Readers Remember

Our car was stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic in downtown San Pedro. We had just heard the news that the Japanese had surrendered.

Drivers were honking their horns and screaming. Others were on the sidewalks and standing in the street, hugging.

In the car, my little girl and I were with a friend and her daughter. We had become acquainted when our soldier husbands were stationed together in the South Pacific.

My friend’s husband would be coming home soon. Mine lay under a white cross on Okinawa, killed in action just four months earlier.

There was silence in our car for a tense, agonizing moment. I reached over and put my hand on top of my friend’s hand on the steering wheel, moved it over to the horn, and pressed down.

There would be no more killing! The war was over!

FLORENE HARWICH DICK

Upland

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When I was growing up in the mid-1940s, I spent many hours in our fortified cellar because outside were bombs falling from the sky.

I was 7 years old and I remember my mother praying daily for peace. I wondered what peace would look like.

One day my mother called me from the cellar with excitement in her voice. Come fast; peace has finally arrived. She went upstairs with a large, white bed linen in her hand and hung it out the window. Maybe this is how you greet peace, I thought.

Then she pointed to our neighbors’ garden below and there it was. Finally, I could see peace with my own eyes. Three huge American Army tanks had crashed through the garden fence in front of us and had secured the town.

I will never forget my first impression of peace.

WERNER RUCKELSHAUSEN

San Pedro