The 1940's began with hopefulness washing across the land. The "Great Depression,” under the assault of eight years of government welfare programs launched by America’s first socialistic president, while still alive and well was loosening its grip.   More men were working and most children were going to bed with food in their bellies.  Car salesmen were selling new cars.  Teenagers were going to movies, dancing, and driving their cars to "Blueberry Hill," where they parked and, as they listened to romantic ballads on the AM radio, explored the same mysteries generations before them had plumbed.

The trial seemed to be over.   Although Roosevelt’s promise that “Happy Days Are Here Again” had not completely materialized they seemed within reach.  Big Band music; bouncy, happy, sometimes silly and often romantic rasped from the speakers of AM radios and 78 rpm phonographs.  "Swing" was king in dance halls, ballrooms and honky-tonks all across the country.  In Tulsa a fiddler/singer/showman named “Bob Wills” mixed fiddles, steel guitars, a high tenor voice, and showmanship to create a new kind of music.  He called it “Western Swing” and took it all the way to Hollywood.  
In 1940 Dad was promoted to an indoor job in Sinclair Oil Company’s machine shop in Caney Kansas, where he would be taught the skills needed to be a skilled machinist.  Our move from a miserable oil field shack two miles east of Drumright, Oklahoma to the small town of Caney, Kansas was a harbinger of good things to come.  Although our new home was on the outskirts of town, literally “across the tracks”; and although we still had to go outdoors to the toilet, instead of lighting a kerosene lamp we could with a click of a switch light up a room.  And no longer was firewood needed.  It took only a match to light the gas cooking and heating stoves.  Our water didn’t come from a community well and taste of sulfur:  It took only the turn of a faucet.  And finally, there were stores only two blocks away.  We basked in the wonders.

Life was good.  I was in a nice school to which I I could walk or ride my bike. I was making friends and having fun.  Dad was home every night.  I had my own bike: this one with tires, seat, and pedals and I was being allowed to go to Saturday matinee movies fairly often. 
Then without warning our peace was shattered.  I learned we were at war, whatever that meant.  My classmates didn’t know what war was either and the adults of that day never spent much time explaining complicated things to kids.   All we knew was that some cowardly race of little people with yellow skin, slanty eyes, and bandy legs called “Japs,” had “stabbed us in the back”.  That’s how the grown-ups described it and they were furious about it.   Some of them were probably also scared but we kids were not worried.  Our world did not seem to be threatened.  
We soon sensed big changes in the air as our older brothers, dads, and uncles began exchanging shovels, schoolbooks, wrenches, and pens for rifles, grenades, flame-throwers, and machine guns.   In a twinkling most of the men in their early twenties were gone.  My brother Rudy, who had not made the move to Kansas with us, but was instead working in Illinois, soon joined them.

When the Ingmire twins Dad joined the “Seabee’s” it was a glorious thing.  Seabee’s, their name coming from their actual designation “Construction Battalions”, were the epitome of American manhood.  They were builder/warriors, equally at home with a bulldozer or bayonet.  Their “official” song trumpeted their talents with words that went something like this:

We're the Seabees of the Navy
We can build and we can fight
We'll pave the way to victory
And guard it day and night

I had seen a war movie showing Seabee's using bulldozers to attack Japanese pillboxes.  With their bulldozer’s blade raised high in front to deflect bullets they crushed the pillbox and its insidious inhabitants.  When Charles and Charlotte (the twins) told us their dad had joined the Seabees I felt that heroism was standing right alongside me.   The fact that I was smitten by Charlotte’s charms only increased her dad’s stature in my eyes.

Charlotte and I had been dancing partners in a grade school PTA musical.  As a necessary part of the dancing, I had been allowed to hold her hand and put my arm around her waist.  We danced “Put Your Little Foot” as partners.  Raymond Cochrane competed heavily with me for Charlotte’s affections.  In a spirit of love struck competition I was inspired me to walk many miles escorting Charlotte home after school.  She lived on the extreme east edge of town while I lived on the northern fringes.  The combined distance was an odyssey.  In the end, the only good that came of it was my physical development.  Raymond got the girl.  I got the muscles.