Evening star., 1945-10-14
lust Between
Yourselves .
-By PhiHb II. Love .

Time was when almost any father
could impress his children with true
stories of his adventures as a youth.
But no more. The exciting years
through which today's boys and girls
have lived have left them Indifferent
to adventure of the ordinary sort.
Dads tale of hiking from Washing
ton to Baltimore, of camping out
on the roadside and being chased by
tramps was q thriller in its day
but that day began to wane along
about 1899.
The Germans started it, with their
lightning victory over Poland. OF
course, the Japanese and the Italians
had been doing the same sort OF
thing in Asia and Africa, but we
hadn't paid much attention. It'was
not until war broke out in Europe
that we began to realize that we
were living in dangerous age. But
even then, most of us failed to rec
ogniZe the seriousness of the danger.
The oceans seemed very broad in
those days.
Pearl Harbor dried up the Pacific
and made THE Atlantic seem a mere
puddle. 1t also transformed our
humdrum lives into exciting ad-
ventures
Do you remember how, during the
first few days after our entry into
the war, we wondered if Washing
ton, New York and other cities
would be bombed? Remember how,
as the Japs scored one victory
after another, we kept wondering,
where's the Navy?" And how
there didn't seem to be any?
And then, after months of anxiety,
the tide slowly turned. There really
was a Navy-and an Army and a
Marine Corps, too-and they began
pushing back the enemy. We con-
tinued our blackouts and air-raiG
drills, but the uneasy feeling that
each one might be the real thing
gradually gave way to the certainty
that We were only practicing
Remember?
No doubt it all came back to YOU.
as it did to me. on Nimitz day, when
some of the men and women who
won the war in the Pacific-and in
the Atlantic, too, don't forget
marched up Pennsylvania avenue to
the music Of their bands.
The tanned. smiling admiral, wav-
ing from his open automobilef
The IA heroes on whom President
Truman had hung the Congressional
MEDAL OF Honor. =. The thousands
OF other sailors, Marines and Coast
Guardsmen. The guns, planes
and landing craft. >. The thousand
roaring planes above.
You thought of the men still over
seas, Of the men in hospitals, unde,
white crosses, at the bottom of the
oceans-men of all the services.
But I started out to write about
adventure.
An adventure, according to the
dictionary, is "a bold undertaking
in which hazards are to be encoun-
tered, and the issue is staked upon
unforeseen events"
When Dad intercepted a forward
pass and ran go yards to score the
winning touchdown for dear ole
Central. or hit home run to break
up the baseball game, or took 8
shortcut across Old Man Withers
field and got chased by a bull. OF
Jumped out the second-story window
the time sparks from the chimney
set the roof on fire-well, he was ar
adventurous fellow, all right, ane
you can't take that away from him
But 1t will be long time before he'll
want to talk about those things
again, or you'll want to listen to him
Unless he's Nimitz, an Eisen-
hover or a Macarthur, or a VAIN
wright. Devereux or Boyington-
or. at the very least, plain CT Joe
his adventures will seem pretty
drab.
That, OF course. is because all OF
us have just lived through the most
/ hazardous adventure in historv