Those 70ish Girls

BY VALERIE HALLA

WWII HOLLYWOOD FROM MOM’S VIEW

When I was growing up in South Dakota, Pennsylvania and California, I heard my mother recalling with a melancholy lilt in her voice about her time in Hollywood during the early 1940’s working in the aircraft industry. She was a young woman from a small, rural area, raised on a farm, quite innocent, bright-eyed and unschooled in the ways of large cities. She headed out west when her country needed wartime workers in the aircraft industry building fighter planes for waging a vicious war. She was also conflicted because she wanted to have a good time trying to forget the dangers our country was facing yet at the same time support the US Allies in a terrible world war. She had a big binder where she had kept War bonds she had purchased to help the cause. She spent all the bonds over the years, but I still have it after she’s been gone for about 17 years. I also still have old photos of her good times blocking out her daily routine and getting to dance to the Big Bands of that era.

I’m writing to show my Mom’s fun outings when my Mom had a turn at a lighter more fun side of her personality, going out for magical evenings in her new temporary home in Hollywood in the turbulent 1940’s. Even when all of the US was under tremendous pressure with young people going to war, my Mom had fun times to relieve the stress. She wasn’t on the farm out in the Plains, nor in the family’s general store anymore. This was an historic time. People were moving with the needs of the country. Movie stars were all over LA, soldiers were everywhere in uniform, seen out and about. The place she went quite often after a long work week was the Palladium on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. It was the center for big bands, big crowds, big names and big times with many young male soldiers and women looking for love. Maybe finding one last happy time before being shipped out to find one’s final fate overseas. You couldn’t plan for life except for maybe one more dance.

Mom got a ride with Murdo, South Dakota friends out to California. Also her sister, Loretta, from Murdo, South Dakota eventually went out there since her husband, Bill, had joined the Army. Their childhood friend, Sugar, joined them in California. Then later my Aunt Loretta gave birth to a baby boy there, our cousin Billy. I’m not sure if Loretta and Bill were in California first or my Mom Ella was. Regardless, Los Angeles and where they lived in north Hollywood particularly, exuded exciting energy from the old 1940’s pictures that I’ve seen. It sounded epic the way my Mom told it.