Two million revelers gathered in downtown Manhattan on the evening of V-J Day, 75 years ago this week. They filled Times Square — waving flags, dancing, and shrieking with joy.
My older neighbors tell me that V-J Day made less of a splash in our tiny town.
According to the local paper, the "Recorder-Gazette," the area witnessed celebrations in big towns like Greenfield, Massachusetts.
Even there, the photos in the paper seem tentative. In one, two little children stand together, one holding a flag. They look confused rather than excited.
In Hawley, as far as I can tell, nothing much happened on V-J Day.
“Somehow, in those days, Hawley seemed separated from the world,” Lilian Cramer Randall told me.
Hawley did participate in the war effort. Gasoline and foodstuffs were rationed. Lilian doesn’t recall worrying much about food. Everyone had a garden, and eggs and milk were available from neighbors.
At the age of 15, Elvira Bellows Scott worked six-hour shifts at the airplane observation post behind the East Hawley Church. “I wasn’t afraid of the dark,” Vi told me. She telephoned authorities to report the path of each airplane that flew overhead.
Thirty-four young men from town fought in the war. Not all came home. Esther White Purinton recalls building a toy airplane with a soldier uncle home on leave. He was killed in the Battle of the Bulge.
The only Hawleyite I have found who remembers taking note of V-J Day is Alice Parker Pyle, who was 19 in 1945. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki took much of the thrill out of the day for Alice. She recalls a dual feeling of relief and sadness.
I guess I’m not surprised there was no crowd shrieking in downtown Hawley in August 1945. There is no downtown Hawley — nor crowds — to speak of. And rarely is there drama here.
In this hamlet, at least, perhaps relief and sadness were more appropriate reactions than revelry, even at the end of what most Americans saw and still see as a “good war.”
Tinky Weisblat lives in Hawley, Massachusetts. A singer and writer, she is also a trained historian.
