Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1943)

THESE LIVES No woman who is true to herself will be able to read this and not be stirred to action BY A FEW months ago I read a newspaper story which shocked me into an entirely new concept of the war. More than that — it gave me a specific idea for something I could do to help win not only the war, as we are wise enough to stipulate this time, but the peace as well. The story was a casualty list, although it was not called that. It told about the army of little children, infants and pre-school children for the most part, who are being left without care while their mothers work. Their mothers are turning out tanks and planes and guns for our fighting men. Their neglected babies, it was obvious at once to me, are just as much casualties of the war as are their fathers and brothers and friends fighting and dying in North Africa, or New Guinea, or Guadalcanal. The statistics in that newspaper story turned my blood cold: Nineteen babies locked in automobiles on one day in a parking lot outside a defense plant while their mothers worked! Children barely old enough to walk roaming the streets with cards carrying their names and addresses and the keys to their homes tied around their necks. Individual cases were worse: Nine-months-old Mary Jean Clairmont murdered in Seattle by a woman who had advertised her "foster home" while her mother searched for a home for her family in that tragically overcrowded city. Twenty-one-month-old Larry Herbst, of Los Angeles, lost, feared drowned, when he wandered away from the house while his mother slept. That mother had worked the "graveyard" shift in a defense plant so that she 48 could be near her child in the daytime. Phil Terry, the wife he is proud of, and the sign that today makes her a marked woman in a magnificent way But even mothers with small children have to sleep sometime. I read about those children with horror, mixed with an increasing sense of personal responsibility. I knew as I read that my conscience would never let me rest until I had tried to do something to remedy the situation. Kids are my weakness anyway. Phil and I have a little girl and now a little boy of our own. "What," I thought, "if it were our three-year-old Christina or our yearold Phil locked out there in an airtight automobile sobbing with fear for hours while no one came? "But Christina and Phil are upstairs in their gay, safe nursery," my brain reassured me. "Their mother and father are here, wanting nothing better than to play with them when they ask, help them when they need it; and the cheerful reliable girl who is their nurse looks after them constantly, seeing to it that they are fed good, simple food, that they sleep when they should, that they are warm and comfortable and secure. "Christina and Phil are not war casualties, thank God," I thought. B1 UT those other babies tortured me. I couldn't wipe out the picture of frightened children just because our own were safe and well. "Why doesn't somebody do something about it?" I thought angrily. But my conscience wouldn't let it go at that. "Why don't you do something about it?" it insisted. Because of my interest in day nurseries, the American Women's Voluntary Services organized a nursery school project and I shall be eternally grateful for their help. At the present time, we have four thoroughly trained women who report as faithfully for work in this first nursery school as though they were being paid kindergarten teachers' salaries. That is how it happened that on Thanksgiving Day, 1942, the A.W.V.S. opened a day nursery for the children of women who must work. I had been casting about for a war job for some time — a serious, important piece of work that a woman of my particular background and experience could do to help the war effort. My conscience told me I had to work or fight in this war, if I wanted to continue living with myself. Oh, I suppose I had done as much as many people from the day of Pearl Harbor. I bought War Bonds, of course. Why not? They're the safest investment in the world. Buying Bonds, like