size) copies of the two dozen photos Moorhouse took that night are now owned by the Elgin History Museum and will be displayed in the first-floor lobby at Gail Borden Public Library through the end of August.
On Wednesday night Moorhouse’s son, Dale, and local historian Jerry Turnquist led a program introducing the exhibit. Some of the more than 50 people that attended shared their memories of living through the war years.
“If Dad had a motto, it was that, ‘If it breathes, take a photo of it,'” Dale Moorhouse said of his father, who worked out of a studio above the Wilson Shoes store on East Chicago Street and made his living shooting photos of weddings, horse shows and other events.
President Harry Truman had called 200 reporters to a press conference at about 5 p.m. Central time on Aug. 14 to announce that Japan had agreed to surrender unconditionally. Nazi Germany had already surrendered the previous May, celebrated as “VE (Victory in Europe) Day.” Word first arrived in Elgin by national radio broadcasts. Within hours, special editions of the Chicago Daily Tribune had arrived by train, bearing the headline “THE WAR IS OVER!”
Moorhouse said his father grabbed his Speed Graphic camera, jammed about 12 4-by-5-inch wooden film frames into his pockets and walked over to nearby Fountain Square, which soon was filled with happy people. Its brick streets were plastered with waste office paper in the style of a ticker tape parade.
“Everyone was at the party,” Moorhouse said. “But one very important part of Elgin was missing. You don’t see many guys that are 20 to 35 years old. They were off fighting the war.”
The photos show celebrators, many apparently in their teens, riding on the roof of a bus whose side urges people to buy war bonds. One group of youths had stolen an outhouse and now crowded around it as one youth sat on the throne of honor inside.
“The newspapers refer to there being sheds. But this was clearly a privy,” Turnquist said. “The crowd set fire to the sheds, the fire department put out the fires and later they set fire to the sheds again.”
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Despite the “speed” in the name of Ferris Moorhouse’s camera, using it was laborious, Dale Moorhouse said. “Today you click click click and you have 100 photos,” he said. “But Dad had one chance to get the picture right.” He said the camera used 4-by-5-inch film set in a wooden frame, two photos per frame, that had to be inserted into the camera one frame at a time. A new disposable flash bulb also had to be inserted before each shot.
Moorhouse said the photos show a gender difference in how formally people dressed. “The ladies almost all wore dresses. The guys came wearing whatever they had,” varying from suits to white undershirts. It was a Tuesday night and he believes many of the people had just left work.
The VFW’s Drum and Bugle Corps hadn’t played in a decade. But its members assembled and staged an impromptu parade down South Grove Avenue. Then some boys started playing baseball in the street.
“There was a lot of hoopla, outhouse burning and all. But on the whole it was pretty orderly,” Moorhouse said. “I’m not sure we could do that today. I’m not sure we could have that kind of a joyous event” without becoming destructive as crowds in many cities have become while celebrating sports championships.
Several of those attending Wednesday’s program had been children or teens on VJ Day. They remembered growing “victory gardens” to extend the supply of food while farmers were away in the service; being forbidden to use flashlights outdoors and shading windows to prevent a city from being visible to enemy bombers at night; recycling metals, even to the extent of saving the tin foil lining of cigarette wrappers; and seeing star flags displayed in so many windows. A blue star meant you had a family member in the service. A gold star meant he had been killed.
“We were proud to do it. There was a lot of pride,” said Wilma Peterson. She said her mother began the war working in a factory that made some kind of item that seemed trivial. So she quit and got a job at the Burgess-Norton company in Geneva because that was making piston pins for engines and link pins for the tracks on Army tanks.
Peterson’s father, meanwhile, was hired to work as a guard at one of the railroad bridges in St. Charles, to keep away any enemy saboteurs trying to blow it up.
Nila St. John recalled how little information the people back home got from their loved ones at the front. While today’s service people can speak live with relatives via Skype and cellphone, “I had two brothers in the service, one in the Pacific and one in Europe, and we heard very little from them,” she said. “When we did get a letter, it would be so cut up by censors that you couldn’t understand it. I don’t know how my mother got through it.”
St. John said one letter from the brother in Europe, Glen Febenstorf, referred to their cousin Nancy in a way that made no sense. The family finally figured out he was sending a coded message that his Army unit was near the city of Nancy, France.
Now in their mid-80s and older, the generation shown in Woodhouse’s photos is disappearing quickly. “My mother, Isabel D’Angelo, was there that night and she would have loved to see these pictures,” said Gary McNeil of Elgin. “But she passed away in April.”
“That Greatest Generation didn’t expect anything. The key word for this generation was sacrifice,” Moorhouse said.
“The other key word was ‘serving.’ I’d like to see more serving go on today.”