 Hello and welcome to your Sheboygan County Historical Society's Museum for our Sheboygan goes to war the home front during World War II. I'm Travis Gross, the executive director here at the museum and I'd like to invite you along on the story of the home front in Sheboygan. I'm Al Herwig. I'm 92 years old. I started work when I was 16 years old at the Polarware Company. I worked there for 47 years and they took me into the service and I was over on Guam and I took my training in Camp Perry, Virginia. We went through the St. Marie Sue Canal over to Hawaii and then over to Guam and I didn't realize how close I was to Japan until I got home and I looked at a map and I repaired great marine engines on the LSTs. On the LST I also surfboarded behind an LST on a door from a cabin that was laying in the junk and then on Guam when there was an invasion here was one of the ships that had, it was like an army tank. It isn't exactly the right name for it but it had a track on it like a tank did but it floated because on shore there was coral and there was deep ditches in the coral. You couldn't even walk out. You cut your knee up to your knees and they delivered them in on shore with these tractors or amphibious, we call it a tank but it was called something else. Then I have a picture of Guam. Here's a picture of Guam before they bombed it because the ships had us shell the island because Japan was on the island and they had to shell it for I'm going to say a week or two and then after they were all done when I came on the island, this is how it looked. There wasn't a house standing and the Guamanians they all went up into the hills to get away from the shelling. It was just hell and I had heard a story that Japan said the Americans were so bad they would rape you and kill you and all of the women, what I heard I don't know if it's true or not but they said that the women jumped off the cliffs with their children just to get away from the Americans. It's a horrible story but that's what I had heard. On Guam we had a submarine from Japan. This was the bow of the submarine. It had three airplanes aboard. One was in like a cooker almost like you would have on your stove. A big cover that was bolted tight. They had to unbolt it and swing it open and get the airplane out. There was two airplanes below and they'd bring it on on the rail and set up the plane and would fall out the wings and then they'd bolt the pontoons on it and in the deck was a crane. Over here you can see the crane standing up. After the plane would come back it would have to land in the water and then they'd bring it back on the rail and put it back on the ship again. I was told that they had wanted to bomb the Suez Canal to stop the shipping from coming over, slowing it down and just to let the Americans know that they could fight but they'd never got that far. The Americans had gotten the ship. I have literature that my daughter had looked up and tells all the whole story about it. When I came back from the war we went, it was after the war was over with. We came through the Golden Gate Bridge and the day after this was in the newspaper that they found a torpedo on the beach so we don't know if it was meant for our ship but we don't think it would have been there that long that somebody wouldn't have seen it because there was a lot of fishermen all over. Of course I had a lot of pictures of pin-ups. I was only 18 years old. When I was on Guam I had my girlfriend's picture along and I found a piece of leather and with the leather I took a nail and I carved pictures on it. On the backside I have a girl and I'm dreaming about her and a palm tree. The thing looked kind of crude but it lasted all these years. Over here I had made silver-near handkerchiefs of Guam and I traded fellas for other pictures. If you look over on the cover on that side there's the atomic bomb. Should I pick it up? I did with a writing paper. I took a razor blade and cut out each color. I had a different paper that I stenciled. I used like a cotton ball or felt because I had no paintbrushes or nothing. These other ones were supposed to represent Tokyo Rose. Tokyo Rose was on the radio program from the Japanese and they'd pick up scuttlebots about people and their kids and they'd say like Johnny your girlfriend is going out with a different fellow and just to knock our spirits down. There's a whole story about her. She just was on the radio programs. Everybody in the Pacific would hear her because she played our kind of music. Every day we had a newspaper and there was pictures of our lives in the service like there were ones where you'd go to the mess hall and you'd pick up a dish and it just came out of the steam and the guy says hurry up your food is ready and you'd have to try to hold it and get your food on it because there are people behind you. So these are all memories of different things. These are in here. I have this collection of pictures from all over the country where the wars were. The Pacific and Germany and Europe and I collected that from ships that came in and I'd ask them for eggs. They maybe were old but not as old as our eggs were and I went to the motor vehicle department and asked them for a piece of wire. I wrapped it around a pencil and I made a hot plate. I dug in the garden and got some clay out of it and I put the wire in there and then I plugged it into the light socket and I took a peach can where peaches came in and I fried eggs in there and I was the head of the camp and we also did I show you the one where I was surfing? We'd save our beer and we'd go out surfing and trying out the LST where we repair the engines and have a little party then right away. So that's I can't think of anything else. Oh on the way back every day just about every day we met a mind floating ones with the prongs out and every time we'd see a mind we'd circle it for about a half a mile well big circle around it anyhow and we shot at it and sometimes it would take a half an hour before we'd hit one of the prongs because the mind was floating up and down the ship was twisting and turning and we met one like I said but it seemed like every day then I wondered what we missed during the night when we couldn't see and that was sort of scary in a sense so when I got home I said we're going to get married life is too short and we were married 70 some years so and I went with her since eighth grade. I am David Martini I am a resident of Keele I used to live in Sheboygan for over 30 years I actually started my military career when I was in high school my senior year in high school I enlisted in the Army Reserve so while the other kids were playing football and stuff I was going to reserve meetings over in Fond du Lac well I went into active duty shortly after that I was a regi in a railroad battalion and I ended up in the combat engineers while in the combat engineers I was in Missouri Georgia a TD wide and the Philippines and Turkey I did a little bit of time in Mexico also I got out of the actual active duty army went into the Air Force reserves for a short while I had medical problems I was eventually discharged so after I got discharged I was looking for something to do and I got involved in the Civil Air Patrol which was a home front type unit and I was one of the men responsible for reorganizing the Sheboygan unit the Sheboygan unit or the Civil Air Patrol actually started I want to say around 42 Civil Air Patrol itself started December 1st 1941 six days prior to Pearl Harbor well the unit the Sheboygan had a unit and it ran continuously until I guess the early 70s and it pretty much died out in mid 90s I was approached by a man trying to restart the unit Gary Thelan and I was approached to get involved with it and I did I was in a unit for 10 years and I ended up eventually becoming the unit commander I was also the historian for the state of Wisconsin for the Wisconsin wing at a Civil Air Patrol as historian my job was to preserve and display artifacts from the Air Force and the Civil Air Patrol related to our state I also kept histories of key personnel in the state and now I've been retired our CAP for about 10 years you know I just don't have getting getting slow and tired I guess but I collect stuff now and part of my hobbies is I like collecting military memorabilia and I have a fondness for World War II and most of the stuff you see on these displays here is World War II on the end here is an actual US Army footlocker and the footlocker was where you kept all your stuff your whole life was basically in this box when you were stationed at a base when you were going from a base to another base you would have a duffel bag it was a big canvas bag probably three feet long he had most of your gear in there and then you might have a grip like a little suitcase we just come grips back into service well then you got to your unit you would have your footlocker and we can talk about things in the footlocker this is actually set up as a museum type display it's not set up like a real footlocker would be a real footlocker is actually a order the way it was laid out and displayed this is set up just for people to see things and this particular footlocker is a whack footlocker which is the women's army corps my wife was part of that but she's not here any this was this is her stuff and she did photography and stuff this is why you see the whack book here and she's got some cameras and things in here and that's no all the whack stuff okay when I was actually on duty I would have a sidearm my sidearm was a 45 colt this is a replica for obvious reasons um but that was my sidearm and you carried your sidearm with you all the time okay um this is the kind of thing you could buy like when I was in the Philippines you could buy this in the basic exchange you put your cigarettes in here let's like a little hut that the natives would have lived in and you could put your cigarettes in the hut and this was your ashtray right here you know they sold all this kind of stuff and all this guy's brought this stuff home okay this is the kind of telephone you would have had on your desk back then and this isn't unique to the army this is just the style of telephone that everybody had back in the day you would dial it you know and most of the time you would end up going through an operator to switchboard and then the operator would connect you to wherever you wanted to go this here is a serving tray it's an ammoed steel these were put out for fundraisers like a war bond drives and things so you could actually buy these or be awarded these for selling so many war bonds and things over here is the typewriter this was pretty much a standard typewriter I would have used back in the day you know I was in the headquarters company most of the time I would have been a standard typewriter I would have actually used and that's a portable you can fold up the case and take it with you down from the phone down from the typewriter is a phonograph that is an actual us army phonograph I restored that it was in beat-up condition when I got it I totally restored it it is totally functional later on we can play it if you guys might hear it play but back over here there's a field that a clerk box or field desk we can see the coca-cola bottle my pipe tobacco my pipe that would have been all my office stuff I would have kept in there my paperwork and no stuff to pertaining no to the office work over here are standard posters of the time this with this poster here would have been in a school because you're buying you're buying a worse that saving stamps and so many stamps would be worth a bond so this would have been in a school the one on the end down there for secure future it says buy war bonds that would have been aimed at the adults and that particular poster you notice the ruralness the guys got a tractor a barn that was aimed at the midwest here wisconsin and stuff they even got the rural type people in the middle here is you say see it says build and fight the navy cbs join or voluntary induction or enlistment applied to your nearest navy recruiting station you may also volunteer for service with the army engineers see your nearest army recruiting station the thing about the navy cbs and the army engineers you could actually enlist up to age 50 if you had a trade such as a carpenter bricklayer cat operator crane operator whatever you were wanted you know so you could enlist and of course everybody knows about the glenn miller band which is probably the most famous band at a time period this particular poster is post war glenn miller was killed in 44 i believe when his plane went down in the english channel uh after after glenn miller disappeared text benekie took over the band and then we have rave mckinley so i'm thinking this is probably mid 50s but glenn miller stuff is impossible to find anything original glenn miller you know is impossible to find other than records records are everywhere but posters and things are impossible to find up on the wall over here there are four uniforms the one closest to dave was my wife's uniform she was the finance officer for the sheboygan wing of the the sheboygan squadron the silver air patrol the next uniform was mine majors i was the commander of the unit i was also the wing historian for the state of wisconsin the uniform next to it is our field uniform and if you can if you can zero in on that orange patch on the pocket the bird dogs that is the original patch from world war two of the sheboygan unit i found one of the members that had one and he allowed us to borrow it and i mean i had a embroidery shop make copies of them but that patch was pretty much lost the history but after i found the one we had patches made so that patch survived the only difference between the original world war two patch and the new one the original world war two patch said sheboy no one says sheboygan county and we're thinking we're not sure but we're thinking walt disney may have designed that walt disney designed a lot of the patches and things for the army air corps and the silver air patrol and stuff but we're not sure on that hi here we are today at our event talking about the prisoner of war that were kept in sheboygan county towards the end of world war two we did have two locations in our county that did house german pow one was camp sheboygan here there's a nice photo of some of the prisoners that were at the old insane asylum that was located on the property that now is valrath companies warehouses the sheboygan police department back in that area they were housed there in 1945 for one year there was a little over 200 that were were housed there so the asylum was vacant at that point and they decided that they could use it for this purpose so they were sent us troops were sent with some supplies to build a fence around the property and and then they brought in the the pow's who then went about cleaning up the hospital so they had places to stay they were the ones who got the beds back in place the furniture back in place did some minor repairs so the windows didn't leak as badly things like that camp sheboygan was pretty unique because they did keep them there for one full year so they were there over the winter camp plymouth on the other hand most people will remember that that was at the county fairgrounds in in plymouth so the troops that were housed there actually was two years 44 and 1945 they primarily used the 4h building that i believe is still out on the grounds that was the bunk houses for the for the pow's the american troops who were there to guard them like this gentleman here they were the ones who stayed in the tents so kind of this idea the sense that the prisoners had the better structures and the guards the americans were the ones who housed in the tents um so in the winter time they took them out but then again in the spring they brought the troops back to the uh plymouth fairgrounds plymouth was an interesting place they both actually had a lot of the local people come and visit with the prisoners at these camps primarily because at that time in the 1940s wisconsin's population was about a third of german ancestry so there's a commonality there was a familiarity with with these prisoners uh so you had community members that would go to these prisons and have conversations through the fences or share some german baked goods like stelen and and and items like that um it got to a point where these prisoners probably felt like they were back home in germany uh that they were treated so well these these four i love this photo because these are prisoners of war and what we see here on their on their pant legs are the markings the pw for prisoner of war now this photo is so great because look at how happy they are look at how healthy they look and these are prisoners they had their mascot dog i'm not sure the story where that is if it was a stray they just took in but i mean they certainly don't look like prisoners of war uh that's how well uh they were treated here in the united states uh there were tens of thousands of germans that were brought here to the united states fort mccoy in western wisconsin was one of the hubs in the midwest that they first went to initially and then from there they were partitioned out to other locations of some of the old ccc camps in northern wisconsin were used for for the prisoners old buildings such as the asylum around the state were used as camps as well so again it was a very short time but one of the population in a population of people in our county that really benefited from the the prisoners were the farmers because the prisoners were allowed to leave the camps during the day and they went to work out in the farm fields doing harvesting and they especially went to work in the area canning companies so just about every community back in the forties had a cannery and these prisoners would work side by side with citizens of the county uh doing the work in the cannery canning food for the stores so a very unique situation when you think about and you and you hear the stories of how american POWs were treated in germany or especially over in the pacific theater a complete night and day comparison of how we treated the germans here the germans came here because towards the end of the war 44 45 uh england was primarily the place that most german POWs were going to in the war and german uh excuse me england's camps were filling up with with prisoners so they made a deal with the united states the united states would start taking some of the prisoners overseas so shipped over to the east coast from the east coast they were put on trains to numerous different camps and forts around the country and from there they were divided up into smaller uh camps such as this a couple hundred few hundred people at at each location so here's a photo i believe this was taken at the plymouth railroad station of the german POWs lined up having just arrived here in plymouth before they were sent off to the county fairgrounds they marched they walked them from the train depot in plymouth to the camp so they walked right down the street people in plymouth came out to see them and uh i don't want to use the word parade but it had that kind of atmosphere to it people came and watched them come into town uh a personal story um with one of these and i found it truly fascinating a robert lorenz told the story of when he was a young boy back in 1945 and they were sitting down for a family supper and a military vehicle pulled up outside their house and two soldiers with a man between them uh came up the sidewalk to the front door uh the door bell rang his father went to answer robert's father went to answer the door and robert remembers as a small boy that whoever this person was spoke with his his father for a few minutes in german uh robert not knowing german didn't know what they were saying uh but it turned out that this person was a p o w from the camp in sheboygan and he had caught wind from one of the local women who would come to the camp to speak with the prisoners and whatnot that there was a person of the exact same name uh living a few doors down from her so they went and investigated and in fact it was robert lorenz's uncle his father's brother uh robert's father had immigrated to canada from uh germany right before world war two started and from there he made his way down to sheboygan wisconsin so robert's father hadn't seen any of his family members in over 10 years at this point uh and the only family member that robert had met from uh his father's family was this uncle and and he didn't really meet him he saw him at the door saw him have a short conversation with his father and that was it never to see him again um stories like that you know it's just unbelievable and how welcoming it was and the fact that these prisoners were allowed to leave the camps um albeit he was guarded but to go work in the field what what is keeping these german soldiers here harvesting what's keeping them from just running off into the hills there is nothing there were a few guards but they could have most definitely done it but they realized that surprisingly even though they were prisoners they had it pretty well they were out they were working they were making money um they did they were yep so after the yeah after the war they had come uh they were sent back to germany but after everything settled down with their responsibilities and whatnot over in germany a lot of them moved back to the states and wisconsin especially mm-hmm i'm marge madden a member of the museum for a very long time and we brought a few items here for you to look at and we hope you'll be interested history is dying if you don't keep it going i'm telling you especially the young folk what i brought here i think i'd like to show you is uh a paper that we used to write letters it was called a female i believe v stands for victory and it opens up like so and here's where you write your letter and tell your boyfriend how much you missed him and you wish he'd be back and blah blah blah we could write what we wanted to but there's a picture here that emeble talked about that's how it looks when they wrote the letter and when you're finished writing you fold it back like this and there's a crease here you fold that like so and then you put the address on there where your sweetheart might be and he might get this a month or so later and then he will open it up and if there's room here he'll write back and then this is what it looks like with the mail that he gets and emma talk about that that's her book here oh and this little that used to be a t-shirt but as the years went by the cotton wore out and i tossed it and i thought i'm going to save this and that's what this is we can do it and that refers to ladies like emma and myself who worked at the core factory and we worked in the piston pardon me i will and we worked in the piston ring department and that's when we sort of found out that men thought they knew everything but i'm here to tell you they don't the people on the machines would stand there and put the piston ring in their slot press their foot down and the machine would go around like that then they would take that piston ring out and fill up the carton and then i would come along as chief inspector and i would pull some of those rings out and look at them i wish i had a micrometer to show you how we gauge the width of that ring if it had burrs on it yet we did what the workers hated we'd say you have to do these all over again and that's why if you want friends don't be an inspector but that's what i did for a couple years and then when the war was slowing down we didn't have to make so many piston rings anymore these all went to the allied air force then they shifted us over to another department which was no longer war required but they wanted to keep us busy so they put us in the brass department and you can keep that department because we live out of there shortly but that's a little bit of the history what we did at kohler and emma did the same thing you want me to talk about it when i okay the same thing we first of all did the there were boxes that came with stacks of of these brown looking piston rings and we inspected them and like marge said we threw out those that eight inches i think eight inches yeah yeah and and uh anything that looked bad we there were culls we didn't use those and then later on somebody asked me if i'd like to be an inspector in the next department where those that passed the first test they were taken over to the lap or micro lap what did they call it hyperlap the hyperlap those are big machines and there was room for five discs to be put in there and that's where they were finished and like marge also said about a micrometer i had to inspect everyone not each one at every once in a while you'd pick one out and again you'd throw out those that weren't any good but i worked there and that and for kohler for maybe about a year and then i i used to ride the bus no the street car from michigan avenue out i don't know where it stopped in kohler but then when um after i was tired of that i went to the garden toy company where i could walk from home just a few blocks away and there they made first aid kits and my job was to um take the basic kit to the department where it was sprayed with a dark green color and then i moved it out and then later on they put a decal on it to mention that it was a safe first aid kit and then there was also another line where they made the um the framework while it was about on this ends big framework in which later on bomb fins were put into these crates and i was a relief girl there when somebody had a break for 10 minutes i take the their place and come back to the next and then after a while i thought i'd like to go back to stenographic work because i had been in washington dc when i first graduated from high school there were seven of us decided we'd like to go to washington dc because civil service was looking for women because the men were all in into the service by that time and so we had all taken the commercial course in high school shorthand typing all of that and um i um we passed the i passed my test in august but i couldn't leave until i was 18 they didn't allow you until 18 so i finally got there in october and by that time some of the other girls had already arrived and they lived they found a house to live in where well the pictures are awfully small but we lived there in a house on the northwest side of of town called carolina place and we would ride the trolley downtown and from there we would transfer to a bus and then we would get across key bridge to arlington virginia and that's where i worked for the um marine headquarters in the uh what was it called anyhow i had to do a lot of typing and in those days when you typed you had to make three extra copies you had carbon paper which was just a black sheet of paper between each one and if you made an error you had to lift that up corrected all of them and they all these four copies all went to different departments and about a year after that some of the girls decided they would go on move on to california one went to alaska and some of us decided to come back to shiboy again including me my twin brother had already was already in the navy and my younger brother was planning on being in the marines so i thought i should be home with take care of my health take care of my appearance we're a little old elderly so i did that and then i um decided i would like to go back to office work again and i got a job at the evil writer lumber company in the lumber office and my future husband we graduated from high school in the same at the same time but we never knew each other in high school and he worked in the other department in the woodworking department and that's how we met and eventually married so when i was in washington we used to buy a pass that we could use for either the um streetcar or the trolley and it cost a dollar 25 cents for a week and that's all it was necessary and you could get wherever you wanted to get in washington so it was a lot of fun we had a lot of good times one time at christmas time our landlady's daughter who was in high school told us oh she had heard we could cut down our own christmas tree if we had like we didn't know it but it was a national forest and here i was given the hatchet and i was in the middle of cutting down the one we had picked out and all of a sudden a squad car came along and two officers were what are you girls doing well we heard we could get free christmas trees out so how are you going to get at home well we had never thought about that so no one behold they took it home for us and we decorated and we had a very nice christmas but i want to mention one more thing when we left kohler we had to go talk to the big hunchers way over in the office up there tell them why we want to leave you couldn't leave Germany had surrendered in may but we couldn't leave because the war still wasn't over so i we had to talk to them personally and ask them and he asked us where we were going and why we're going will we be doing post-war work over there oh absolutely you know so we moved out east for body air that was the history of working at kohler we worked for the hc penny company and i might add that it was a submarine base and we girls thought we had to add to the war effort right was 5000 sailors there no that's the place to go well they were they were all in the war yet no yeah but i think that he was in the merchant room yeah so we were over there for about a year and um we saw uh just before japan surrendered we had to go back home so we're going less than a year but at least that core work was very very difficult and we were happy as hell to get out of there but i just want to mention that we had to get permission can you imagine that well i had to get permission to leave washington too and i said no i'm leaving because i've got a month vacation due and i've got uh sick days and i had accumulated enough a month vacation where did we're there before i for that when you work for civil service you had benefits i don't know what i earned in those days but probably 20 cents an hour maybe i know the the foreign got 90 cents an hour and we thought wow that must be a big payday one of the other things that was very interesting during the war our church trinity downtown in sheboygan put out a newsletter for our servicemen every month they'd get a newsletter and um i brought two of them along and one of the issues in the january issue of 1945 mr. elford young from the elford young clothing company he thought it'd be a good idea to have a picture taken of the church on christmas eve of the school children always had their programs in and so he hired a photographer to come and take a picture and it was included in the next issue which the guys all really like because they had gone through school there and this was the staff that put out the newsletter there were different positions i was an inquiring reporter whenever we'd see any of our servicemen downtown or at church we would talk to them write a little bit about them in the newsletter just interesting facts not anything secret or anything like that and um so mr. young also thought it was nice that we had a staff who was willing to do that there were i think about 18 of us and then he had a banquet for us at the grand hotel at that time it was a different world you know so and that pretty well sums up i what what i did emma i wish we had ration books here yeah have all of you young people heard of ration books you didn't get a lot of sugar candy was hard to find if you wanted a nice chocolate candy bar you got in line when you heard chocolate was in and you got in line and then when they waited on you could buy that one big candy bar wasn't it wasn't it shoes were rationed too i thought shoes i thought you were limited to buy two or three pair a year that's all well that's all we bought anyway emma well i know but some people like shoes more than we did we had shoes for the work day and we had shoes for sunday we had two pairs of shoes hi i'm hurl and this is my wife charmaine kenevers we both lived during the second world war with our families and we had a lot of things that were important to be done and one was really the expansion of the gardens the victory gardens and what that meant in addition to the normal gardens that most families had in those days generally we found a place where we could grow more things and my dad bought i shouldn't say bought he rented a plot of land north of sheboygan which was good farmland however there was one major problem with it and the major problem was it was the great guy up there that controls rain sometimes it rained adequately and sometimes it didn't and there was no faucet available for water so can you imagine little guys with a bicycle here and a gallon of water here here trying to pedal out to the gardens my wife also had a lot to do and she'll tell you about their victory garden now charmaine hello well i'm happy to be here today and it's a good thing for the younger folks to learn all about the home front during uh during the the forties during the war years i grew up in kohler and my parents had a victory garden and in fact there's a picture of my mother right here with some of the produce it's from august 1941 and this photograph was taken right across the street from which is uh the upper upper road in kohler across from the cemetery where they had the victory gardens there were also some victory gardens where the the streetcar no longer ran and they they took out the tracks and so i remember weeding the garden it was never my favorite thing to do but the vegetables were fresh and delicious and it was a good time of life and i think that's all that i really remember about victory gardens except that everybody had a victory garden so we're happy to be here today and we wish the best to everybody good afternoon my name is henry young i have been a member of the sheboygan county historical society for over 20 years and retired within the last year from being the program director for the third saturday programs which in looking back over the years we've done 10 11 straight years of programs every saturday third saturday you'll notice a change now where we're moving on to more programs outside of the museum or other things but we're happy to be here i am in proud to have three of my publications here one the sheboygan press it's in a color page and two chicago chicago tribunes from 19 whatever the year the war ended 45 may 7th i believe we're happy to be part of this be invited to be part of this program today we have a lot of pictures here articles that have been brought either from the research center or from our homes personally and we like to share it with our audience i know that about an hour ago our attendance was just a little over 125 so we're happy that we had a nice turnout for today's gathering i'm proud always to be able to help the museum wherever i can either on the financial development committee or the third saturday committee and uh it was tough to me for to say goodbye but it's fun to come back as a so-called veteran and share my knowledge and share one of the programs that we're experiencing today we've had several guests that have stopped and have talked about their war years and not many from world war two because they'd be close to 100 now or high 80s 90s so we're happy to display our our wearers here with the audience that are coming by today logan my name is logan benin and i've been a member of the museum and the third saturday committee for about six years and this was by way of invitation invitation from henry young who asked me some years ago whether i would like to join and i said yes the only newspaper here that i saved and i was 12 years old when world war two ended it was this one the one in the red headline and obviously it caught my eye and i put it away i have many other newspapers but they're all subsequent to this particular great event the sheboygan press was quite a different publication in those days charlie broton mr charlie broton was the editor of the sheboygan press and those of you who know sheboygan know that broton drive along the lakefront and sheboygan was named after him as is the sheboygan march and the march as well so i enjoy being here too i enjoy history i've always loved history even though i was a teacher of language arts at local high school south high school and history's always been one of my passions as well this particular book is available in the mead library it is uh on the home front in sheboygan and it's full of things that pertain to sheboygan or world war two what it was like and my recollections are quite sharp because even though i was only 12 when the war ended it was the topic of the day people talk every day about the war and it was very often on the almost always on the front page and very often in the headlines as you can see so um it uh it it was something i remember quite well and um i i i treasure the papers i have although i have a couple dozen more papers they all are about events that followed after the end of world war two so i'm happy to be here i enjoy this kind of thing and glad to give back to my community i'd like to add a couple comments of my personal recollections when i would logan and i are the same day went to the same high school central high school in sheboygan but there were things i remember from world war two such as when there was a us o club uh in the old recs theater in sheboygan people that had their victory gardens my father had a little sticker on his car with a either a letter a or a b or c designating what type of i think that was a was four gallons a week i think four gallons yeah if you had an a sticker you were close to heaven and i remember when they sold in the grade school every friday i think it was they would sell saving stamps 10 cents little stamps you put them in the book and when you had 18 dollars and 50 cents worth of stamps you could get a bond and within 10 years that 18 dollars and 50 cents was worth 25 dollars although many people didn't hold on to the bonds that long you were allowed to cash them in and most of us did