The Unforgettable Christmas of 1944

Below is an article my late father, Dan Phillips, wrote and submitted to a Christmas story contest in our hometown newspaper. It was selected for publication in August 1999. The story details his experience as a six-year-old boy during Christmastime of 1944.

Unforgettable Christmas of 1944

By Robert Daniel Phillips

MY MOST MEMORABLE CHRISTMAS was the Christmas of 1944, for many reasons, including the gifts! World War II was in full-swing and shoes, sugar, meat, tires, cigarettes and gasoline were rationed. In the fall of 1941 my parents had bought a new, two-bedroom bungalow on the outskirts of Louisville, Kentucky, with a full basement, for $2,100. My Dad had finished the attic for two more, large bedrooms. At six, I was the oldest of four boys, I was in the first grade at St. Dennis Catholic School, and my world was really expanding.

When I started school, I was left-handed. But the powers that were decided it would be better if they could change me to a right-hander. I do not remember it being a big deal until the janitor-maintenance man told me that when the new military rifles were fired, the empty shells would hit a lefty in the face; and if I wanted to be a good soldier, I would change to a righty. Well, if there was anything any six year old wanted to be in 1944, it was to grow up to be a good soldier. I don’t remember any problems except the occasional lapse. Each day, the nuns would lead us in prayers for our country and our servicemen. One of the hooks the nuns used to get us to print neater was that we could send letters to servicemen, which would make them feel good and they would fight better and win the war sooner. If Sister Mary Raymond said it, this six year old knew it was true.

Every night, Mom would lead us boys in a “God Bless” litany of family members and friends in the services. Uncle Max with General Patton in Africa, Sicily and Europe; Uncle Shaggs with Merrill in Burma; Uncle Myron with General Clark in Europe; Uncle Carlton on the U.S.S. Enterprise, an aircraft carrier in the Pacific; Great Uncle Chester with the 11th Infantry with General McArthur; Cousin Jimmy, a waist-gunner on a Superforttress bomber in the Pacific; Cousins Tubby and Paul on Destroyers in the Pacific.

Every evening, after the dishes were finished, Mom would sit at the kitchen table and write letters to family servicemen (I wondered how she wrote so straight on paper without lines) and Dad and I would get to add a few lines to each letter. When she put a letter in an envelope, you cannot imagine the thoughts my imagination conjured up about what it would be like when and where those letters were opened. She would read aloud the letters she received, and it was really a thrill when a line or two was directed to me.

Shortly before Christmas, the nun instructed us first graders to color a mimeographed picture of Santa Claus and when my Mom saw it, she gave me a note to take to school. The next morning on the bus, a third-grader laughed at me as I was trying to read the note: it was written in cursive, and I was holding it upside down. A big guy, seventh- or eight-grader, read it. Mom wanted some of the mimeographed pictures, if there were any to spare, to send to family members in the service after I colored them.

When I arrived home that afternoon with my pictures, Mom and two neighbor ladies were sitting at the kitchen table, crying. Aunt Irene, Mom’s eldest sister, had called from Cleveland and said she had a telegram from the Army saying Uncle Shaggs, Mom’s brother, was missing in action. Later that evening I was coloring the pictures and Mom was washing the dishes. I was asking her how they could have lost a big man like Uncle Shaggs, when Dad called me into the living room. When I went in there, he told me to quit pestering Mom. From the tone of his voice I knew I had better quit or I would be catching a crack. Behind me Mom said, “Don’t be too hard on him, he doesn’t understand.”

When I turned, my Mom was standing there barefoot (shoes were rationed), in a house dress and apron, wiping her tears with a tea towel. My Dad dropped his newspaper and leapt from his chair, and held her in his arms as she sobbed on his shoulder. He said, “Don’t worry, Marion. Shaggs was the toughest son of a gun to ever come out of Cleveland, Ohio. And if the Japs have him, feel sorry for the Japs.” I wondered how anyone could feel sorry for the Japs. Mom continued to write letters and pray for Uncle Shaggs as if he were not lost.

On Sundays when the weather was nice, Mom and I would walk the two and a half miles to St. Dennis Church for Mass. Before we left, Mom would cut pieces of cardboard to cover the holes in her shoes. She would lean on me when she changed them, as the old pieces wore through. On the first trip my brother George made with us, it was raining when Mass ended. We started home when the rain stopped, and an elderly couple offered us a ride. The lady wore a hat like Mom’s, with the veil across the forehead. As we were going along, my brother George announced, with the aplomb that only a five-year-old can muster, “My mom has holes in her shoes, but she has cardboard in her purse to cover them.” Mom explained to the surprised couple that, with four active boys and Dad needing work shoes, she would make do without. Every Sunday thereafter, that couple would wait for us at Hudson Avenue and Cane Run Road and give us a ride to and from church. I cannot recall their names, but may God bless them wherever they are today!

My brothers and I were warned not to expect too much for Christmas, as everything was rationed and Mom and Dad felt it was traitorous to buy anything from the black market. A few weeks before Christmas, Dad started to go to the basement every evening after supper. The only time we were allowed to go down there was when he called me down to stick my finger in a hole in a piece of wood. When he was satisfied with the size of the hole, he ran me upstairs, and that was the last any of us boys were allowed down there. Shortly after that, my Mom brought home a big, old, ugly black rubber thing some neighbor had given her. When I got home from school the next day, Mom had broken blisters that she had gotten trying to cut that rubber truck-tire inner tube with her scissors. Dad took the tube to the basement and cut out her patterns with tin snips. The next evening, she had lots of cuts on her fingers where she had tried to sew the rubber material, but the needle would slip off her thimble and stick into her fingers. Dad was pretty upset with her for hurting herself again by not using an awl. We did not have one so Dad walked the two miles to the Parkland A&P store and got an icepick. (He walked because the motor in our family car, a 1932 Plymouth, was bad, and parts could not be had until after the war.)

After the holes were punched, it was easy to sew whatever she was making. These were the days before Band-Aids, and so they wrapped her wounded digits with strips of white cloth, and tied a knot on top. With the cloth ends standing up, Dad said it looked like she had a double fistful of baby rabbits. When she wiggled her fingers, us boys thought that was uproariously funny!

About a week before Christmas our Grandfather George Phillips, known as “Boss Phillips” in Warren County, Kentucky — but “Pap” to us grandchildren — came to Louisville with a pickup truck-load of gallon cans of sorghum molasses. He had boiled it down to sell at the farmer’s market. Sugar was rationed and people used sorghum molasses for sweetener. That evening Pap taught Mom and Dad how to make molasses taffy. First, you boil it down to a certain thickness, and then pour it out on a piece of waxed paper and let it cool. Dad broke the wooden handle on the family butcher knife trying to break off a piece, and he went in the basement to get a claw hammer (which mom washed first) to break the taffy. Molasses taffy was the greatest candy you ever ate. First you had to “waller” a chunk in your mouth forever until it softened, and then you got to chew it for what seemed like forever. When Mom said she would like to have enough molasses to make candy for the neighborhood kids, Pap brought in five extra cans of molasses; I got to count them! Aunt Earlene Honnaker also sent two shopping bags full of home-dried apples! Every night until Christmas, Mom made taffy after us boys were put to bed, until she had enough molasses taffy for every family on the 3300 block of Hudson Avenue, and then some.

The Christmas tradition at our house is that the children are put to bed early, and after Santa has time to come, the kids are awakened and the gifts are opened on Christmas Eve. The toys are played with, and the kids are taken back to bed, as they nod off. I will never forget the tree that year. It was lit in all of its glory with all the presents around it. (A fully-lit Christmas tree was no mean trick in those days because the lights were series, and if one light went out, all of the lights on that string went out, and it was hard to find the bad bulb. And maddening if two lights went out at the same time.) Under the tree, there was a Garland “M1” rifle, a Thompson submachine gun and a 45 Colt automatic pistol with — what do you suppose the holsters were made of? — you guessed it, truck-tire inner tube cut and sew with red, white and blue thread, with a “US” sewn into each side. Shoot, we had enough armament to start our own war. Also, there was a big, painted board with two wagon wheels on the back, and two spoked doll carriage wheels on the front, complete with ropes to each side of the front axle for steering, and a painted push stick. At the time, we boys were not too impressed with it.

The day after Christmas some of the neighborhood boys laughed at our wooden guns, but by lunchtime their guns made of “potmetal” were broken, and ours looked better than ever. After lunch Mom brought out the pushcart and it was an instant success. Not only did the neighborhood boys line up to ride it, they lined up to push it. If President Roosevelt knew what a weapon we had there, he would have immediately confiscated it for the war effort. Shoot - as a tank, it blew up more Panzer Tanks than General Patton ever dreamed of. And as a B17 of Flying Superfortress B29 Bomber, it wiped out more Jap and Kraut cities than existed, and as a P38 or Mustang or Naval Hellcat fighter plane, it cleared the skies of all Japanese-German fighters, bombers and kamikazes (suicide bombers) until we were all super aces. As a Marine Corps landing craft, we whacked every Japanese-held island in the South Pacific, and as the USS Seawolf Submarine, we snuck into Tokyo Bay and wiped out the Jap Navy. And in my mind’s eye, it was all done with some kid steering that cart who had a chunk of molasses taffy in his jaw, trying not to slobber on himself. The Lord only knows how many “banzai” (Japanese suicide) attacks our wooden weapons wiped out. You can bet with our arsenal, none of my brothers or I had to be Krauts or Japs when we chose up sides of the war. And every man in that block-long Hudson Avenue addition spent the final eight months of WWII scrounging replacement wheels for that cart as they broke or wore out. Our weapons lasted so long that my youngest brother, John — born in 1955 — had some to play with, repainted a thousand times at least!

One warm late winter afternoon, we got off the school bus to find six or eight neighborhood ladies in our front yard, laughing, crying and almost dancing, letting us all know they had “found” Marion’s brother, Uncle Shaggs. It seemed he and thirty-some men had just walked out of the jungle in Burma. When the men started getting home from work, Mr. Barbee gave my Dad a lift, and he bought four cases of “92” beer and put them in a washtub with ice and soda pop, and they had a block party. As the party went on, my mother would start to stare, cry, and then she would laugh through her tears. I can not imagine the highs of emotions and relief she went through that day.

I have the letter Uncle Shaggs wrote her on Christmas Day, 1945 from Rangoon, Burma. He said, “I was ‘carping to the Padre’ (Catholic Priest) about not getting to come home because the war had ended over four months ago. The Padre told me there was no way the army would turn us jungle troopers loose on the American people until we settled down, became civilized again, and the sooner the better.”

As I look back on that Christmas over fifty years ago, I am filled with pride of my parents, a young couple with a growing family who were too patriotic to deal in the black market, or buy or sell ration stamps. I remember Mom, after talking it over with my Dad, giving Mrs. Ruth Lawrence a five-pound sugar ration stamp when all of her stamps had burned in a kitchen fire. My mother was the daughter of Polish emigrants, orphaned at twelve, and she and Uncle Shaggs were passed around older, married brother and sisters until they graduated high school and went on their own. Dad, Jim Phillips, was a farm boy from southern Kentucky with a ninth-grade education who had come to Louisville to be a construction laborer during the Great Depression, and by hard work, worked himself into the steamfitter-pipefitter trade. He was helping build the Charlestown, Indiana Ammunition Plant when the war ended. I am proud of their patriotism and their sense of family pride, inspiration, sacrifice and responsibility in working it out so they could give us boys “The Unforgettable Christmas of 1944.”

I only “tolt” two lies in this whole story:

2. I doubt Uncle Shaggs ever knew what “carping” meant, and if he did, he never said so or wrote it.

My mother, Marion Phillips, passed away in 1988 and my Dad, Jim Phillips, lived with his second wife in Green Township, Indiana, and built the Maple Grove Mobilehome Park and store before passing away in 2006 in New Port Richey, Florida. Uncle Max, retired, lives on Patty Court in New Port Richey.

(Editor’s note: Max passed away in 2011. Dan Phillips retired in 1999 after a lifelong career as a steamfitter-pipefitter. He lived between Indiana and Florida until he passed in 2008.)

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