Pearl Harbor Birthday
by Cindy Goodman

If Mrs. Bill (Emma) Behr were to write about her most memorable Birthday, it might well be December 7, 1941. Her friends had planned a Birthday party for her, and all was going well when news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor came over the radio. "Needless to say," writes Emma, "the party was a bust."

Emma was still in high school at the time and, like the rest of her friends, was agog at all the fellows in uniforms. Within about a year almost all the eligible boys had joined the service. Consequently, social life was not exactly what she expected as a high school graduate. Even the yearbook was cut back and turned out to be the only soft cover yearbook in the school's history.

One of Emma's first volunteer jobs was working on the Ration Board at the local school, where she explained the coupons and coins. She was valuable here because she could speak German and understand Yiddish. She also knew many of the neighborhood people.

Gasoline rationing for many New York City people was not a great hardship since very few people in the city owned cars. For a nickel a person could get all around the city by subway, bus or trolley car. Emma remembers doing lots of walking in her days, and to her and her friends, twenty blocks was just a stroll, so why spend a nickel when you could walk!

New York City was a busy place to live, even with black-out curtains, air-raid drills, and never-ending lines for rationed items. Since there were no social activities, she went to work for a major Insurance company whose policy was to send employees to work on the Bond Wagon twice a week. Emma did this for three years and received a certificate for selling War Bonds.

The company also asked the single female employees to attend several dances held at the large hotels, but strict policy prohibited the women from letting the servicemen take them home. "Besides," she writes, "the guys would have gotten lost changing trains." Her company also arranged for the making of three pound boxes of cookies that could be sent to the servicemen in the States, and a local candy company made available eight ounce boxes of candy that could be sent first class to the men overseas. When Bill was in England, Emma sent him some of this candy.

Emma spent much of her time teaching Sunday School and helping out on Saturday morning with religious instruction. Many evenings she was busy typing letters to the fellows that were in the service.

Bill came home from England in September 1944 and they were married in September 1945