Dec. 7, 1941. A typical peaceful Sunday afternoon in Southern California. A ballgame was underway at Sunland Park, and the stands were full. I was 8 years old and at the game with friends, looking for those big Pepsi or RC Cola bottles. Those babies were worth 2 cents each — get a handful and you could go to the Saturday matinee!
Suddenly the somber voice of the announcer came booming through: “All military personnel return to your base or ship immediately, your leave is cancelled. The U.S. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor has been attacked by elements of the Japanese Empire!”
Pearl Harbor? No one had a clue where it was!
That 30-second announcement changed our lives completely. There was not a family in Sunland-Tujunga that was not affected in some way.
My BB gun was now an M1 rifle. The avocados in our tree were now hand grenades. Our games went from cowboys and Indians to U.S. Marines vs. Japanese Army. We were taught to hate the Japanese by radio and newsprint and the newsreels at our local movie theater. It wasn’t long before war propaganda movies started replacing the cowboy pictures. We loved classics like “Wake Island,” “Bataan” and “Guadalcanal Diary.” How could we not win the war with John Wayne on our side?
Rationing began almost immediately. Each family was issued “war ration books.” If you had an “A” sticker, you were allowed 4 gallons of gas per week; a “B” sticker, if your job was deemed essential for the war, meant perhaps 8 gallons per week. Every family I knew only had one car — even Harry Morrell, who had built much of Sunland and owned many of the buildings on Foothill Blvd. including the Post Office, had that one big Cadillac he drove around town.
Some of our friends’ fathers and older brothers seemed to disappear overnight. They were enlisting in droves or being called up by the draft. The National Guard was mobilized. Many of the men and women in Sunland-Tujunga made the drive down to Burbank to work at Lockheed Aircraft. Seemed to me that every family in town had someone working there or in one of the surrounding machine shops. Our whole economy shifted to war production.
How excited we became when one of those Lockheed P-38s came flying up nearby La Tuna Canyon, banked and roared back down through our valley! Maybe it was piloted by high-scoring ace Richard Bong, who went on to have a confirmed kill of 40 Japanese planes? (Isoroku Yamamoto, the planner and architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, was shot down in the Solomon Islands by a P-38 in 1943.) Everyone in town was saddened when a P-38 crashed in the canyon at Shadow Hills and the pilot was killed.
I remember getting out of third grade at Sunland Elementary School with my best friend Pete and going up and down our streets with our wagon, collecting papers and coffee cans, doing our part in the war effort. Some dads were air-raid wardens, responsible for so many blocks. We had test blackouts when the wardens were supposed to go around and check to be sure no light could be seen coming out of any of the homes.
It’s funny, though, I don’t recall ever sitting in the dark and being afraid we were going to be bombed. But my older brother does remember this — and our sister, the oldest, remembers our dad telling her to not show any fear during these blackouts, so as to not upset her brothers.
Perhaps our Sunland restrictions were a little relaxed, but it was a different story over the hill down in Burbank, where my wife Sally was raised. Her father was their block warden and the blackout was strictly enforced. I suppose it had to be, because of Lockheed making airplanes nearby.
When you think about it, there was nothing to bomb in our town — except the Adams olive cannery. We sure loved those Adams olives!
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