Fortunes of war, on the home front

I am now a relatively old man living in Independence. But often my mind dwells on personal events in the past. This is one of my memories.

In the spring of 1945 I had just completed my junior year of high school at Pleasant Grove, Utah, and had two major concerns on my mind. The first was World War II, in which the U.S. was an active participant since the Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Selective Service was in full swing, and all of us young men knew that it was probably only a question of time until we would be drafted. My second concern was the need to get a summer job.

My mother’s best friend lived in Ogden, and her husband was chief financial officer of a cannery within walking distance of their home. They offered me a job and a place to sleep on their back porch, so off I went to Ogden which was a long way away, about 75 miles. They had several children of whom Robert was my age.  

I’ll never forget my first meal with the family. I had never tasted horseradish, but Robert assured me that it was wonderful and piled a huge spoonful on my food. When I put the food in my mouth I experienced the hottest burning sensation in all my life. I wanted to spit it out, but I didn’t feel that was appropriate under the circumstances, so I simply suffered intense agony, which Robert enjoyed immensely.

Robert and I got jobs at the cannery and were assigned the task of working in the huge third floor loft where we loaded empty cans of various sizes on metal rails that delivered the cans to where they were filled, sealed and cooked. Paper labels were applied later, and sometimes we helped with that chore. Five-gallon cans were shipped to feed GI Joes overseas.

The only other person working on the third floor was a young lady who had her own small office, where she used a microscope – to us a most ingenious instrument – to inspect each batch of food just before it went into the cans. She always wore a white smock, which indicated, at least to us that she was a trained scientist.

We were intrigued by the microscope, and she showed us how she used a grid to count how many pieces of insects or other foreign matter were in each batch. She assured us that the pieces of insects had no deleterious impact on the taste or nutritious value of the food, but if the insect count was too high it couldn’t pass interstate inspection and could only be labeled and sold within the state. Nevertheless, for many years after, I always checked to make sure my canned food purchases had out-of-state labels and, thus, less insect content.

There was some sort of manufacturing plant next door, and they employed a number of Italian prisoners of war, most of whom couldn’t speak English. They would arrive by bus every morning and were a very happy lot. Their shirts had a big “PW” (prisoner of war) stamped on the back.

Armed U.S. military guards looked over them, but there was an obvious close comradeship between guards and prisoners. For example, every so often the guards would want to crawl through the fence to the cannery for a free handout of fruit or vegetables. They would simply hand their automatic weapon to the nearest PW while they made their errand. We noticed that the booty was shared equally with the Italian PWs.

I came to understand that these Italians PWs were very happy to be away from the battlefields of Europe and were probably eating better than they ever did in the Italian military. While Mussolini may have been a protégé of Hitler, I don’t think that friendly relationship filtered down to the average Italian soldier.

There were also a few American-Japanese assigned to work at the cannery. We were not told where they came from, but we had heard a little about Japanese internment camps being set up away from the Pacific Coast and assumed that is where they came from. I don’t think they were paid, but they seemed very happy to spend time at the cannery instead of wherever they were housed.

One young Japanese-American was assigned to work with us. I don’t remember his name, but we were told that, even though he was a few years older and infinitely better educated than us, he was to do whatever we told him to do and should he ever cause us any trouble he’d pay dearly for it. We were too young and ignorant to be sensitive to any moral issues involved, but my conscience has bothered me many times since as I grew older and, hopefully, wiser.

This was my first experience with what really amounted to slavery and, in our ignorance, it seemed to be a very beneficial system – at least for us. It really is quite a heady experience, particularly at such a young age, to be given fully authorized control over another human being.

But for Robert and me, our primary objective was to make money. We found out from Robert’s dad that the cannery needed a team to come in after the last shift and do a thorough steam cleaning of the entire cannery work floor. That meant hosing down the lines where the women pealed tomatoes or peaches, snipped green beans, etc. We figured we could do it in less than three hours and bid for the job and got it. It paid far more than our hourly wage, but somebody noted that teenagers by law could work only so many hours per week, which we were obviously exceeding.

Robert’s father somehow covered for him and I solved my problem in an ingenious way. For years I had been registered in school using my stepfather’s surname so as to avoid any confusion in our small town concerning why I went by one name and my little sister by another. For years I had always been known as James A. Nielson, and that was the name on my Social Security card. So I simply applied for and received a second Social Security card using my birth name, James A. Everett, to use on our cleaning contract.

After that summer I never had any reason to use this subterfuge again, and I suppose that, in time, the Social Security Commission simply assumed James A. Nielson had died.

This allowed Robert and me to put in many long hours of work. There were a few times when we were so exhausted that we’d have our Japanese-American “slave” do our work while we got an extra hour or two of paid sleep hiding behind some stacks of empty cans.

Several years ago I traveled back to Ogden and found the old Allington home. But the site of the cannery and factory was just a large, weed-infested field with no trace left of the work that took place there during World War II.

I also tried to research where the Italian prisoners of war and the Japanese-American interned citizens had been housed. But that information seems not to have been recorded on Wikipedia or any other Internet site.

But it is indelibly recorded in my memory.