[This story is reconstructed from a conversation between Jan Kinnaman, my sisters Jackie and Kathie, and me via Zoom on Monday, Dec. 14, 2020. The source for the reconstruction was an audio transcript produced by Zoom, so this involved a lot of editing and interpretation.]
It was a Sunday. My friend Evelyn Meagher and I had gone to the movies. I don't remember what we saw. But I remember that to get to this particular theater, I had to walk down Fullerton. Evelyn lived over some kind of business. She and I walked along Fullerton to Kimball where it turned into Logan Square. The theater was called the Harding, and we enjoyed going there because it was a big, fancy theater. I don’t remember what we saw [see image 1].
But I remember that when we came out of the theater and into the lobby [see image 2], there was nobody around. There was just nobody. And nobody told us, you know, come on, move on, and keep going, because we were just kids.
And Evelyn and I walked down Fullerton and we began to notice that there was nobody on the street. There were no cars going by. There was nobody walking. We got down to Fullerton and she went ahead to go someplace else. I think her mother wanted her to go see someone else after the theater. I don’t know where she went, or what the rest of her experience was that day, but mine was that I went home and my mother and dad were sitting at the kitchen table, just stunned. They began telling me what they knew listening to the radio in the kitchen. We wanted to know what was going on.
The next morning I went to school. What was really shocking was that some of my classmates were already sure that their male parent was going to go to war. One of them, named Arthur, was my good friend. He was just devastated because his must have been in the reserves or something. We talked about war all morning long. We stopped to hear the president in Congress, declaring war. Good old FDR’s voice was familiar to all of us, because he was on the radio a lot. Anyway, several of my friends were going to be losing their dad or their older brother. [Weren’t you worried that Grandpa Herrington would have to go?] No, he wasn’t in any military thing, that is to say, he wasn’t in the reserve or anything like that. No, I wasn’t worried. He was too young for World War I and too old for II!
Johnny McGee went, though. Johnny had lived with us for a while, and he went, with devastating effect. I don’t know if he was in the Army or the Marines. The Marines, I think. He was on Iwo Jima. What he told me of what they found on Iwo Jima, it affected him. My understanding is that he gets something like 90% of the total disability. That’s the highest that anybody does. He’s not the only one who gets that, but he’s among the worst ones. [This was a cousin? What did he tell you?] Yes, he’s a cousin. He’s one of Ellen’s, my dad’s sister. He is one of Ellen’s children. He was so mentally torn for a long time. He said that in Iwo Jima or the Solomon islands they had deep caves [see image 4] and the Japanese, wisely, hid in them. The trauma that got Johnny was that he had to use a flamethrower to get them out. So he was, you know, it was just awful. Of course there were people who reminded him that if you were on one of those ships at Pearl Harbor, it was pretty awful, too.
Johnny lived with us for a while. That was the summer I broke my back. I had graduated from high school, and I was supposed to go to nurses’ training in September or October, but because of my back I didn’t. Johnny was back home by then. He said, I’m going to take you out to dinner, and we’ll go wherever you want to go. So we went to the Pump Room in the Ambassador East Hotel. We had a glorious time. They weren’t quite sure what to make of us, because of course I was full grown by then, and Johnny was coming in with a woman, a girl, who was, you know, we weren’t acting like lovers or anything, but we were acting like we knew each other. I remember one waiter thought we were brother and sister. Johnny lived with us. Slept on the back porch. While he was in the military my folks had the back porch made into a room. So they had a bed for him, and a chair of course. It was off the kitchen. So he had food and sleep, and we just had to share the bathroom is all. He lived with us before he left, but he didn’t have a nice permanent place when he came back. We had that for him. He wasn’t entirely well when they discharged him. It was too bad. He’s still alive, or at least he was the last time I heard. At the Pump Room [images 4 and 5] there’s a place on the sides where—what do you call them, kids?—there’s a table with benches on either side like that. [A booth?] Yes, a booth. [Back to the meal:] It was a wonderful thing. It was the first time I had a wonderful meal like that. Now, I’ve had other wonderful meals since then, but oh, that was fun. The guy delivers it right to your table! That was Johnny’s thank you to me and my folks.
