Today is Pearl Harbor Day. I can’t help but wonder how many people alive today know the full import of this day. For my parent’s generation, it was their September 11th. More than 2,300 Americans died in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and about 1200 were injured. After Pearl Harbor, recruiter’s offices were full with patriotic young men (and women) signing up to serve in the armed forces.

My mother was one of them. She enlisted in the WAVES.

“When we enlisted, we signed up for the duration plus six months,” she told me. “We didn’t know how or when or even if the war would end. Hitler looked unstoppable. There was talk that the war could go on for years and years. The media called us ‘the lost generation.’ We were an entire generation that missed the years of our youth. That time of our life was lost to those war years.”

Her true love - the young man she’d spent months getting to know and love - also joined the Navy. About a year into the war, his boat was hit by a German torpedo and he suffered severe injuries and required extensive physical rehabilitation. When he came home from the war, he told my mother that he was now only “half a man” and according to my mother, he said that she deserved better and that she should forget about him and find someone else.

When she was in her late 70s, she finally told me this story. And that was only because I found a well-hidden 1930s photo of my mother and this fellow. When I showed this photo to my mom and started asking a few questions, she finally told me the whole story.  When she looked at the snapshot, tears came to her eyes, followed by a soft smile. When she spoke up and started talking, she described him as “the love of my life.”

That’s one couple, and one story. And two lives changed forever by the war. And one of millions of stories, I’m sure.

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Pearl Harbor

There’s a wonderful book titled, “The Good Old Days, They Were Awful!” It’s an interesting book with many stories of how life “back in the day” was not all peaches and cream. I agree with that - to an extent - but there were some bonuses to life back then. However, as far as issues of sanitation, we’re miles ahead of our ancestors who lived in the early 1900s.

Here’s an ad from the American Carpenter and Builder Magazine, from 1912. (Story continues below photos.)

1912 American Carpenter and Builder ad

Close up of the modern toilet

Take a better look at this contraption. In short, the (ahem) “human waste products” were dropped into a steel box directly under your house (aka basement or foundation). After a time, you’d stir the (ahem) contents in this box and add chemicals a couple times a week.  See the handle beside the toilet (on the floor)?  That’s your stirrer. And see the large pipe behind the toilet? In a perfect world, that’s a vent pipe that directs odors out of the living space. In a perfect world.

I suppose for those who were accustomed to donning warm shoes and making the long trek to the outhouse in the backyard, this “chemical toilet” was better. I suppose.  But in the real world, that thing must have stunk to high heaven. And what poor soul was charged with crawling under the house and cleaning out the box twice a year?

I love studying the good old days and I love writing about the good old days. However, when I finally learn how to travel back in time, I think I’ll take my modern plumbing with me.

One of my favorite movies of all time, perhaps my all-time #1 favorite movie is, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

In this post-WW2 film, George Bailey gets to see what his town, Bedford Falls, would have looked like if he’d never been born.  Without George’s positive influence and his ever-fledgling Building and Loan, the modern subdivision of Bailey Park would never have been developed and countless citizens would never have had the opportunity to become homeowners.

Without the Bailey Building and Loan, George finds that Bedford Falls is full of substandard rental properties. And because there are so many rental properties, there is less stability in the family structure and in a broader context, there is less stability in the whole community.  In this alternate sans-George world, Ernie the cab driver does not live with his family in their own “nice little home in Bailey Park,” but instead, his home is a decrepit shack in Pottersville and it’s implied that this hardship is partly to blame for the fact that Ernie’s wife “ran off three years ago and took the kid.”

The streets of this alternate-Bedford Falls (now named Pottersville) are lined with liquor stores, night clubs, pawnbrokers, striptease shows and pool halls. Gaudy neon signs flash “girls, girls, girls” and illumine the night-time corridors of Main Street. Citizens are neither calm nor law-abiding and brusque policemen struggle to keep peace and order.

George’s revelation that he really had a “wonderful life” stemmed in part from the realization that his meager efforts to give people the chance to become homeowners gave them a feeling of accomplishment, prosperity, security and pride. By extension, the whole community benefited in important, significant and enduring ways.

The early Sears Modern Homes catalogues stated this basic philosophy in different ways, but there was an elementary core truth therein: Homeowners have a vested interest in their community and communities with a large percentage of homeowners will enjoy a greater proportion of  prosperity, stability and peace.

Perhaps Sears was, to small communities in the Midwest, what George Bailey was to Bedford Falls. Sears empowered and enabled tens of thousands of working-class and immigrant families to build their own home. What would countless Midwestern towns have become without Sears homes?  How many towns in the Midwest were spared the fate of becoming a Pottersville? Probably many.

Sears Modern Homes made a significant difference in many communities throughout the Midwest. I’m sure of that.

The author of four books on kit homes and the country’s leading expert in this field, Rose Thornton has been featured in the national media dozens of times. But when she tried online dating, she learned that her professional success and personal accomplishments didn’t carry much weight.

After 70 first dates, Rose learned what too many men consider most important: Physical beauty.

Read her engrossing and deeply personal (and at times heart-wrenching) story that frankly and honestly discusses the challenges of being less-than-beautiful in a dating world that judges you first and foremost, by your thumbnail profile picture.

Rose Thornton is the author of six books, including The Houses That Sears Built (2002,) Finding the Houses That Sears Built (2004) and California’s Kit Homes. Her newest book (a field guide to kit homes sold by Montgomery Ward) will be published in Winter 2009.

Rose has traveled to 24 states to give 200 lectures on Sears Homes, from Bungalow Heaven in Los Angeles to The Smithsonian in Washington, DC. She has addressed a wide variety of audiences from architectural preservationists in Boston, St. Louis and Chicago to kit home enthusiasts in small towns across America.

Rose has appeared on PBS (History Detectives), A&E (Biography), CBS (Sunday Morning News) and her book was featured in its own category on Jeopardy. She is considered the country’s #1 authority on kit homes. Her work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post, L. A. Times, Dallas Morning News, Old House Journal, American Bungalow, Blue Ridge Country and about 100 other publications. Twice in the last three years, the story of her unique career was picked up by the AP and in May 2009, she was interviewed on BBC Radio.