Home Front Girl: A Diary of Love, Literature, and Growing Up in Wartime America
PREFACE of working-class families she found employment herself most regularly as a camp counselor every summer She also volun teered at various organizations such as Billings Hospital and the House of Happiness where she taught nature study to children As a scholarship student at the University of Chicago junior college junior and senior years in high school and then as an undergraduate at the U of C from 1940 to 1944 Joan was an intelligent humorous insightful self-mocking and pensive reader of her times and the people around her Her diary gives us an impression of certain aspects of cul tural and psychological importance not readily seen in history books Joan weaves personal reflections on love nature and God with commentary on contemporary political events Habitually late for school Joan shows her naïveté through out her diary For example she indicates sympathy for Charles Lindbergh’s isolationism before the entry of the United States into the war She interweaves the hijinks of her high school and college crowd with insights into cultural events She hears radio shows no television then and goes to the movies quite often no streaming films on her computer Her love life is that of a typical teenager she realizes when she is experienc ing a silly crush and relates how various passions peter out or develop into necking Joan offers us more than mere historical color She alter nates between being a flighty teenager and a budding poet she falls passionately and frequently in love she makes fun of herself yet reflects seriously on political crises nature religion and poetry Her reactions to world events can be pro found reflections on the impending death of her generation As early as 1937 Joan believes that the year 1940 will be a decisive year in history A pacifist she learns to bandage for xiii
PREFACE the Red Cross and works in a factory inspecting cans for the war Joan’s passion for classical literature and culture enables her to see the bombings of London and Berlin as examples of another Troy the city tragically besieged by the ancient Greeks in Homer’s epic The Iliad Her school notebooks which she kept while she was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago from 1940 to 1944 likewise contain information about a young adult’s life in the early 1940s Found tucked in between the covers were two pamphlets one on Wartime Canning of Fruits Vegeta bles The other from the Association of American Railroads in Washington DC warns Don’t Waste Transportation A large part of the Pullman sleeping cars and passenger coaches are assigned to troop service and the armed forces have first call on all the rest Plan ahead avoid weekends and holidays travel light Joan copied over detailed instruc tions on how to knit Men’s Heavy Gloves as knitting was one way that girls could support the war effort Not all the information in her notebooks is utilitarian In psychology class on January 19 1943 after notes about Pavlov’s dogs and conditioned responses Joan wrote Dog gets neurotic if compelled to make too fine a distinction Me too Then she drew a picture of a dog salivating Amongst her scribbles about John Donne’s poetry igneous rocks and Aztec gods are doodles of girls heads and dresses the actress Dorothy Lamour and an anthropologist gone native in his sarong She also played hangman and calculated her men strual period In May 1943 she even jotted down below her English poetry homework a list of 34 boys she dated starting from when she was in elementary school Joan wrote this list shortly before her wedding to my father Robert Bob xiv
PREFACE Thornton Morrison He is noted near the bottom There are numerous messages to her friend Betty Crawford These entries vary from the frivolous Look at the long haired lad in the row ahead and Oh this is deadly evidently con cerning a boring lecture in history class to the conversational Are you going to Northwestern next quarter to the epic Germany Declared War This Morning As an anthropology major at the University of Chicago Joan was told quite seriously by one of her male professors that the only way a woman could become an anthropologist was to marry one Joan would have seen these journals with the eye of an anthropologist She believed that everyone has a story even though he or she may not yet realize what it is As she presciently wrote on October 19 1941 To understand one’s story is to weep with pity In her school notebooks for her History 201 class Joan jotted down information from Allan Nevins’s The Gateway to History 1938 and reminds herself to read some chapters in Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Then she wrote The true historian puts into history his imagination and the projection of his own soul into the facts Interestingly Nev ins became the so-called father of oral history the kind of historian Joan became later in life In a way this book is her own oral history unearthed from file cabinets not accessed for decades She pours her soul into the events that transpire on the world stage Robert Maynard Hutchins the president of the Univer sity of Chicago at the time was an idol for Joan as her journal makes clear When she heard his speech The Proposition Is Peace The Path to War Is a False Path to Freedom on the radio in March 1941 she enthusiastically embraced its xv
PREFACE sentiments In her journal she seems naive enough at this point to mistake the isolation endorsed by the America First Committee as simply a philosophy of peace Nevertheless the seeds of her later activism against war had been sown Many years later in addition to supporting presidential candidates against the Vietnam War she wrote an op-ed col umn that appeared in the New York Times on May 1 1975 The headline read Pax which is Latin for peace In the article Joan reflected on the ending of the war between Viet nam and the United States and the death of her nephew in Vietnam She pleaded for the country to reconcile after the national trauma What has happened has been a sorrow for all of us Let us mourn our loss but not divide ourselves over the open grave I’ll agree not to say we never should have gone into Vietnam if you’ll agree not to say we should have given them more Okay Pax By this time Joan had been married for more than 30 years to Bob Morrison a graduate student in chemistry at the U of C They met on Washington’s birthday Sunday Feb ruary 22 1942 and were married on June 19 1943 They were married for almost 67 years Bob died two months after Joan did After graduating from the University of Chicago in 1944 she and Bob traveled to many US cities while he was in the Navy Bob became an ensign and a radar instruc tor Later he was assigned to a destroyer captained by the famous PT boat leader John Bulkeley The war ended before Bob had to be sent to the Pacific Bob and Joan moved to New York City where he became a professor of organic chemistry and eventually a famous writer in his own right as coauthor of Organic Chemistry the standard textbook for a number of decades Joan meanwhile wrote for women’s magazines x vi
