Charles Osgood - Defending Baltimore Against Enemy Attack: A Boyhood Year During World War II

I T WAS THE BEST of times, it was the worst of times.

Charles Dickens didnt write those words about the year that I was nine in Baltimore, but they happen to fit. That year, 1942, was the best of times for a Baltimore boy who always seemed to be feeling good and the worst of times for a nation reeling from the first blows of World War II. However, in spite of their opposite states, the kid and the country were connected from the moment the year began, a watershed year for America and a long warm bath for me.

On January 2, two weeks before I turned nine, the Japanese took Manila and I sadly had to pin a tiny Japanese flag to the big map I had mounted on my bedroom wall. It would be June 4, the date of Americas great victory in the Battle of Midway, before I could happily pin up an American flag.

That wall map of a boy whose name was then Charlie Osgood Wood (I later took as my professional name Charles Osgood) hung above a windup Victrola phonograph, a small rocking chair, and my pictures of Babe Ruth and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Those two men are mentioned in the proper order, because Roosevelt wasnt from Baltimore.

Nine-year-old boys today, to whom a Victrola would mean either nothing or Victrolas Secret, hang pictures of celebrities on their walls; but mine held Great Britain, North Africa, and the Marshall Islands, places I learned about from the front pages of the newspapers that I delivered. I didnt have Kobe Bryant, I had Kobe, Japan.

The Marshalls? Garry and Penny, right? El Alamein? An Israeli rock star, right? Doesnt he have a new single that just passed one by Jakarta? Everyone knows, of course, that Monte Carlo heads a crime family and the Azores are a skin disease.

Although memory has a built-in sugarcoater, and childhood is seen through the cotton candy of time, I have always been certain that there was a genuine sweetness to the days when I was nine years old and the country was united in winning the last good war, if there could have been such a thing. In January of 1942, not only Manila had fallen, but Bataan and Singapore too; London was being bombed nightly; and America had half a navy and an army as strong as Perus. Things looked hopeless or even worse, but only to those who werent as mindlessly happy as I was. Not for a moment since December 7 had I expected America to lose the war: I made Donald Duck seem like a pessimist.

And the miracle of that time was that I was hardly a lonely optimist: Millions of Americans were singing Lets Remember Pearl Harbor and When the Caissons Go Rolling Along. And Americans were sustaining their morale with other songs that were calls not to battle but to smile, singing Dont Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else but Me, The Hut Sut Song, and:

You leave the Pennsylvania Station bout a quarter to four.

Read a magazine and then youre in Baltimore.

In that Baltimore, the Orioles flew lower than todays baseball birds because the team was just minor league/international league. There were white wooden houses with big front porches, and grand white stoops that had been famous for a hundred years, and a theater called the Hippodrome that had both films and the nations last vaudeville shows for twenty-five cents, and the homes of H. L. Mencken and Edgar Allan Poe, and an edifice poetically called the Bromo-Seltzer Tower, the only American monument that involved indigestion. In Manhattan, a college boy met his date under the Biltmore clock; in Baltimore, he met her under the fizz.

And there was milk delivered in bottles and mail delivered twice a day and a boy named Charlie Wood delivering the