This is what my mother, Joan Wehlen Morrison, wrote one week after she turned 15 years old, on December 31, 1937.
Friday, December 31, 1937
I had the awfullest dream last night. I dreamt a war was begun and people were running about with brightened looks in their eyes. I was a boy and I knew I would have to be a soldier. I was afraid to go to war. I kept seeing trenches and mud and horror and pain and things—and killing people—and I was terribly scared inside. But I knew I would have to join the army anyhow because otherwise people would call me coward. I went to enlist and that’s all I remember. I figured I might have three months in a training group before I would have to fight. It was a terrible dream and I was so scared. That’s all I remember. . . .
I sit here and wait for the last minutes of 1937 to come to an end. 1937 sounds like such a momentous year—like 1492 or 1066 or 1588 or 1776, doesn’t it? I’m sure it marks a crisis in our history. But 1940 sounds even greater—well, we must wait.
I’ve been reading my journal over, my journal of this year—and plenty seems to have happened. A king has been crowned—England’s George VI. Edward married Wallis
Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII, who abdicated to marry “the woman I love.”
and closed that part of England’s history—or did he? The Spanish Civil (?) War continued and the Japanese began and conquered an undeclared war in China. Now the civilization of thousands of years is under the flag of the rising (or setting?) sun of Japan. . . . Add to things that have happened: the Hindenburg, last but one of the great airships, burned to cinders in New Jersey. . . .
P.S. Marconi[1] also died this year.
[1] Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, who was also considered the father of the radio.
Home Front Girl 