Uneasy Neighbors
Part 1: My father’s memory and my search for story
Last month, I went to Washington, Illinois to conduct research and give a talk about a creative project I’m finally getting my hands around. The surprisingly lush, rolling prairie landscape of Tazewell County, the town of Washington’s old central square with its bandstand and gorgeous old buildings, and Dutch Lane just north of town will always maintain quasi-mythical status in my mind. My father, a lifelong Mennonite minister, referred often in his sermons to this place he was raised and lived until he left to complete alternative service as a conscientious objector during the Korean War in the 1950s.
A few times each year throughout my childhood, our family packed ourselves into the Ford Fairmont station wagon to visit relatives in Illinois. Sometimes we’d take a detour down Dutch Lane, passing what had been the “Camp Homestead” where my father and his four brothers were raised. The multi-story brick house flanked by large shade trees had come down from my father’s mother’s family, many of whom arrived with the Amish migrations during the early 1800s, sailing by river boat up from New Orleans on the Mississippi and Illinois rivers to settle the Illinois plains.
Like my mother’s ancestors who immigrated to Pennsylvania and Ohio as early as the mid-1700s, the Amish and Mennonites leaving Switzerland and Germany were at different points during and after the Reformation fleeing political persecution for positions on pacificism and adult baptism, known as Anabaptism. Both beliefs made them “anti-state,” neither Protestant nor Catholic, and a possible threat to newly forming societies in Germany and Switzerland.
In the early 1900s during World War I, these pacifist beliefs for which these communities sacrificed much to obtain were under scrutiny again, this time in the United States, and particularly in the rural areas in which many Mennonites, Amish, and my family lived. During World War I, in Tazewell and Woodford counties in Illinois, church doors were painted yellow for cowardice. Mennonite land and business owners were at times harassed and threatened for refusing to purchase war bonds or fly American flags on their properties. Resisting conscription in military service and other expectations of war time American society sometimes came with fatal consequences. Additionally, anyone with German names or accents were watched with suspicion by other townspeople. My father’s parents still knew enough German to speak to each other but didn’t pass it down to their children.
This fast-track through 100 years+ of family history is relevant as “Uneasy Neighbors,” the title of the talk I gave at the Washington Historical Society last month, refers to both the German POWs interned in Washington during World War II and the Mennonites within their larger communities in central Illinois.
A few paces down from the Camp homestead stands small house that had once been the one- room Stormer School. My grandmother and father attended Stormer with their siblings, relatives, and neighbors, both Mennonite and non-Mennonite, all of whom would have grown up, learned side-by-side, and worked together when needed on each other’s land.
Illinois’ one-room school system lasted longer than most other states in the country. When my dad attended in the 1940s, my grandfather and other local fathers comprised Stormer’s “school board” and my grandmother and other mothers helped clean and maintain the building, airing the desks out on the lawn before the year began each fall.
In 2014, one of the last times my father drove with my mother and I in front of the Camp homestead on Dutch Lane, he got out and spread his arms across one particular oak tree he’d known well as a child. His arms couldn’t span the enormous base, but that wasn’t the point. Chin resting against the trunk, he looked up toward the span of branches. He needed to be there, making physical contact with his memories of Dutch Lane.
My Father’s Memory
On that visit, I’d started preliminary research for a project based on a memory he recalled late in his life. In a neighbor’s field contracted by the canning factory Libby, McNeill, & Libby, a crew of World War II German prisoners of war worked on the pumpkin harvest just behind Stormer School. During recess and lunch, my dad and his friends climbed the fence, eager to talk to these strangers.
I saw right away how the memory cast a kind of quivering wonder. He seemed surprised by it and didn’t know why he hadn’t remembered earlier. He remembered their denim work shirts emblazoned with the letters “P.W.” He remembered some spoke English. He became visibly emotional, realizing in retrospect the larger events converging on that group of young farm kids born into the larger political and social terrain of being pacifist during tense, patriotic war years. My father wasn’t certain what year the prisoners were there, but I now estimate it to have been during the fall of 1944, when he and his twin brother were 9 years old.
During that first conversation, he realized he must have been talking to the men near the end of the war, when cities in Germany were being heavily bombed. The men might have had partners or children who didn’t know where they were or if they were even alive. They might have had families or sons their own age, and not known if they were alive. “I never asked those men about their families,” my dad said. This seemed to haunt him more than anything, that he never asked the German men who they were or who they missed.
This story and his response to it would have fit with my father’s sermons that often considered inner and external conflicts in our personal lives and society, restorative justice, and the Mennonite’s historic position on peace. In keeping with his life work, my father never referred to the men collectively as “the enemy” when he remembered them. (They likely included a mix of men conscripted into the military service and those who supported the brutal Nazi regime.) To that nine-year-old boy in the Illinois fields and the eighty-year-old looking back seventy years later, the Germans were men harvesting crops in fields he knew well. They were men relating to the land just as he did.
“Back-breaking work,” my dad said of harvesting pumpkins in 1944. The mature squash had to be picked one by one and loaded by hand onto a wagon. For him, the crop also signalled the end of the long harvest cycle. My dad also remembered one of the POWs, worried for the young boys’ safety, advised my dad and his friends one day that they shouldn’t come visit them so often as the local guard with his military rifle often sat beneath a tree far away.
My father’s memory wasn’t a story, only a snapshot, but I was immediately drawn to emotional conflict the recollection stirred and the fact that I knew so little about World War II prisoners of war held the United States. I began researching material trying to learn more about Camp Washington in Tazewell County, Illinois.
A novelist friend directed me toward firsthand accounts. She said in addition to reading and learning about the era (and watching Michael Kitchen’s fantastic Foyle’s War), I should read what people read during the early 1940s in Washington, Illinois. Watch what they watched. Listen to what they listened to. That was where I’d find the “voice” and tenor of the fictional world I needed to create.
But what did people in Washington and Metamora read at that time? Newspapers, my dad said right away, and for my purposes, the more local the better. Catalogs and newspaper ads. School yearbooks. Church bulletins and Bibles. The backs of cereal boxes. Letters, of course. I consulted indexes of novels and literary work published, read and performed in 1944, including this dramatic list in which JD Salinger lands on Utah Beach while working on the Catcher in the Rye and Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Victor Hugo pitch in to read Pablo Picasso’s play under the direction of Camus––though the racier selections likely never made it to the US at the time, let alone the young Mennonite family on Dutch Lane.
When I asked my dad what books he remembered having around the house, he laughed. “We were a house of five boys,” he said. He remembered a copy of Black Beauty, likely a gift from his schoolteacher aunt.
Radio was a life force during that era for both news and entertainment, so with my parents and alone, I listened to news broadcasts, Benny Goodman, Nat King Cole, Tommy Dorsey, and clips of old recordings from Chicago’s WLS National Barn Dance. I realized my research for this piece, whatever it was, had begun years ago before I could appreciate it. During cross-country trips in that previously mentioned Ford Fairmont station wagon, my sisters and I were forced to listen to old Fibber McGee and Molly, the six-cassette tape set a fund drive perk from the local NPR station. As Dad sat in the driver’s seat laughing to antics that seemed wildly unfunny to his pre-teen daughters––things falling out of closets…again?––the sounds, the timing, and that strangely cheerful pitch, contain characteristics and undertones of years also dominated by worldwide violence and loss.
When my parents were still living in Tiskilwa, Illinois, I flew in from Brooklyn for Christmas, and we drove to the public library in Washington to explore on microfiche the Tazewell Country Register for 1942-1945. I found little mention of the local Camp Washington or the POWs in the papers (I wasn’t alone; more speculation on this phenomenon in the next part of this series), but I did find other “voices” of the time, voices I needed.
The paper published letters from local young men serving in North Africa and Pacific. I’m not certain the senders knew their letters were being published for the entire county to read, but they reveal heartbreakingly young, upbeat observations and longings, preoccupations with food, with their bodies, and with cigarettes. The editors of the Register offer advice to readers on what to send in response: “What men overseas want from family at home––newsy cheerful letters and photographs or snapshots; short letters from friends; cigarette lighters that will light in a strong wind with extra flints and wicks; waterproof shockproof wrist watches, hunting or boy scout knives. Subscriptions to pocket sized magazines and books…”
Shockproof, an understatement. Some of the letters were followed up with death notices of those same voices a few months later.
I also read through ration notices, cooking tips and recipes, suggestions for growing and maintaining Victory Gardens, announcements of fund drives to send troops even more cigarettes, and movie advertisements including Bambi and Tarzan Triumphs alongside those highlighting wartime heroics.
I knew before starting the project that with the men gone, women got more lucrative jobs in the more exciting St. Louis and Chicago, and opportunities with the WACS, the WAVES, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but reading the actual work shortage notices and ads in factories emphasizing “perks” such as a work week shortened to five days made the fact more vivid. The worker shortage is why the POWs ended up in Tazewell County. There was also a teaching shortage. My father remembered Stormer School had a new teacher every year during those years. In the Tazewell County Register, new teachers hired at the high school had profiles that focused on looks and personality more than credentials, perhaps trying to make the job of rural high school teacher appear more glamourous.
Importantly for my project, I saw the names of men called to register were published in the local papers. For Mennonites and other conscientious objectors, a new designation in World War II, this would have made registering as a conscientious objector a very public choice in areas where patriotism was high.
Cheerful. Shockproof. The war appeared in every column on every page.
The following summer, I flew in from Brooklyn and dragged my parents to Peoria, so I could explore those same years in the Peoria Journal Star. (In truth, my passion for reading old newspapers on microfiche began before this venture: that whir of the film spinning on the reel! The snap at the film’s end! The grainy quality of the old images sliding out from the past!)
The pages of the Journal Star showed concerns of a more urban environment. Reports on riots in faraway Harlem and gun violence in Chicago. A murder-suicide at nearby Camp Ellis. Young military men on leave from nearby bases visited Peoria on the weekends, and the editors expressed concern about local girls “cavorting” with them on particular streets. Peoria’s larger clothing stores meant more fashion ads with colors in women’s fashion trending toward Marine Blue and Victory Red.
Chatty calls for donations include items that disturb modern sensibilities: hosiery (silk and nylon) for the manufacturing of powder bags, parachutes, tow ropes, and vital needs; milkweed for lifejackets; “junk jewelry” to be shipped to servicemen in the South Pacific for “bartering with natives who dig foxholes, carry ammunition, bring in the wounded, and perform many other tasks in exchange for baubles.”
On those early trips to Washington and Peoria, I did gain a preliminary sense of how people talked, what they ate, what they cared about, what they were being told was glamorous, and what was “newsworthy.” Reading through those tightly printed columns, I engaged with stories as the original readers did, absorbing facts and information in a way that felt more tactile––a transmission of time, tone, and vocabulary.
A Search for Story
And, with the obvious benefit of hindsight and history, I began to have a sense of what was being left out, the shadow side of the external determined cheer. These shadowy presences indeed seemed to be the place where I might find my own story. However, I also risked a common hazard. Research can be a wildly enjoyable way to avoid the actual writing, a deceptively “productive” form of procrastination.
This past June on a flight home from Rome, I watched the truly excellent documentary Turn Every Page about the biographer Robert Caro and his editor Robert Gottlieb. In the film, Caro exudes a sort of low-key, introspective thrill as he walks into multi-level archives of the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library or when he stands behind Johnson’s trembling, elderly brother, certain some untapped truth must be there.
Perhaps all writing, creative or otherwise, is a form of “story dowsing,” a search for story through a combination of excavation and instinct. Though I do have an outline and draft, I still have a long way to go in this process. Those hours of reading and searching for something I couldn’t name but could sense was necessary. I also didn’t know those hours would be some of the beautiful last days I would be spending time with my dad in that part of the world he loved so much.
(Next installment, I get down to work…..)
I realize that I never comment here because I read these posts as pdf on my Apple Books app! Fascinating first part, looking forward to part two!
Coming soon!