On Sunday evening Dec. 7 1941 at 20 minutes to eight I was sitting on
the living room floor listening to The Jack Benny show on the radio. I was
home alone; my mother was in the hospital with a stomach problem, and
my sister and brother in law who we lived with (3816 Review Pl. Bronx,
NYC) were visiting her. The broadcast was interrupted by an
announcement that the Japs had attached Pearl Harbor, (which I had
never heard of) in Hawaii, (which I had heard of). I was extremely annoyed
because it interrupted my favorite radio show, and I was afraid it would
disrupt the rest of the evening. It DIDN'T. Aside from some scattered
announcements nothing more was reported.

My sister came home around ten and was worried that I might be
frightened, but of course I couldn't care less. The next day is history.
We declared war on Japan and then on Germany. I remember reading a
headline news column by Bob Considine, leading reporter, columnist in
the NY Journal American warning that this would not be a short war. The
dirty Japs had prepared for this and it may take several months for us to
defeat them. How little we knew. In the following weeks and months we
found out how ill prepared we were. The war news went from bad to awful.
We were losing on every front. The first good news we got was the
morning we heard about Doolittles raid on Japan. I was in the barber shop
when I heard a lot of yelling out on the street (238th St.) Everyone was
excited. You¹d think we had won the war. It was just so good to get some
positive news. Now the war was EVERYTHING.

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