This picture of my mother and me was taken 75 years ago on my first birthday. I imagine she planned to send it to my dad who had yet to see me in person as he was in the Navy and had been somewhere in Pacific since a month before I was born. My mother was living with my aunt, her older sister, who's husband was also in the Navy, who also had a one year child that her husband had not yet seen in person. The two sisters and two cousins lived in a one bedroom house with an outhouse, no car, no telephone, and I think they only had well water with a hand pump in the kitchen.
A lot had happened in my first year of life:
June 6,1944 D-Day in Europe
June 1944 My dad's only sibling, a younger brother, graduates high school and leaves for basic training in the Marine Corps as he had enlisted while in high school.
March 3, 1945 My dad's brother is killed in his first action during the invasion of Iwo Jima.
April 12, 1945 President Franklin D. Roosevelt dies.
May 8, 1945 Victory in Europe declared.
May 11, 1945. My aunt's husband is killed by the kamikaze attack on the USS Bunker Hill.
May 1945. My first birthday.
Victory over Japan came on August 15, 1945 and my Dad, who was a radio technician and had been assigned to a Marine headquarters unit, visited Japan as part of the first occupation forces. He finally got home in December.
I groused about being locked-in during this Covid-19 pandemic but as I thought about what my mother went through, I'll hold-on a little longer.
