Carolyn King Waller
My mother Carolyn King Waller stopped by Lisa’s History Room this afternoon for a little chat. Carolyn was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1934. She has a mind like a steel trap; her ability to recall stories from the past is legend.
Lisa: Thanks for stopping by today, Mom. Everyone knows that you love history. What would you say is your favorite period?
Carolyn: Probably the World War Two years, 1941 to 1945. And of course World War Two for other countries was longer that. 1941 to 1945 were America’s war years.
Lisa: And why is that your favorite period?
Carolyn: The fate of the world hung in the balance. It was a lot of drama – really, truly, good against evil.
Lisa: So it fascinates you.
Carolyn: I’m not the only one…others are fascinated by it still…of course, we didn’t know about the Jews being exterminated, 6 million…then the Stalin thing…Stalin moved in from the east, we (the Allies) moved in from the west. The countries that Stalin occupied in the east became known as the countries behind the Iron Curtain. Churchhill coined the phrase. The poor people who had been under Germany were then under Russia! We didn’t really free them. The people in those countries had no freedom. We slowly woke up to who Stalin was. The Russians never left, including East Berlin, so World War II strengthened the Russians, it helped one problem, it created a worse one though, by increasing the strength of the Communists. Roosevelt was blamed for that but there wasn’t much he could do. It was said that Roosevelt gave too much away to Stalin at the 1945 Conference of Yalta,
1945 Conference at Yalta
but there really was very little he could do about it. They (the Communists) were there – they had occupied Eastern Europe – they had “boots on the ground.” We didn’t know then that Stalin had murdered millions of his own people, that he was a monster. In the early days, Truman even said, “I like Old Joe.”
Lisa: What else makes it an interesting period?
Carolyn: Outsized personalities of Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchhill – huge . Churchhill was a fabulous orator, Roosevelt knew about ships, had knowledge of the military, selected good generals. Hitler was a poor strategist; he entered all those countries at once. He told the generals what to do but he wasn’t good at military strategy. He was just a madman.
Lisa: To learn more, are there some books you would recommend?
Carolyn: Books about the period abound, certainly the biographies of those four men, stories of the war itself would be good.
Lisa: Does a particular book come to mind?
Carolyn: Kennedy’s thesis that became a book, While England Slept, No Ordinary Time, the Churchill bios by William Manchester – The Last Lion, A Man Called Intrepid…
Lisa: What films capture the flavor and the truth of the war?
Carolyn: “The Best Years of Our Lives” showed the problems of returning servicemen from the war. “Edge of Darkness,” with Errol Flynn and Ann Sheridan depicts the Norwegian struggle. Norway was given away by the Quisling leader. The Norwegians had to fight Germany in an underground movement. There may be another movie, “A Moon is Down,” by John Steinbeck about occupied Norway, but I’ve not seen it.
Lisa: What else?
Carolyn: “Escape” which was a book by Ethel Vance, with Robert Taylor and Norma Shearer; “Night Train to Munich,” with Rex Harrison; and, of course, “Casablanca; “Ministry of Fear,” with Ray Milland; “Cloak and Dagger,” with Gary Cooper and Lily Palmer,
“Watch on the Rhine,” with Bette Davis and Paul Lucas, and “OSS,” with Alan Ladd. All of those are great movies.
Lisa: What was it like to be a young girl in the war years?
Carolyn: In elementary school, our room would get the American flag for the week if our class bought the most war stamps and bonds that week. The classes competed to have the flag on display at the front of the room. It was a big deal. I was at Fisher School two years. Stamps were ten cents, bonds were $18.75 redeemable in ten years for $25. You had a book of stamps and you would try to fill the book with stamps. You would turn in a certain amount of stamps to redeem for a bond. That paid for the war! My grandparents sold cattle during the war years and they gave me money to do it because I was always a big stamp buyer. The government was smart to do that. It was an easy way for the government to get money from the citizens to finance, to fight the war. So many (citizens) had schoolchildren. While boys – women and men were fighting and dying in the war around the world – I was a young girl busy doing cartwheels in the front yard and joining little clubs – I was totally isolated. I didn’t know anyone who died in the war.
Lisa: Changing the subject, you wanted to say something about (actress) Carole Lombard.
Carole Lombard and Clark Gable
Carolyn: Yes. Japan attacked us on Dec. 7, 1941. In January 1942 Carole Lombard went on a war bond tour – to Indiana I think. She wanted to get home to see (her husband and actor) Clark Gable afterward, in a hurry, because they had had a fight over Lana Turner. She insisted on flying out to California late at night when it was dark and foolish to fly over the Rockies. She should have waited for a better plan but she insisted on flying out. She crashed in her plane in the Rockies. She was only 33. All they found of her were her earrings. Clark went to the scene and was distraught. He was always a good drinker, but he isolated himself for a few days afterward or so and drank heavily before he came back out. Roosevelt said she (Lombard) was one of our first casualties of the war or maybe even first hero. Before she had left, she had said to Clark Gable, “Pappy, you need to join this man’s army (meaning the United States Army).” After she died, Gable did just that; he enlisted. He was about 41. He didn’t need to sign up. They were not drafting men of his age. But he was distraught and he did it. He was made a captain or something at the top – he became brass right away – he was too important to be just a regular fellow. He may have been in the Army but he was still a celebrity.
Lisa: Was Clark Gable decorated?
Carolyn: He was stationed in Great Britain, he was an officer, he may have been in some forays over Germany.
Lisa: What will we be talking about during your next visit to Lisa’s History Room?
Carolyn: What should we talk about? Should we talk about history?
Lisa: Well, if you had something you wanted to tell, what would it be?
Carolyn: I’d tell about the depression years. We had butter beans at Mother’s, and (my grandmother) Nona cooked cheap things, rice pudding, bread pudding, onions….the hobos, I don’t want to say that, the homeless people, they would come to the back door. Nona would give them a plate of food and they would to go and sit out under a tree in the backyard and eat their food. People weren’t afraid of other people back then.
Lisa: Okay, save those stories for next time. Thank you so much for stopping by today.
Carolyn: Well, bless your heart, you make me feel like a celebrity!
Lisa's History Room 
Dear Lisa Rogers,
I love your guest! She conveyed the big picture of World War II in bold, broad strokes. Too many times, we focus on the Battle of the Bulge or Invasion of Normandy, or the like, and the big picture gets obscured. World War II worked like an old-fashioned Etch-A-Sketch! The conflict demolished the old hegemonies with new ones that would affect the world for decades to come. If we can only remember how such events form predicates for our future, it is more likely that we can learn from our mistakes.
Your guest has an admirable command of recent history.
I am personally looking forward to the next conversation regarding the era of the great depression.
Thank you, Lisa! & Thanks to your guest!
Sincerely,
Shirley Kavanaugh
Phoenix, AZ
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Shirley, thanks for your pithy commentary. Your command of WW II history is right up there with Carolyn’s. Keep coming back.
Lisa
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Lisa, your mom has great memories. I remember rationing–oleo with the little yellow tablet that turned it yellow so it looked like butter, a shortage of sugar, shoes, etc. Mostly though I too was oblivious–I was younger than your mom, and I didn’t know anyone who died (my dad fought in WWI). I remember hearing my folks talk about Pearl Harbor but not the day my dad came into the kitchen to tell my mom (supposedly I was playing on the floor). My first public memory is of the day Roosevelt died–a woman got out of a car down the street cheering. I grew up in a household where Roosevelt was a hero, so I went inside and told my mom he had died. She said, “Hush, don’t talk like that.” But these days I am fascinated by WWII history and I much enjoyed your blog.
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Hi, Judy, thanks for the meaty comment. Roosevelt was always revered by my mother and her parents. I was shocked when I married and my mother-in-law vilified FDR.
Lisa
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Cool! Nice post! And thanks for all the info, Carolyn 🙂
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Readergirl, you are such a faithful reader. Keep coming back.
Lisa
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Your mom’s comments bring up an interesting debate – whether Hitler or Stalin was worse. (She seems to think Stalin was.) We discussed this a lot in my Russian history classes, though we generally avoided discussing the topics with Russians. Our professors, who were all from Russia, hated Stalin, but whether they thought he or Hitler was worse we never asked.
Russia’s current government has taken some creative liberties with history, but mostly they have downplayed the negatives from the past, including from Stalin’s time, and before the fall of the Soviet Union discussing history was very difficult. When I lived in St. Petersburg as a student, I didn’t know how people felt about Stalin, and I did not like to provoke arguments, so I didn’t ask, but through the course of things I found that opinions vary widely. It seems people who were personally, directly affected by the purges and the famine hated him (my friend’s host grandmother would spit whenever Stalin’s name was mentioned on TV, because her husband was sentenced to a gulag), but most other people were more or less ambivalent – Russians are tired of talking of their history and Russia’s failings. A small percentage, mostly pensioners, remember Stalin as a fearless leader who led their country against the fascists. However they feel, Russians are ready for Russia to be great again, and so as a nation they ignore the truth. It’s led to a ridiculous degree of tolerance for skinheads and nationalists. (I was always puzzled by the skinheads…they are so ignorant of history that they don’t know that Hitler considered Slavs inferior and planned for their eventual enslavement.)
Contrast this with Germany. Germans are so racked with collective guilt over WWII that I doubt for a second that anyone outside of the neo-Nazi movements would even think of defending Hitler. I really think Russia is going to have to have a similar reckoning with its own past before it can move towards a truly open society.
But all in all, I still think Stalin was less dangerous, though perhaps not less maniacal or evil. One thing I learned in Russia is that Russians are significantly less organized than Germans, and I would rather have an inefficient, disorganized monster than an efficient, organized one, if they are bent on the destruction of Western society.
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Heather, I agree with you about the two different models of society – Russia is definitely behind the times and in disarray. It probably always be due to its geographical setting – cities far apart and weather often keep communication so difficult in a society that people in those countries are less united in purpose. German efficiency scares me.
As for my mother’s take on Hitler and Stalin, I think her comments on Stalin refer to FDR’s imperception of his tyrannical nature. She mentioned that this wasn’t common knowledge at Yalta – as a result, FDR was too generous with Stalin and America paid the price later (Cold War) and FDR’s legacy was tainted.
Lisa
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I loved hearing about history from my grandmother! Thanks for posting!
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Carolyn has an endless supply of information to share. I must interview her again soon.
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We definitely made a mistake in underestimating Stalin, that is true!
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We went from WW II straight into the Cold War because of Stalin. The fifties didn’t feel any safer than the forties. For that matter, the sixties were pretty scary, too. We were worried about Cuba attacking us in the early sixties, to such a degree that where I grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas, the site of an important, large naval installation, when I was in early elementary school (c. 1961), we had air raid drills every first Monday of the month (I think) at 1 p.m.; the details may be a bit off but there were monthly drills. I can remember taking cover under my first grade desk or running to the shelter of a tin roof on the dirt playground of my elementary school when the air siren blasted through the city. It piped fear through my veins along with the German war movies my grandmother Mimi took us to see at the drive-in. I could just see a German flotilla or Russian navy entering CC Bay and enemy soldiers appearing at my house, 3 blocks from the coast, to brutalize me. I thought up places I would hide from them. The best place I came up with was a grandfather’s clock. We didn’t own one though. Now I know that I could not hide inside a grandfather’s clock. The cabinet door that sits below the clock face opens up to reveal the clockworks, not a cavity for me to fit inside, as I had dreamed.
Lisa
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Excellent site.
For more on Lombard’s fateful trip to her native Indiana, go to http://community.livejournal.com/carole_and_co/67196.html, http://community.livejournal.com/carole_and_co/68149.html and http://community.livejournal.com/carole_and_co/68533.html.
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Vincent, I enjoyed your site, too, and will keep returning. My mom can tell stories galore about Carole Lombard and Clark Gable. I will tell her about your site.
Keep coming back and leave some comments about the content; okay?
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Anyone slightly interested in Carole Lombard will enjoy this website. Full of never -before-seen memorabilia like notices Carole gave out to people who attended her War Bonds rallies – Excellent. Interesting to see Carole signing her name as “Carole Lombard Gable.” My mother knows a lot about Carole. Gable loved Carole to pieces but couldn’t resist having the odd affair – why? Clark’s drinking probably played a part.
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Very interesting interview with your mom. My mother was a child in the same time (born 1930) and had some very similar stories to tell. What I found interesting as a young adult in the 1970’s, was my new father in laws views.
He was much older then my parents (born 1911) in Britain. He had very different memories of Europe at the time, and absolutely hated Americans. He loved the old Brit phrase about US GI’s ” Overpaid, oversexed and over here”.
His stories about the deprivations of the middle class in the UK during and after the war were really heartrending! The horsemeat steaks story was especially bad.
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Janet, do you ever watch the BBC mystery series, “Foyle’s War”? You would enjoy it. The series takes place in WWII Britain and many of the conditions you describe (rations, oversexed Yankees) are portrayed vividly. Thanks for visiting Lisa’s HIstory Room and keep coming back.
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