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PELHAM HIGH SCHOOL LIBRARY MEDIA CENTER
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U.S. History Reflective Journal or Historical Novel Project Mrs. Bailly-Burton's Class
Ben The Life of James McCloud I am James McCloud. I live in Boston, Massachusetts. The year is 1935 and we are in the Depression, but we managed to find a place to live and I somehow kept my job at a corner market, but I don’t know how long I will have my job. We live in a three-family house with two other families. They are the O’Reilly family and the Fitzgeralds. The Fitzgeralds live on the second floor. Our family and the O’Reillys aren’t too friendly with them, but they own the house, so we don’t complain. Jack O’Reilly and I have managed to support both our families for four years. I met the O’Reillys in 1930 after I helped Jack carry his packages that he had dropped in the street. We talked and I told him of our housing situation, and he offered my family a place to live. The Depression hit us hard, but others weren’t so lucky. I heard on the radio that twelve million people were out of work in 1933, compared to the four million the year before. One of the hardest people hit was my friend Stewart Griffin. Not only did he lose his job, but he lost his house as well. He blames the Depression on Hoover, but I think that it was caused by overproduction. He and his wife are now living on the street and they are penniless. He hasn’t worked in two years, and he stands on the side of the street wearing a sign that displays his work ability, hoping that someone will see him and give him a job. I hope he finds work soon because he needs to support his wife. I have a wife and two children. My wife is named Jane. I met her back in 1929, a few months before the stock market crash, at a church social. We talked after and found that we have a lot in common. We were married later that year. My eldest child is named John. He was born in 1930. He is always a good boy and rarely does anything wrong. His sister, Amy, was born in 1932. We are a perfect family in almost every way. A few months before Amy was born, we got a kitten. John, who was three at the time, named her Pinky, because of her tiny pink nose. The cat became a part of our families almost at once. Jack and Jane have just one son. His name is Michael and he is six years old. He loves having the company, and so does John. They both love Pinky, and play with her with various strings, and feathers they find lying around. The occasional mouse keeps her happy as well. Once a month, we all go out to the movies. It is usually on a Saturday, but every once in a while; we will go on a Friday. We sometimes see the same movie two or three times, but no one seems to care. We all get two features, news reels, cartoons for the kids, and serials for the adults. We get all this for ten cents each. Money is hard to come by, but we need to get out and forget about our troubles. In our spare time, we all listen to the radio. Our favorite shows are the soap operas, but we also like the game shows and boxing. My wife also likes to make scrapbooks of the times, as well as with family photographs and from pictures of her favorite actors and actresses from magazines. My hobbies include reading as well as walking to the library with John to find books that he will want to read or want me to read to him. We recently bought a Monopoly game. Jane, Jack, Mary, and I sit down after the kids go to bed to play the game. It is fun, but it takes so long. Our longest game started at eight o’clock and ended at ten thirty. Mary won, she was so excited dreaming of the American dream of owning property, but then and we all went to bed. President Roosevelt gave one of his Fireside chats with the American people earlier tonight. I listened to it and I thought that he really is the right man for the job. He has made such an impact on the nation that it looks like an end to this Depression may be only a few years away. As I already mentioned, I work at a corner market. I get paid twenty-five cents an hour for stocking food as well as lowering and raising prices and taking receipts. Jack works a few blocks down the street from the market at the neighborhood drug store. We are lucky that he has a job there because we get a lot of medicines and remedies easier than we normally would. John has a fiend whose father is a farmer. He comes into town about twice a month to try to sell some of his excess crops and milk. Because of this, we now get one or two free bottles of milk from him whenever he comes into town. Every little bit helps in this economy. In our backyard, we have a good-sized garden where we grow our own fruits and vegetables in the summer. We have cucumbers, corn, and tomatoes. My wife cans the vegetables for the winter so we can save some money, and we eat most of them but then we sell the rest for a little money. My wife also keeps some flowers as a hobby. She and the kids are out back a lot and they tend to the plants and vegetables and the kids are quickly developing a green thumb. All the kids love to be read too, and their favorite books are the Dick and Jane books. They teach kids to read, and they do a very good job of it. They will probably always remember reading “Look. See Dick. See Dick Run”. They just love these books and I have to admit, I do too! It is now 1946. The rationing of food and supplies has been hard. We have coupons that are used to receive supplies for the month. The blue ones are for processed foods, and the red ones are for oils, fats, etc. The U.S. entered World War II in 1941 after the Japanese bombed us at Pearl Harbor. I was shocked when I heard of it. It was totally unexpected. We have never been attacked on United States soil before by a foreign county, and we lost several of our carriers in the attack …. so many people died. There were rumors of German concentration camps, and we didn’t believe it, until we entered World War II. Who could believe that an entire race would be targets in this way? In this country, eventually one hundred and twenty thousand Japanese Americans were sent to camps to be held in these camps. We also heard about the testing of atomic weaponry, I hoped that we didn’t need to use it, but my fears were realized when Truman authorized the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. We bombed Japan in August of 1945 when we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. The town was devastated and then we bombed them again three days later in the town of Nagasaki. Seven days later, Japan surrendered to the Allies. We also ended Hitler’s reign in Germany in 1945, and the war ended and it took us out of the Depression. During World War II, thousands of new jobs had been created for the war, and my wife got a job as did Jack’s wife Mary. They both worked making bullets for the soldiers, but since the war ended, they now work making and repairing clothes. Even though they work at a tailor’s shop about a mile from the house, they often bring their work home with them and continue working at home long into the night. In April of 1945 President Roosevelt died. It was devastating; it was time to move on. Truman was elected president later that month on the 19th. Everyone in the house was upset and saddened by the news on the radio, and it was hard to keep myself together, but we all got through okay. John, Amy, and Michael are all in school now, and so we are free to leave the house while they are at school. Mary and Jane return home from work to make lunch for the children when they come home from school for lunch. They go back to school an hour and a half later and come home from school at three thirty. Mary and Jane are always at home when they get home to help them with their homework and to start making dinner. The seven of us always eat dinner together, and we tell each other about how our day was and what we did. Our movie nights are still the highlight of the month, and we have seen a lot of movies. Some of our favorites are Boomtown and Fantasia. The kid’s just love Fantasia, a new Disney movie, it’s so different for us. Their favorite part is the one with the dancing animals. They find it funny and absurd. The cartoons before the movies are also very good. Bugs Bunny is a new addition to the comedy. Even I love the antics of that rabbit. After dinner, my family will, on most nights, sit by the radio and listen to programs like the Lone Ranger, and Major Bowie’s Amateur Hour. Soap operas are still very popular at our house, and so is boxing. The families just love to sit together in the living room and find out what will happen. The winters in Boston are very cold, but the kids always have something to do. Whether it’s a snowball fight, making snowmen, ice-skating in the park after it was flooded, coasting down a street, or simply talking with friends, they are never bored. John and Michael are into marbles now. They have a wonderful time just sitting and playing with them on the rug. When the summer finally comes, they also play a lot of baseball pickup games. Amy is always playing jacks and pick up sticks with her friends. Amy is now also working on her own scrapbook. She is making one of John Wayne. She absolutely loves John Wayne. My wife is also making a scrapbook of John Wayne. We even still go to the movies on Saturdays. It costs a little more now, but we are making more money now, so it is fine. Since John and Michael are constantly outside playing baseball in the nice weather, we need to know where they are, and they need to know when to come home. They usually come home when the streetlights come on. They were told this, and they listen do it most of the time. Every once in a while they will come home five or ten minutes late, but they are always home for dinner. If they don’t come home, my wife rings the “cow bell” and they come running! The corner store that I work in is still running and is becoming a huge store. But unfortunately, the drug store where Jack worked has closed. A bigger store had opened up in the neighborhood and it put the small store out of business. Jack has found a new job at a local restaurant as a waiter. We both make fifty cents an hour. John loves comic books now. He really likes Superman, Batman and Flash Gordon. He goes to the comic book shop every Saturday with his allowance and buys the newest issues and a newspaper for me with some money that I give him. Amy loves to read. She has read some of her mother’s books, her favorite books are Moby Dick (published 1857) and Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, but they are a little old. So glad to see that Amy loves the old Agatha Christie books, since that one it was published in 1939. She has read most of Agatha Christie's books and will have read them all soon. The year is 1959, and we are still living with the O’Reillys. Pinky died in 1949. It was hard, but it is time to move on. We have a new kitten and his name is Spade. The family on the second floor left back in ’55, and we now split the house evenly. We get the left side of the house, and the O’Reillys have the right side. Both families pitched in and bought the deed to the house from the Fitzgeralds. We then were able to do as we please with the house. The kids are grown up, and John moved down the street. He never went to college and found a job as a fisherman in Boston. He has been very successful so far. He met a girl named Sally; and they plan to marry soon. Amy is now in college, and she still lives with us, and is studying to be a nurse. Michael didn’t go to college either. He went straight to work at a movie theater, which thrills me since I love movies! I still go to the movies when I can, and I still read, and Monopoly is still really fun. After church, we always have everyone at home and we sit and play Monopoly. I have become quite good at the game and have a very good strategy. I think it’s because I survived the Great Depression. I don’t always win, but I rarely lose. I have found out that your spending habits ion the real world will relate to Monopoly. If you are good with money, you will do well at Monopoly, but if you spend money that you don’t have, then you will do poorly at the game. You really need to plan ahead for that game. It still is fun though. Roller-skating is very popular now, and Amy is going out with her friends to a roller rink at least once a week. And I see a lot of the neighborhood children playing hopscotch and jump rope all the time. She also plays hula-hoop and she is getting good, but I'm not! The kids love Elvis Presley. His music is odd, but I’m open-minded. It’s is not the best music I’ve ever heard, but I like it, and I really don’t see why it is controversial. Elvis is great musician and singer. Amy went to one of his concerts a while ago, and she loved it. There is also some more controversy going on about the McCarthy files. Joseph McCarthy claimed that he had a list of more than two hundred people employed by the State Department were members of the Communist party. He never could produce the list, but he kept at it for a long time. He was very repetitive, and eventually was censured by Congress. It involved a lot of people who were famous and it was interesting to hear about. A lot of people were “black listed” because of their supposed involvement in the Communist party. The Korean War was not the best idea ever, but I suppose it had to be done. Apparently, it all started back in 1950 when the UN refused to recognize the Chinese Communist government as the official government of China. The fight was almost exactly like a game of tug-o-war. The war was an unofficial one because war was never declared. That was confusing because it was called a “Conflict”. It looks like a war, but it’s not a war. I know a lot of young men who are there, and it is exactly like a war. Polio was the prominent disease for paranoia. I was worried about it for years, until Salk created a vaccine for it. After that, I was relieved to know that it could be prevented. Apparently, President Roosevelt had Polio. He invited children with polio to the White House and he gave heartily to charities. I was a bit surprised to hear this because we never saw him in a wheelchair. We now get polio vaccines or just like taking little “sips” to combat this terrible disease. Medicine has come such a long way! This year, we added two new states to the union. Alaska was added in January, and Hawaii was added in October. We now have fifty states in total. Since we have two new states, we also have a new flag with fifty stars. I think that I will keep the old one to maybe sell it in the future.
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Elizabeth
Strauss, Media Generalist
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