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Sue Cummins
Aurora, CO

My father and mother moved from northern Indiana to Kansas City before the war began in 1941. My father had been hired by North American Aviation; and though he had no training as an engineer, his job soon seemed as though it should have required that education.

Some time after my brother was born in 1942, my father left home to go somewhere in Kansas to get his physical to join the army. In that time, as far as my parents knew, he wouldn't be back home before training and probably combat. However, in a few days, he returned home a bit crestfallen, and handed my usually shy, quiet mother a piece of paper that indicated he was 4F (physically unfit for service); apparently he had been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, although he later wondered if the authorities just didn't want to decimate the employee base at North American Aviation any further. Anyway, my mother proceeded to run up and down the street in our neighborhood, waving the 4F document, yelling at the top of her lungs, "Bill's 4F! Bill's 4F!", embarrassing her downcast husband immensely. This was the war most men wanted to fight, and he wasnt happy to be turned away.

He was still employed at North American when I was born in 1945, and as the soldiers, sailors, and marines returned from the war, those who had previously worked for the company were rehired (by law) if that was their wish, and my father lost that job, for which he was by then being paid the generous sum of $800 per month. I've always felt it to be a sign of my father's good character that I never heard him complain about that job loss, even though the company which then hired him only paid him $200 per month to start; quite a cut in pay. But the little family of four somehow made it on that salary, buying their first home, a little two-bedroom place in which my brother and I would share a bedroom until he was 8 and I was 5, when we moved on up to the 3-bedroom, 1 1/2 bath home. That first house would definitely represent a poverty-level standard of living today, but we didn't feel deprived.