FOR MOST OF THE CENTURY: BIRTH OF SON, END OF WAR

Jean Bell Mosley's new autobiography, "For Most of the Century," is only available in serialized form in the the Southeast Missourian. Return each week for her continuing story.

April 20, 1944

After supper on Wednesday, April 19, 1944, Edward and I and Queenie, the bird dog, walked northward on the gravel street to the top of the East Rodney hill. There were no houses on the east side of East Rodney then. The hilltop lots were owned by Aven Kinder and were lush with lespedeza. Queenie has a great time thrashing around through it. I had earlier called the Wednesday Night Bridge Club hostess to say that I wouldn't be there that evening. There were little telltale signs that something was about to happen -- the miracle of a new life.

By midnight I was in Southeast Missouri Hospital and Dr. John Cochran, my obstetrician, had been notified. He came and went back home, determining the birth was not imminent. It did not occur until 12:52 p.m. on Thursday, a 7-pound, 12-ounce baby boy. My first look at him revealed what I thought to be the prettiest little nose I'd ever seen. His hands and feet seemed big. There was a red mark on his forehead when he cried, which Edward and I thought resembled a baseball bat. This eventually faded away after a few weeks.

I had decided, previous to Stephen Price Mosley's birth, that I would bottle feed the baby, for I felt a vague commitment to Mrs. Roth and the management of the insurance agency while Mr. Roth was still in the war in Europe. A new secretary had been hired, and Mrs. Roth was trying to run the agency, but I felt that I should keep myself available for any problems or questions that might come up.

I was called on several times during the transition and hired Mrs. George Spence, a mature neighbor lady, to take care of Stephen while I was gone.

This period did not last long, and I felt free at last from public work. How beautiful and satisfying to stay home and enjoy our new son and the things I had dreamed of while taking dictation, tapping away on the manual-operated typewriter in that hot, second-story office. Such simple things as baking a cake, working in a garden, walking in the woods were huge enjoyments.

The long leisurely hours at home brought back, almost, the same deep, childhood joy that I had felt when Lou and I had our little playhouse homes in a rail fence corner where there was sweet order, no hurry and time everlasting. But there was still the war.

WWII ends

Sixty-seven days after Stephen was born, United States forces landed on Normandy Beach in France. It has been known ever since as D-Day. Some of the men who had accompanied Edward to St. Louis that bleak induction day were killed on Normandy Beach.

We knew things were dreadful in Europe, but we actually didn't know that the Holocaust was going on at the rate that it was. Little dribbles of information reached our ears, but it was not until the war was over that we learned the enormity of the death camps at Dachau, Auschwitz and other concentration camps to which Hitler had Jews and others sent to be killed, mostly in gas chambers.

Each evening we sat huddled, as if under a dark, damp, umbrella, before the radio, listening to the solemn tones of H.W. Kaltenborn, Edward R. Murrow, William Shirer and others telling us as best they could what was going on, on both our war fronts -- Europe and the Pacific. As in WWI, places we'd never heard of became very familiar on our tongues -- Dunkerque, Iwo Jima, Bastogna, Anzio Beach. Audie Murphy, the lad from Texas, was showing the world what a soldier was. The faces of Eisenhower, MacArthur, Churchill, Stalin, Chiang Kai-shek, Mussolini, Tojo, Hitler and de Gaulle became very familiar to us.

All the time, unknown to us, the common people, the Manhattan Project was under way -- the making of the atomic bomb.

Slowly, slowly things began to look better for us in Europe. We were winning more and more battles, marching steadily eastward toward Berlin, Germany's capital. The Soviet Union was coming at the Germans from the east. It looked as if Hitler were going to be stopped.

In 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt was elected to a fourth term, an unprecedented event in United States history, but the feeling was that to bring in a new president at this stage of the war would not be wise. He won by a big majority but died 83 days later, April 12, 1945, before he got to see the end of the war in Europe, which was 26 days later, May 8, 1945.

Our own Missourian, then Vice President Harry Truman, a no-nonsense, pragmatic sort of man, became president.

The war in the Pacific seemed unending. We gained. We lost. We gained. When Truman weighed the probability of the number of deaths and amount of destruction if the seemingly unending war were continued against the death and destruction the fall of the atomic bomb on Japan could cause, he straightaway, and typically Midwestern, said something like, "Do it."

It was done. Hiroshima received the horrible bomb first, on Aug. 6, 1945. When the Japanese didn't surrender immediately, another such bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. This was the end of the war.

Ever since then some of the leading powers of the world have been trying to stop the making of such a bomb and other nuclear weapons. I keep track of the movement, hoping to see the day when weapons become plowshares.

So, the long, weary war was over. I was almost 32. With each birthday I kept multiplying the accumulated years by two to see if that time had been reached when I could reasonably consider my life was half over. 64? No, surely not. There was so much more to do. I had a son to raise, cookies to bake, flowers to tend, beans to can and maybe something more. Something more? What?

Getting back to normal life, having rations removed and the "black umbrella" folded, seemed slow. But life was good. To break a couple of speckled brown eggs on the edge of the old blue crock and whip up Grandma's famous Sunday coconut cake without worrying about sugar, to make a meal from our garden, to arrange a bouquet, even if only of wildflowers and other such simple things was enormously satisfying. Good still spoke to me in every beam of sunshine, the silvery slant of rain, the uncurling of a Heavenly Blue morning glory, the unexpected winter cardinal alighting on a twig of the cedar tree when all else seemed dull and lifeless.

Stephen had begun to talk rather glibly in complete sentences. Later, as a history teacher in the Sikeston, Mo., High School, he taught his students all about WWI and WWII and probably accumulated more knowledge about them than we who had lived through them.

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.