Me -- Downingtown The First Time Chapter 6

 CHAPTER 6 

The house at 424 Washington Avenue (left) was only slightly different looking in 1941. The siding was white wooden planking then, not yellow aluminum. The front door was solid wood with an inverted cross design, no window. The railing around the porch was wood and  painted green. There was a porch swing where the bicycle leans.. Do you know the kind I mean? It looked like a sofa with large metal armrests on each side, but it was build on a frame that gently swung back and forth if you wished., they called it a glider. There was a matching chair to one side, but it didn’t swing. It might have rocked a little.

 What can I tell about that first year? Not much. I can’t tell you a

lot about the next three years either. I was at first an infant and then  too busy trying to talk and learn to walk. (Photo right; my dad holding me on the front porch, March 1942. You can see the solid white door behind us.)

The most vivid memory of those first three years were the sirens.

Downingtown blew a siren every day at twelve o’clock just to tell everybody it was noon. You could set your watch by it and that may have been the purpose, to allow everyone to synchronize clocks and watches each day. I believe it was the siren at the Minquas Firehouse on East Lancaster Avenue, just at the edge of the downtown business area. It was the closest to us and the siren was loud. Perhaps both the Minquas and the Alert Fire Companies sounded their sirens. The Alert was on the west side of town. I don’t think there was a municipal siren at Borough Hall.

I probably wouldn’t have remembered the sirens as much if this were the extent of their blasts or the occasional fire call. They would have become regular noises of daily life, but life in Downingtown after December 1941 was no longer routine. There was a war going on engulfing the whole world. The sirens that remain in my memory were for air raids.

 (Downingtown from the railroad bridge on Rt. 332 looking north, 1940)

We never had an actual air raid, of course. But we had drills and false alarms. No one looked at the clock when the air raid siren sounded or asked, “Where’s the fire”. Everyone sprang into action, all tinged with a bit of panic and fear. “Is this the real thing? Are the Gerrys coming to bomb us?”

 Well, I didn’t understand any of that. I was one, two, three years
old and had no concept of war or
bombs. I only knew everybody around me was nervous and running about doing strange things that I didn’t like. The blackout shades were drawn, all the lights turned off and the radio lowered. The house got very dark inside and the street quiet outside, except for those sirens blasting away. I was still afraid of the dark then and all this excitement scared me to death and made me cry. Then my mother or grandmother would hold me and tell me I had to be quiet.

Grandfather Brown was a member of Minquas and a Fire Policeman, which meant he was also the Air Raid Warden for our block. This only added to the chaos for little toddler me. First of all, we were going to do it all by the book. Second, when the blasts came he was dashing about getting his helmet and whatever other official equipment he was supposed to carry and then fleeing out the door to make sure the neighbors were in compliance.

 There was  a large yellow chart tacked to the back of the cellar door, which opened from the dining room.  (The photo left was taken in 1952, long after the air raid sirens went quiet, but is one of only two of the interior of that house. You can see the cellar door just behind me as I imitate  Frankenstein’s monster. The siren patterns were posted on the other side of that door.) The chart showed what all the different siren blasts meant. Long blasts meant one thing, short blasts meant another. So many blasts in a row and how fast or slow they came singled something. Grandfather had the whole thing memorized. If he was home he would announce what was going on, if it was his company or the Alert, whether it was a fire or something else, and how big a blaze.

 

I would tense up at any blast, even the noon horn, because I didn’t make any distinction. I immediately looked about to see if the Blackout Shades were being drawn.

Its difficult to separate years that long ago. I won’t even try. That is one of the reasons this is called Impressions of my Life. Sometimes I can only give you impressions of my memories.