The Past 70 Years

Our papers and T.V. are full of accounts of the Invastion at Normandy these days.   Today marks the 70th Anniversary.

I have a book that is a very good account of that day.   Some of it is hard to read.   I cannot imagine what that was like.    The book I have is "The Bedford Boys".   It's about the town Bedford, VA and how they lost 16 young men that day.  It describes just what it was like when these young men hit the water.

We receive a local paper and every week they have a section called "A Step Back In Time"  Now and then they also have a page on "A Little More History"  This week they have several articles about Normandy and also a section this week entitled   "D-Day Plus Twenty Years".    It  was written in June, 1964.

When I read that article and realized how close we were, even then, to WWII it made me sit up and take note.    I remember very little about the actual war.  I remember having "blackouts" where we had to pull all the blinds in the house.   The old dark green one's that were ugly and let NO light in.   We also had ration stamp books.   Sugar and bread were rationed, also shoes.   I still have a book somewhere with a stamp or two in it.

BUT...when I looked at the date "1964" and the headlines  "D-Day Plus Twenty Years"   I caught my breath.  The fact that I had been married just a few years after WWII shocked me.   I had not realized how much had happened in those twenty short years.   By the time the article was written I had two girls and my life was very full AND seemed very safe.   Ted, however, had served almost four years in Korea.  

Growing up in a small town was a wonderful thing but it also shielded me from the things that were going on in the world around me.   Of course we did not have T.V. and get the facts practically before they happened as we do today.     My main source of news came on the big screen every week at the movie.  

I guess the thing that shocks me the most is how I could live in that era and not realize all the terrible things that were going on in Germany and how lucky we were to be living in the United States.