My grandfather, Master Sergeant Peter Lefavi (ret), fought in the Pacific front in WWII, serving on a B-17 bomber. He was a career military man, serving in the Air Force (after it was formed) until he retired. He died after a long fight with Alzheimer in December of 2000.

This, though, is the story of my grandmother, Dorothy Lefavi. I recently talked with her about what it was like to be a U.S. citizen during WWII. As you'll read, it had its own hardships and even casualties as people did their best to support the war from home. I hope this is informative for everyone.

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I met your grandfather in 1940. It was open house at Chanute Air Force Base in Rantoul, Illinois, the largest technical training base in the U.S., and I went there with two friends who lived Kankakee (Chanute is 60 miles south). We drove down to the air force base and walked across it, and two fellas offered to show us the base. Since we didn’t know where we were going, we accepted. They invited us to stay for the dance that night, first taking us to dinner and a show. Your grandfather kept coming to Kankakee after that.

Since he didn’t have a car, he kept hiring friends to take him to Kankakee. His home base was Mitchell field in NY where he was assigned after training. Before returning there, he proposed to me. He sent the engagement ring in the mail after he left.

The war started December 7th, 1941, and then I was married to your grandfather on January 1st, 1942, in Tucson, AZ. I didn’t want to get married if war started, but he talked me into it. I went by Greyhound to Tucson and married in a Methodist church there. One of the men from his outfit was there with his girlfriend as attendants. Your grandfather left the day after we were married for the south Pacific. The next time I saw him was in the union railroad station in Chicago, IL, about three years later.

It was the time of gas and food rationing, with books of stamps for gasoline and food staples such as sugar. Everyone was in the same boat then, and you didn’t think about it much. I took the civil service exam and then went to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio for work. I worked as a typist in one of the offices. While working in Wright-Patterson, I would take the train from Springfield, Ohio, to visit my family in Illinois because of the gas rationing. During some of the time when most of the men were gone it was difficult for businesses to find help. At one time, they needed some one on the gas island, so I worked at a gas station in Kankakee.

Airmail letters used onion skin paper, and we had APO’s to write to. Your grandfather wrote everyday while away, but the mail was censored, so some of it was occasionally cut out. I would get several letters at a time. I wrote back to him everyday, too.

While he was in the South Pacific, they would fly into Australia for a break. He would send gifts from there such as sheepskin rugs - a pink one and a white one - and a shell necklace. He would use broken pieces of windows from crashed planes to fill the openings of the sea shells. For some of the clothes from Australia, the buttons were made of tin – they didn’t have normal button material in Australia.

Shell necklace made by my grandfather

For entertainment, I would go to movies and learned to roller-skate. That’s when roller-skating rinks started. I lived near a small town called Bonnefield which had an old hall they turned into a roller-skating rink. Your grandfather sent me a pair of shoe skates with zippers.

They sent over men to the Pacific they called 90-day wonders because that’s all the instruction the pilots had. Your grandfather opened a school in the jungles to help train them. His main job, though, was as a tailgunner and chief engineer in a B-17 bomber. During his tour, he was in the Fiji Islands and New Caledonia. He had a stack of pennants from all the islands.

Your grandfather took a GED test while in the service. He could have gone to OCS while overseas, but then he would have been sent back for another three years.

The government eventually built Elwood ammunition plant in the cornfields of Illinois. I worked in the fuse and boosters section until I was asked to move into the laboratory where gunpowder was tested for moisture. While working there, I wore uniforms I changed into at a change house where you had to make sure you had no metal on you so there couldn’t be sparks. There were no nails in shoes - used wooden pegs in place of them. Instead of hairpins, we used little pieces of wood with toothpicks in them. Everyone was warned if there was an explosion of any kind not to go to the change house because between where we worked and there was where the black powder was stored.

One night during the graveyard shift in the summer of ‘42, the lights flashed as if it were lightning, and we thought there was possibly an electrical storm. We heard a loud BOOM! Everyone ran out into the field as instructed. We found out that there had been an explosion killing a number of people and breaking windows in Chicago - about fifty miles away. Who worked there were mostly other women like myself and a few men.

One fella said he was standing next to a conveyor belt and saw a fireball coming down, and, next thing he knew, he was picking himself up out of the field with a broken collar bone. There were also pieces of bodies found in the trees scattered over a large area. Forty-eight civilian workers were killed.

I worked at the city national bank in Kankakee as a teller in the car loan department until your grandfather returned. He came back in December, in time for our third anniversary.

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