Ed Lorenzi: Reflections on a life

Lessons from a real father, born and raised in the United States. Fought in World War II.

Reflecting is an almost full-time occupation these past three months, remembering Eden, high school days, six years in Binghamton, marriage, old friends, academic highlights, places I’ve visited, watching the girls grow up – all those great memories. Going further back, I think of my parents. As a male, I guess I identify more with my father and how he grew up, the examples and model he set for me, the stories he told me, the incredible experiences he had during his youth, from the death of his mother and sister to his experiences in the war and the years that followed. As a student of history and awash with shows about World War II, I often focus on his two years in the war, following two years in college, which all followed a very tough, impoverished youth.

His war experience, dramatically highlighted by examples like this of the Eighth Army Air Force, cause me to admire him all the more. In the first two years of combat in England, fliers in the Eighth had only a one in five chance of surviving their required 25 missions. How did these young men, like my dad, do this? What level of courage and commitment was required? Could I have done this? (I doubt it.)

Perusing these pictures of Paige and Ed from that era, these photos produce a narrative in my mind, trying to capture what they were doing, how they were feeling, and how they lived in the 1940s. What I realize is that life then was so much simpler. People moved around a lot less. There were less than half as many Americans. Television was still in its infancy; radio and movie theaters were the dominant audio media. Newspapers were plentiful and very local, with a lot of cities having two or more papers, usually competing for a Democrat or Republican base readership. Factory jobs and mining represented a larger percentage of the work force than they do today.

People attended religious services on a more regular basis. Religion was not just a nominal activity or a demographic; people practiced their religion, and not only in their houses of worship, but also in their own homes and, often, their schools. Relative to the population and even on an absolute basis, there were more priests, nuns, churches and parochial schools.

A lot of rural homes still lacked indoor plumbing. For those lucky enough to have a full house, kitchens were more labor intensive. The really lucky – but not necessarily ‘rich’ – had domestic help, for cooking or housekeeping, not so much for child rearing. In fact, a hundred years ago, domestic help was the second largest occupation in America, second only to farming.

Travel was limited by today’s standards. People often lived their entire lives in a relatively small area, maybe no more than fifty miles from their birthplace. Longer distances traveled were rare; international travel was for the rich and idle.

Forget making phone calls outside your local area; they were rare and expensive. Instead, people wrote letters. Kids had ‘pen pals’ to exchange information and to create friendships with people outside their immediate geographic area. Penmanship was a key skill and having to write down one’s thoughts caused people to work to perfect their spelling and grammar.

Schools stuck to basic subjects and few high school grads went on to college. Education was clearly a preparation for citizenship and work. Subjects were basic and much more intense. History, geography and civics classes taught students most of what they knew about the world and the government and while imperfect, that instruction was helpful, practical, and more comprehensive than how these subjects are taught today.

Although simpler, more basic, life was not necessarily better. Of course, for those living in poverty, the elderly and the unemployed, those times could be a lot worse. There were fewer dollars for public assistance, nothing like food stamps, Medicaid, or extensive unemployment benefits as we have today. The safety net – if it existed – was in the extended family or in religious and other forms of charity. And while technology and the basic mechanics of daily life were less complicated, people needed to learn to fix broken things themselves, from darning a sock or to sewing a button to replacing a broken part on your auto or repairing the roof on your house.

In classes this century, I would often assess student knowledge of income and wealth. Few, if any students realized how the blight of poverty shifted in the last sixty years from those over sixty years old to those under thirty years old. Among adults, millennials were more likely to be ‘poor’ (low or negative net worth) than retirees today, even if the millennial had a good income and the retiree had no work income at all. As for net income (what financial benefits people had after they paid their taxes), the gap between the high and low incomes was much smaller once taxes were subtracted from the higher incomes and government cash and other benefits were added to those with low incomes. In general, there was a lot less wealth and a lot more poverty all across the country and the world.