The Pittsburgh Press (January 11, 1946)
I DARE SAY —
There’ll be some changes made
By Florence Fisher Parry
I read a book, “Glory for Me.” MacKinley Kantor wrote it. I understand a motion picture is going to be made of it. Indeed, I hope so. It is the story of what happens to several young men who survived the war and came home. It tells what they came home to. You can find their experience duplicated wherever you look. It isn’t the way they dreamed it.
There’s a popular song, “I’ll Buy That Dream.” Every time I hear it I think, somehow, of the cost of the dreams that our boys bought with their lives – or if not their lives, with their blood, with pain, with a demoralizing monotony of waiting, waiting, which is the very essence of war. They bought a dream out of a catalog of things remembered back home; of dear ones glorified by distance and loneliness. And then out of the beautiful package of their final return, they pick up the dream that they bought.
How many find themselves cheated?
I’ve been noticing something lately. It happens all the time. It’s happening to all employers who have personal contact with discharged veterans. When they came home on furlough, they always managed somehow to make a beeline to the place where they had worked. They seemed to have a competition to get back there as though they needed a touchstone with security before they returned to combat or to camp.
But almost to a man they were rather vague about coming back to their old jobs if and when the war would ever be over. They were noncommittal. They were going to wait and see. I remember how enlarged they all seemed to be: taller, somehow, leaner, harder, older.
I remember how we’d tell them that their jobs were here waiting if they wanted them, and they’d hedge a little. They’d be pleased, but they’d hedge. They wanted to tackle something bigger than that which they left. And I shared that confidence. It wasn’t a question of the job. It was here, all right, waiting. But would it be big enough for them? That was the question.
Change of heart
Well, the first boys who got back immediately after V-J Day came in all right, shook hands all around, but almost to a man decided to take a flier for themselves. They were going to have a try at their own business with the G.I. Bill of Rights’ help. they were going to school to learn a new trade. Home was wonderful. America was wonderful. In America anything was possible. Their confidence broke my heart for I knew they were in for a tumble.
But that was months ago. Since then, how the picture was changed! These recent discharged men have got home just in time to see the greatest strike menace and paralysis of recovery this country has ever faced, the men in their own families off on strike. Little businesses are beginning to get scared, are waiting to see, are drawing in, are not taking on new help or old.
These boys returning sense this quickly. They don’t show the cockiness of the discharged boys of several months ago. They’re bewildered. They’re seized with a sense of insecurity. It was plain as day to them yesterday what they wanted, what they were going out for, when they got back. But today – No. They don’t know. With the consequences that when they find that they can get their old job back, they grab it with two hands, no questions asked. It’s a god-send to them. their relief is profound.
Let me tell you of two cases I know about:
One man, a valuable man, got back after three or four years in India. He went to his former employer in that same hesitant way that men had who were looking for jobs during the depression. When he was told that his job was waiting for him, and what the pay would be, he was stunned.
“Why, I didn’t expect to get half that!” he said.
“Why not?” he was told, “that’s what we’ve been paying the others who took your place.”
Then there was a younger boy – a Navy boy. It was tough trying to make a place for him. After all, some of these war-time men were very faithful and had become very valuable.
Just to get back
“I’ll take anything you have, no matter what it is,” he said, “just to get back. I’m scared – honest! I’m only 21, and I’m scared at the way things are, back here. My father worked steadily all through the war at cockeyed wages, they were so high. This his union struck. He’s been out of work for weeks at a time. He’s used up all his savings. He touched me last night for $20.
“Yeah, I saved some, too, but how long will it last at this rate? What’s happened over here, anyway? How do you think it hits us getting back home after three or four years, finding our fathers and brothers and friends out of work on account of strikes? Using up more of their savings than they’d ever make, no matter how much of an increase they’d get even supposing they’d win out.
“Sure, I’ll take anything you have. Let me sweep out, run errands, drive a car, learn anything. Pay me anything, I don’t care how little if I’m surplus, if it’s just a question of your taking me on, for honest, I’m in a fog. I can’t get my bearings.
“I just feel if I could get back where I was before, just in the same place and the same kind of work and with some of the same old people around me, that would put me on my feet. Gosh, when I think how cocky I was about getting back to the United States – would I turn the world over! Would I get ahead! Would I be my own boss!”
Yes, that’s getting to be the way it is – already – already. Talk to employers. See if it isn’t so.