How World War II shaped American family entertainment

Editor’s note: This is the sixth installment in the West Hills Gazette’s nine-part series that looks at life in Robinson Township during World War II. This series, written by Janet Gonter of the Robinson Township Historical Society, originally ran in the Suburban Gazette in 2017 but is timely now, as the 80th anniversary of the end of the war will be observed later this summer. Check back each Sunday for a new installment.

Imagine a time in Robinson Township — or any town in the USA — when the American family had no television. No computer. No cell phones. No video games. In short, with an average annual income of $2,000, the American family of the early 1940s relied on simple forms of entertainment. During World War II, the great outdoors, radio, music and movies were all the entertainment America needed.

For children, entertainment was simple. The war was a far-off concept that hardly affected their innocent lives. Like all kids, they looked forward to the last day of school and a whole blissful summer off.  Shoes, which were largely unavailable because of the rubber ration, were put away for the next school year and church on Sunday, and kids went barefoot virtually all summer and played outdoors all day long — games like Hopscotch, Hide & Seek, Four Square, Statues and of course, Red Light, Green Light. They flew kites, built forts and caught fireflies. In winter, they rode sleds, built snowmen and had snowball fights. The fields, the woods and the creeks were their joyous playground, even in wartime.

For families, radio provided endless magic. Moon Run native Gwen Gaspare Brouker recalls, “We sat around our large radio at night and listened to ‘The Lone Ranger,’ ‘The Green Hornet,’ ‘Inner Sanctum’ and ‘Fibber Magee and Mollie.’” Radio? Really? Absolutely! The imagination of listeners filled in all the blanks! Once a week, families like the Broukers listened to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Fireside Chats,” where they could hear the latest news about the war from the president himself.

In addition to daily news and drama, radio also provided music, which developed its own wartime sound. Glenn Miller’s big band music, often heard live, became the rage, along with many other artists’ war-themed songs like “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” by the Andrews Sisters, “I’ll Be Seeing You” by Billie Holiday and “The Last Time I Saw Paris” by Kate Smith. If you strolled along any street in Robinson Township on a summer evening, you would be sure to hear snippets of these songs drifting from every open window.

Movies were a huge form of entertainment in those days, but usually meant taking public transportation since gas was strictly rationed. Families might take a bus to see a movie at the Orpheum or Roxian Theater in McKees Rocks, or the Liberty Theater in Carnegie. Many movies had solemn wartime themes, like “Mrs. Miniver,” “Back to Bataan” and “Gung Ho,” but big, happy musicals like “Holiday Inn” and “For Me and My Gal” provided a welcome — if brief — respite from the war. Hollywood stars like Jimmy Stewart, Tyrone Power and Clark Gable became instant heroes and role models when they signed up for service in  the U.S. military. At Forbes Field, film stars like Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney and Carole Lombard made hugely successful personal appearances to sell war bonds. Needless to say, movies and movie stars were an important distraction during the war.

Between movies, newsreels — 10-minute black-and-white narrated  films often shot on the battlefield — provided the only real images of the war for the public, and played a vital role in getting information out there. Cartoons were also shown, and like movies and music of the time, cartoons and comic books often had a wartime theme with the Americans as the “good guys” and the Germans and Japanese as the “bad guys.” No one considered this kind of thinking  politically incorrect back then. The war was the war and the U.S. was “in it to win it.”

It’s hard to believe how much entertainment has changed since the 1940s. The grainy black-and-white images from World War II represent an ancient time to us, but for those who lived through the war years, the memories — both good and bad — will last forever.