The food line

If you talk to anyone who lived through World War II, eventually they will tell you about the lines--the lines at the grocery store, the lines at the gas station, the lines for ration coupons. My mother-in-law said there were even lines in church to receive Holy Communion.

Earlier on, I wrote about Alice Harder Sorensen, and her experiences on December 7, 1941. During the attack, she was at the home of Commander "Swede" Momsen at Makalapa Housing. It wasn't until early afternoon that she was able to get home.

She remembers: “I didn’t leave Makalapa until 2 p.m. that day. I was evacuated in a caravan and driven home. When I got home, mother told me that Mrs. Rudee called. Mrs. Rudee was an old family friend from their days at St. John’s Military Academy in Delafield, [Wisconsin] whose husband was stationed at Hickam. Mrs. Rudee asked Mother if she and three other wives from Hickam could stay with us because their homes had been strafed by machine gun fire from low-flying Japanese planes and their entire housing area was evacuated. Of course, my mother welcomed them.

“When Mrs. Rudee and the other Hickam wives arrived, I remember staring into the car they came in. The car had been used as an ambulance during the attack and the back seat was covered with blood. A wool Army blanket had been draped over the seats, but some blood seeped through and couldn’t be hidden.

“By the time our guests arrived, my father had already covered the windows of our house with tar paper. The overall effect was to make the house feel hot and humid. The paper blocked out breezes and light and trapped in the heat. There was no TV then, and all our news came from the radio. Our radio was a large RCA model. There were large tubes in the radio, and they cast a glow from the back so my father put the radio on the floor against an interior wall so no light would shine from the tubes. Then he brought in our supply of surplus food from the garage. It was mostly cans of spaghetti, fruit cocktail and tuna, but it came in handy feeding the four extra women.

“The morning after the attack, my mother sent me to Hadley’s Bakery on Beretania Street to buy bread because she knew that food would become scarce—and she was right. People were already lined up on the sidewalk in front of Hadley’s and in front of every other store on Beretania Street, and for the rest of the war it seems like all we did was stand in line for something.