Page 28 - Winterling's Chasing the Wind

(5 cents), I would purchase a model airplane kit. It was usually a World War II plane.
After a couple years, I had mounted the “squadrons” of model planes all over my
bedroom on strings that stretched from wall to wall. I built one model of Kitty Hawk
fame, flown by the Wright brothers. I constructed it from a photo of the historic flight,
and the model actually flew when pulled by a light string.

Jimmy Butts’ family lived in a house next to the Naval Baptist Church in Yukon, across
Roosevelt Blvd. from the Naval Air Station. The church later was renamed Yukon
Baptist Church. We both attended Sunday School there. We had a teacher, Bob
Peterson, who encouraged us to memorize a scripture each week. At the end of each
session, he’d hand each of us a business-size card with a hand-printed scripture verse
on it. We carried it with us all week, and to this day I can still quote more than a dozen
verses I learned as a teenager.

CHAPTER 05 - Family Life
Children in my generation generally lived in a different world than grownups. We
pretty much played, either alone or with neighborhood playmates. Our interaction with
parents was usually at mealtime, when we were sick, or when we had questions about
our homework. This being World War II, we were urged to conserve food and
materials for the war effort. Our car had an “A” sticker on the windshield to represent
our allotment for gasoline. The top half of the headlights were painted black to keep the
light from illuminating the sky for potential enemy warplanes. Our family had food
ration booklets containing stamps for our allotment of things like meat, sugar, and
butter. One day, Mother took some fresh vegetables to the Canning Kitchen. When she
brought home the box of shiny tin cans, they had not been labeled. For the next few
months, she didn’t know what she was serving until she opened the can! She also
planted English Peas and Cherry Tomatoes in a Victory Garden across our backyard.
The peas and tomatoes were a tasty snack for us when taking a break from our outside
activities. The games we played were Dodge Ball, Red Light, and Hide and Seek. We
also exercised on a pipe connected to two trees for doing chin-ups.

During the war, our clocks were advanced one hour to conserve energy. It was called
Eastern War Time. I remember playing softball outside in daylight as late as 9 PM but
turning out the lights to go to bed an hour later at 10. We used no electricity to cool our
homes because there was no air conditioning available in those days. We usually kept
our windows open during warm days and nights. We depended on screens to keep the
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