LIFE1936-1948

America is preparing to celebrate it’s first peacetime Christmas in five years. The Dec. 10, 1945, cover story proclaims that women can once again dress up for the holiday season. Several ads depict sheer rapture as servicemen retrun home. The Community Silverplate ad says:

“Today’s the day the stars sing, the sun rides high. Today a wordless glory fills the air.

Today…this day…this prayed and planned for day…this day the man of your heart comes home for keeps.”

Sixteen million Americans answered the call to the colors in WWll and they too dreamed of returning home. For most it was a major readjustment period. “Nervous out of the service” was a common expression. Some wives only knew the youthful soldier they had married before or during the war. Many women gained a new independence working during the war and didn’t want to give it up. Battle fatigue, disabilities, nightmares and other difficulties took their toll. But on “this day”, Dec. 10, 1945, most of the boys were home again and America expressed it’s joy and pride for a job well done.

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Lustron Homes were decades ahead of their time. Imagine a combination dish washer/clothes washer and all outside surfaces, including the roof, made of steel and covered with baked enamel! The inside walls were made the same way, and the inside doors were pocket doors. The radiant heat came in at the top of the walls, but the warmth never made it down to the floor which was on a concrete slab.  To escape our apartment on the south side of Chicago not far from the steel mills, my parents purchased a Lustron in 1950 and we had it erected on 2 1/2 treeless acres in Crown Point, IN. It arrived on a truck that looked like a car carrier and was put up in a few days in December, 1950. The company fell into bankruptcy soon after we moved in and the truck remained in front of our house for six months. Every time the wind blew…a common occurrence on the Indiana prairie…chains hanging from the truck rattled. Lightening storms were especially frightening since out all steel house was the highest point in the area, but we were never struck. My mother did witness a tornado plow up the field across the street. We escaped the Lustron 3 1/2 years later when we moved to Lake Bluff, IL.

In late 1948 The Chinese Communists were sweeping their way to victory and defeated and captured 400,000 Nationalist troops in Mukden. This was the beginning of the end for the Nationalists and they capitulated in May, 1950, thus ending the Chinese civil war that began in 1927. Mukden, now called Shenyang, became famous in 1931 when junior Japanese officers blew up a section of Japanese owned railroad and blamed Chinese dissidents. This provided the pretext for the Japanese annexation of Manchuria. Featured on the cover of the Nov. 8, 1948, LIFE is Helena Carter. She made a few B movies and faded into obscurity by the early 1950’s.

The polio epidemic swept America in 1948 and no state was hit harder than North Carolina.  No one knew how it was spread and children were encouraged to stay inside during the summer months.  By 1952 almost 60,000 US children were stricken annually.  In 1955 Dr. Jonas Salk discovered the vaccine that ultimately wiped out polio.  A great American, Dr. Salk refused to patent the vaccine and left it in the public domain.  Actress Collen Townsend (on the cover) only made a couple of forgettable movies and then quit to marry a presbyterian minister.  She later headed up the Billy Graham Crusade.