At a recent event commemorating the 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Frankfort resident Dorothy Chapman, 80, asked the audience if anyone living on that “date of infamy” could remember what they were doing that day. “Because I definitely do,” Chapman said, “even as a five year old.”
It was a “typical Sunday” for the Gronau family, she said. Chapman remembers walking with her parents Bill and Louise and her siblings—Jean, 15, and Arthur, 12—to services at St. Paul’s Union Church in the Beverly Hills neighborhood of Chicago.
Afterward, they returned home to enjoy Sunday dinner, “the best dinner of the week,” she said.
Then, while her siblings helped their parents with dishes, “baby” Dorothy, 5, was sent to the living room with the “funny papers” to tune into her favorite Sunday program on the family’s large Philco console radio, she said.
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At that point, Chapman didn’t have a care in the world until her program was suddenly interrupted. She remembers running into the kitchen to tell her parents that the “radio was broken,” and they returned to the living room with her to see what was wrong.
Chapman doesn’t remember the words, but she remembers the reaction of her parents as they heard the news of the attack.
“I’m looking at them and the looks on their faces made me feel that something dreadful (happened),” Chapman said.
That day was the beginning of four years that impacted Chapman’s life, she said, but she knows that her child’s perspective of the war years was vastly different from that of the rest of her family.
Looking back, she wonders if her parents, Bill and Louise Gronau, were concerned at the moment they heard about the attack that her father, born in 1903, would be drafted.
But for Chapman, it was an exciting time in many ways.
Fortunately for the family, Chapman’s father was too old for the draft and her brother too young, so there was no daily fear of loss as with many families. Nevertheless, they all pitched in to help with the war effort.
“Everyone was involved,” Chapman said. “Everybody was doing something.”
Louise Gronau joined a volunteer organization, which Chapman believes was the Traveler’s Aid Society, meeting soldiers at LaSalle Street Station and helping them to find their way to the Frank White house in Beverly where a kind of suburban USO was set up.
“The story was that any service man that would like to take the Rock Island train out to 103rd and walk a block over to the ‘White house,’ they would be guaranteed a home-cooked meal,” Chapman said.
Chapman said her “very attractive” sister Jean was the perfect age at 16 and 17 years old to help entertain many of “the boys” who were not much older.
Teens like Jean from Morgan Park High School helped “Mom” White to make sure their guests were well fed, comfortable and entertained by all the appropriate sites the big city of Chicago had to offer.
Chapman said she was constantly delighted at seeing her sister “dressed in her Sunday best” to go out on the town with young men from all over the country and some from other parts of the world.
Chapman said “everywhere you went, the boys had uniforms on.”
“For me, it was kind of more exciting, like Hollywood,” Chapman said. “I didn’t realize, I wasn’t thinking they could go off and get killed. I just thought they all looked handsome like they should be in the movies.”
Despite the perceived glamour and her youth, Chapman did not just watch from the sidelines. She said even the children had roles in the war effort as they collected tin foil, helped older siblings haul scrap metal and worked in the “victory gardens.” Chapman and her friends considered it a normal part of their lives to have sugar, butter, gasoline and rubber rationed and to play in the street because cars were few and far between.
And, World War II role playing was part of their everyday play. A favorite bent poplar tree became a bomber from which the children could shoot at the enemy and parachute out when they were hit.
“We called it our B-29,” Chapman said. “We had one branch that we had to parachute out of for whatever story we were making up. We had foxholes in the prairie where we’d make fire and cook potatoes.”
“Everything was the war, “Chapman said. “We tried to make it like we were part of it.”
The innocence Chapman had on Pearl Harbor day was wearing away by war’s end. Chapman said she remembers that she and her friends didn’t know much about the atom bomb, but they knew it was going to be dropped somewhere.
“We didn’t know how to accept that,” she said.
The children weren’t sure whether or not they might be a target, so they decided to take a walk through the neighborhood “and look at everything we liked … because it would be gone,” Chapman said. “It was silly, but that made sense to us.”
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Ginger Brashinger is a freelancer.