A young man in Louisiana was called into the US Army during the war to defeat Nazi Germany and their Japanese allies. He was assigned to the signal corps, which involved him in radio technology. Not long after his training had been completed in Utah, the war ended when the Allies drove the third reich into the ground and their demonic leader shot himself in the head in a Berlin bunker.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, so to speak, our American military had teamed up with Albert Einstein to devise a way of using atomic energy to manufacture a super bomb, an atomic bomb, the likes of which no man had ever seen. They used the finished product to inflict atomic explosions on Japan, an event unlike any that mankind had ever witnessed or experienced. In the sweet by and by of progress, we developed technology for peaceful us of atomic power to generate electricity.
When the big war was over, Louis was released from his military training. He returned to Louisiana and studied forestry at Louisiana State University. There he met Kathryn, a hometown girl who was majoring in chemistry.
They married. Soon thereafter, they brought two boys and two girls into this world. Having obtained employment as state forester for the state of Mississippi, they bought a house, using the postwar G.I. bill funds to get a start in post-war America.
Their son, Carey, born to Louis and Kathryn in 1951 on a Friday 13th, July, was photographed while striding through the early days and driveways of the baby boomer generation, while they were living in a suburban neighborhood of houses, many of them financed by the G.I. bill for veterans who had defended the free world in the big war.
Meanwhile, back in Baton Rouge, Kathryn’s mother, a widow, married a prosperous insurance man who had started his own insurance company, because. . . because that’s what Americans do; they start companies to make products and perform services, and to prosper.
Carey’s maternal grandmother, Lelia, and her husband enjoyed travels in different parts of the world. Somewhere along the way, Lelia purchased a precious pottery vase, which had been set upon a marble table top in Lelia’s living room.
Many years later, the vase was brought to our home, where Carey and Pat have lived since 1992, on our wooded hillside in the Appalachian mountain, near Boone. We appreciate the forest in our back yard, the rear of our 1.6 acres. It does not represent the classic American suburban yard. We don’t even have to mow a lawn! The forest in is a tribute to my father, Louis Rowland, the forester, and his service to our USA in the Army signal corps, back in the day. In a moment of reflection on life’s precious memories and artifacts, I set these items on a deck rail and snapped into photographic blogdom the memory of daddy’s shortwave radio and mama’s vase that her mother had given her.
The short wave no longer sends signals across radio waves of the world, because i don’t know how to operate it. But my dad did, and I remember him. The vase represents a prosperous life, now long gone, that had been lived by my grandmother in her travels around . . . what Louis Armstrong called a Wonderful World.
I have chosen to utilize this blog space with these memories and a link to the song that I wrote about my generation:
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