Ellie Hanold 8-5
5-12-14
Social Studies
Interview Transcript
M: ME
G: MY GRANDMA

M: Where did you live growing up?
G: I lived in Indian Hill estates in Wilmette. I lived in a red brick Georgian House that my mother and father built. I was 2 when they moved there. We were renting around the corner because my father hadn’t lived here, my mother and my father haven’t lived here that long. Indian Hill Estates was just starting. They built a really pretty red brick house just around the corner from where we were living.
M: How many siblings do you have and how old are they compared to you?
G: I have one older sister and she is two and a half years older than I am and she was three classes ahead of me in school. Her name was Marion just like your mom.
M: What was your childhood like?
G: Well, we rode our bikes a lot and in the summer we used to hope that the good humor man came by. And um, I went to school, not far away, I could walk to school.
M: What school?
G: Well this is an interesting part when you said you wanted to ask me about during the war. My grammar school which is Harper School and people at your school probably know friends who go to Harper School was built during the war. And that was very unusual. It was built when I was going into the second grade, which means 1942, which is right in the middle of the war. And um, because all the building materials were needed for what me call munitions the ammunsions for fighting the war they didn’t have those supplies available for building new houses, new schools, new anything. So the fact that Harper School was built at that time was very unusual and it was a really pretty red brick schools people wanted to come see it from all over because first of all there weren’t many and second of all it was very very pretty, so that was a big deal. Somebody got permission to have the materials I guess the schooling situation in Wilmette Illinois mush have been considered pretty critical that they had to get another school and so they got some kind of special permission to um build and not just because they felt like it.
M: I know you were very young when the war was happening but do you have any childhood memories that have to do with the war?
G: What was fun for children, things were rationed that means you couldn’t go to the store and buy as much of something as you might want, you had little stamps that were like little coupons and you could buy enough as long as you had a coupon but if you used all of your coupons then you couldn’t buy anymore until the next month or whatever. The gas was rationed so you couldn’t just drive all over everywhere. So one of the things people did was they had vegetable gardens, and that of course was something that the young children could participate in because it was fun to help water the garden and weed the garden and pick the vegetables and that sort of thing and you felt like you were doing something but since I was so young obviously it is not like I was participating at some sort of huge level. My father had an injury as a child and so he walked with a limp and as a result, he was not eligible to be in the war and so we didn’t have anyone in our immediate family who was in the war. But, I did have a distant cousin that was a landing signal officer on an aircraft carrier you see it in movies and news reels that sometimes someone in the navy is standing on the aircraft carrier and he has like flares in his hands and he is signaling to the planes as they are coming in so they know what to do to prepare because landing on an aircraft carrier isn’t so easy, it is a rather small space so you have to hit the right part of it just right and he (her cousin) was a landing signal officer which I have to say that we thought was very fascinating and exciting but that was really my closest relative that I knew anything about what they did in the war. Another memory that I have from the war is that my mother was a volunteer at Greta