I helped with the war effort

During the school Christmas vacation in 1942 I was one of the 20 or so students chosen from the Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington, D.C., to go across town to the Navy Department to do some paper work for the Navy. We were to be paid $40 for those two weeks of work.

For many of us it was our first experience of working at a job except for things like mowing lawns or babysitting. You remember that Washington was under a full time "brown-out" and everything was dimly lighted so the capital city wouldn't be such a good target in those days of World War II.

To get to the temporary quarters where this paper work was being done, we had to take the streetcar down Wisconsin Avenue, which was almost a mile from our home on Nevada Avenue. The use of private cars for school or work responsibilities was limited for the war effort use of gasoline, so my sister Ellen couldn't take me to the street car stop where most of the other kids were waiting for this early morning car. I am sure that the regular riders on this car were dismayed to see about 15 high school boys and girls join them on this rather long ride. We were excited and probably a little nervous, but the regular riders were just plain tired or needing that last rest before starting into their day's work. My memory is that we needed to get on this car at 5 a.m., to reach our job over in the northeast side of town by 6 a.m.

We were told that there would be a cafeteria there for us to buy our lunch, but after the first day of waiting in line to get our food at the cafeteria we started bringing our lunch. We had a morning and afternoon break, plus 30 minutes for lunch.

Our job was to take these huge ledger books that when opened were about one yard wide and check the figures entered into the book by the night shift ahead of us. When we found an error we corrected it in red and marked the page and that book for further checking probably in the early evening shift. Our understanding was that those people we passed leaving the facility when we arrived had put in the original numbers. We knew that the figures had to do with ammunition and weapons, but we could not read the codes to know exactly what we were recording for the Navy to count on.

We did not have any adding machines, but I think the night shift who started the procedure did have some adding machines, which were covered over for our group to ignore as we used our own mathematical skills to check if they had copied everything correctly. We had mainly addition and subtraction problems to check, nothing very complicated.

For many of us it was our first exposure to workers who smoked continually, swore frequently, resented us coming and taking this two weeks work away from them since we all were middle class students from the newest high school in town. We were amazed at the number of errors we did find which made us worry about the war effort for sure.

Thinking about this story there are dozens of things that wouldn't be done that way today. First, the mothers in our community would not have let us girls or boys walk alone in the darkened streets at 5 in the morning. However there wasn't the danger and fear of assault then as there is now. Second, if that large a group from one school was going that far, at that hour today, we would have been taken by bus with a teacher supervising us.

Third, the work we were doing would not even have been necessary with present day computers. Even the simple adding machine would have speeded us on our task, but a computer would eliminate at least two shifts of those workers.

Although most of our group were from prosperous families, we began to learn more about making that $40 spread further by carrying our lunch and saving our rest period for relaxing and not standing in line.

And last, we all learned to appreciate each other more than we had in school activities. Working together took away the beauty-queen/ handsome jock, cheerleader skills and more expensive clothes that divided us in the school halls.

When we returned to school after the vacation we wanted to tell others about our experiences but we discovered that the ones who did not go were not interested in "how we spent our Christmas Vacation."

But when I could place six records on my new record player without getting up to change records between songs, I felt great that I had earned the $40 that was about what the radio/record player cost me. And I think I learned a lot about the work ethic while being a patriotic citizen.