Sunday, May 18, 1997

Stories waiting to be found

By Bob Greene

Speaking of libraries - as we were in a recent column, with the suggestion that instead of wasting time at fast-food places trying to get cute yet ultimately worthless giveaway toys for their children, parents should sign their boys and girls up for story sessions at their local public libraries - the rewards of such places can warm you anew, and when you're least expecting it.

Sometimes when I'm out of town with a few hours between appointments on my hands, I'll wander down to the local library just to look around. I can think of few places that make you feel your time has been as well spent.

It happened the other week, on the road. I was walking through a library, not looking for anything in particular, just pulling books off the shelves to see what they were about.

That's one of the nice things about libraries - you don't go there looking for the latest best-seller that's received a lot of publicity or even necessarily to look for one book in particular.

You're able to walk around with no goal in mind, knowing that sooner or later you're likely to find something that will please you - something that, when the day commenced, you didn't even know existed.

So it was this time. On one of the top shelves in the midst of the non-fiction section, I saw a book with the title: While You Were Gone.

I pulled it from its place; the subtitle was, "A Report on Wartime Life in the United States."

The premise of the book was simple and enticing:

Millions of American soldiers had been overseas during World War II, and they had missed much of American life in the 1940s while away fighting for their country. They would be returning to what, to them, would in some ways be a strange land. What had gone on, while they were away?

The book - published in 1946 - was edited by a man named Jack Goodman. He had assigned various writers and experts to write informative essays on 24 different subjects: "How We Felt About the War"; "What We Talked About"; "What Happened in Science"; "The World of Sports"; "The Radio"; "Advertising"; "The Movies"; "How We Planned for the Veterans' Return"...

If, in 1946, the book performed a service for the men and women who had been overseas, today it promised to perform a different service.

Those of us who were born after the end of World War II have many sources to turn to to learn about the war itself, but there is relatively little available to tell us what it was like back home.

Looking at the jacket of While You Were Gone, I found myself eager to find out what was in its pages - the pages of a 51-year-old book I would never have been aware of had I not walked into this library and turned at this aisle.

I couldn't check the book out - I didn't have a library card here - but when I returned home I got it from a library. I'm reading it now; it's every bit as quirky and fascinating as I had hoped.

Paul Gallico on what was on Americans' minds:

"There was the war. And then after that there were the hundreds and the thousands of little things and big things, tragic, funny, profound, silly, vital, unimportant, American things that went to make up the rest of life at home during the war years, the things you would have laughed, or gossiped, or shed a tear about had you been a civilian in these United States, those years from the spring of '42 to the summer of '45, while you were gone."

Dan Parker: "Baseball sent over 4,000 men into the service but managed to carry on with the 1,700 remaining players. Of the 41 minor leagues in existence the season before Pearl Harbor, only nine remain."

Norman Corwin: "There was friendly scorn as well as corn in the repertoire of radio comedians, and the routine of ridiculing the star was always good for a laugh. Stooges kidded Bob Hope's chin, Jimmy Durante's nose, Jack Benny's pinch-penny habits, the bags under Fred Allen's eyes."

Anna M.W. Wolf and Irma Simonton Black:

"One group of people, however, no serviceman would even want to find unchanged. That group is the children. The most obvious and yet amazing feature of childhood is its capacity to grow in all directions at once. Anyone who has not seen a child for a year or more will find that child a rather different person from the one he left."

One book on one shelf in one library. Waiting, as all the books in all the libraries wait, to be found.

Chicago Tribune