It was, I suspect, a dearly treasured possession of my late father. The photograph of my father, uncle, and grandmother was taken in Brooklyn early in 1946 when the two boys - young men, really - returned from the Second World War.
That Dad went to great pains to have a local photographer make duplicates after he became the snapshot's sole survivor and when it was clear his own days were numbered tells me much of the tough-as-nails prison guard given far more to the levity of a relentless practical joke than to sentimentality. But there it was: two young sailors with their mother; a homecoming that must have been repeated thousands and thousands of times throughout America and, indeed, the world after V-J Day.
Of the countless pictures this Baby Boom history buff has gazed upon over the years, none is to my mind more evocative of the existence of a Home Front than this happy reunion and none more suggestive of the manner in which ordinary lives are swept up in the tempests of monumental historical events. A few blocks away from the Manton's home on Brooklyn's Fifth Avenue lived the Graffs; a couple in their forties with two teenage daughters. That family, my mother's family, had no such joyful reunion; the son, Sgt. Robert Graff, had been killed in action in 1943.
From the rooftop of their apartment, my father and his brother frequently spied the silhouettes of warships "dark gliding" in the East River towards the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Not even the most vindicated seer could have prophesized that the two youths, who had known only the shabby poverty of the Great Depression, would sail to distant parts. Bill ended up in Oran in North Africa. Charlie, crossed the cornfields of Kansas and the deserts of Utah to on a crowded troop train bound for the Pacific. Neither brother's war experiences were festooned with sea battles or blood baths to capture remote islands although they did have their share of misadventures and got a geography lesson bar none.
On December 7, 1941, when their Sunday matinee was interrupted with word of the Japanese air attack on the American fleet which bifurcated the their generation's lives into two acts - before and after The War - nobody had ever heard of Pearl Harbor and the Hawaii my father would visit three and a half years later on his way to Guam was still a place of dirt footpaths through jungle and pineapple plantation.
After the war, in 1952, Bill could not resist the lure of Levittown and, after summers spent visiting is home, Charlie belatedly followed suit in 1968. Two young brothers who grew up in poverty, who had seen first hand the soup kitchens, bread lines, street evictions and unrest of the 1930's, were now suburban homeowners. It was an amazing change of fortunes experienced by many homecoming GI's to Levittown and to places like it or modeled after it and was nothing less than the epitome of what was called "the American Dream".
My father never saw the Pacific again after the war. He oftentimes spoke of returning to the hills overlooking Agana Bay and to Wikiki Beach, but it never happened. He worked hard and years of chain smoking caught up with him and by the time he finally retired, the vigorous youth with muscular physique and luxuriant hair had been reduced to a sickly cancer patient tethered to oxygen tank and surrounded by sepia-tinted medicine bottles. No vacation to Guam or Hawaii. How that homecoming photograph must have taken him back to a time when Brooklyn seemed like the whole world and the future seemed to loom new and promising.
Want to learn more about the history of Levittown and the surrounding communities? Visit www.levittownhistoricalsociety.org
