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Remembering World War II: Houston Students Interview Their Neighbors By Maggie Riechers These veterans’ memories of the Second World War are compelling. Listen to the story of the fourteen-year-old who con-vinced recruiters he was old enough to enlist and found himself a berth aboard a Navy submarine in the Pacific. Or the pilot who flew fifty missions unscathed, only to learn that on the first flight without him, his crew crashed into another plane, killing all twenty aboard. Or the soldier who survived the agonies of the Bataan Death March and three and a half years of Japanese captivity. For seventh graders at Hogg Middle School in Houston, the stories of more than half a century ago are bringing a piece of history alive—World War II and the role played by their neigh-borhood, the Heights. The students rediscovered the past in their own back-yard by talking to local people who lived through World War II. The oral histories have been made into a book called The Heights Remembers World War II: Our Community in History, published last October. It is also a website at http://wwii.rice.edu. “We wanted to come up with a way for middle school students in the inner city to study history that involved their own community,” says Leslie Miller, senior research scholar at Rice University Center for Technology in Teaching and Learning. “We designed the Community in History program to engage the students in historical research and for them to relate to the past through people and places right in their own neighborhood. The idea was to show kids that history is living; it is a continuing process.” Rice has an ongoing relationship with Hogg Middle School and has run summer institutes for teachers to help bolster the teaching of humanities. When history teacher Michel Hinton sug-gested the World War II project, Miller thought it an ideal way to put the community-in- history concept into action. With the help of the Texas State Historical Association, veterans groups, and historian Louis Marchiafava of the Metropolitan Research Center of the Houston Public Library, the students began their project. Rice already had a plan-ning grant under NEH’s Schools for a New Millennium program; it received more Endowment support to carry out this phase. The Heights is one of the oldest communities in Houston, created when the Omaha and South Texas Land Company purchased more than seventeen hundred acres of land northwest of Houston in the 1890s. The developers decided to call it “the Heights” because the tract is twenty-three feet above the level of downtown Houston. They wanted to convey to potential buyers that it was a more healthful place to live than Houston proper, which was periodically plagued with epidemics of yellow fever. Hogg Middle School is seventy-five years old, and many of the veterans the students interviewed are alumni. Its school population today is 89 percent Hispanic, with 25 percent of students enrolled in English as a Second Language classes, 92 percent classified as economically disadvantaged, and 59 percent identified as at-risk students. Michel Hinton suggested the World War II project after the John H. Reagan World War II Memorial was built in the Heights. She proposed that students collect the personal stories of people right in the community who had been a part of that history. Under Marchiafava’s guidance, the students researched specific battles. They also learned how to collect oral histories, and found the veterans more than willing to talk. And so it happened that the students heard the story of Richard Jenke, the fourteen-year- old so desperate to serve his country after the bombing of Pearl Harbor that he lied about his age to join the Navy. Jenke worked as an electrician aboard a submarine that resupplied guerrillas in the Philippines and prowled the Pacific looking for Japanese ships to destroy. Jenke spent thirty-four months in the Pacific and was overjoyed to return home. “Freedom is never free. . . . You have to protect it,” Jenke told the students. “You have to nurture it. I hope . . . none of you ever have to go out there and defend it.” The students learned, too, of Billy Lindley, the pilot whose plane was shot down on its first mission without him. He served as a combat pilot with the Thirteenth Air Force, 307th bomb group, 372nd bomb squadron, heading missions targeted to Rabaul, one of Japan’s most heavily fortified islands. “We took a beating at first, losing many airplanes and also crew members, but we kept pounding the target until we annihilated it,” Lindley told the students. “It became of no use to the Japanese and no threat to the Thirteenth Air Force.”His plane was hit on one run, losing its hydraulic system, but he and the crew made it safely back to base. After nearly fifty missions, Lindley was relieved of combat duty. And then came a terrible moment. On his crew’s first flight without him, he told the students, “They went into a cloud bank . . . when they broke through they were in a head-on collision . . . and all twenty men were killed. . . . These were the tragedies of war as we experienced it, as we saw it. It was a terrible thing.” Another of the moving stories for the young historians was that of Avril Steele, who survived the Bataan Death March and three and a half years of captivity after U.S. and Filipino troops were forced to surrender to the Japanese in 1942. Steele had quit high school to join the army. By Christmas of 1940 he was stationed in Iba in the Philippines, an idyllic kind of place. Not quite a year later, on December 7, 1941, everything changed. Hours after the bomb attack on Pearl Harbor, while Steele was in the mess hall, the Japanese attacked the Philippines. He ran outside and saw the sky filled with planes. “They were silver in this pretty blue sky,” Steele told the student interviewers. “That was the prettiest sight you’d ever seen . . . until you saw those bomb doors open.” After the bombing of Iba, Steele’s unit moved to Manila, where it was attacked again and where Steele got hit in the forehead by a piece of shrapnel. The American and Filipino forces were outnumbered and out-gunned. As the fighting continued, food and supplies dwindled. “We were eating anything we could—snakes, monkeys, and just anything we could find,” he recounted. After the U.S. troops surrendered, Steele endured the grueling Death March to San Fernando. Eleven thousand to sixteen thousand Americans and Filipinos died along the line of march. Until the Philippines were liberated, Steele was a prisoner of war. “There’s just no way to describe that,” he told the students. “You just live from day to day or hour to hour. You never knew when your time’s coming.” More than fifty years after his release, Steele is still affected by his ordeal. “I see things sometimes yet because I’ve seen some of the most horrible things.” At the same time, he recognizes his role as a witness. “I’m history,” he proudly told the students. “These stories made history real to the students,” says Hinton. “They could connect words on a page with the people who actually partici pated in World War II.” Many students had learned of the war though movies, never measuring the screen image against the reality. The students also spent time learning about life on the homefront in Houston during the war. Valerie Jolly told of listening at school to President Franklin Roosevelt’s radio broadcast declaring war against Japan. She told the students about schoolchildren helping to collect scrap metal, paper, tinfoil, and other materials for the war effort, and she showed the students ration stamps and newspapers from 1943. “Everything went towards the war,” she said. “Everything we did was an effort for the war.” The finished product of the students’ information gathering was the book and website, produced with help from Melinda Wolfrum, a history major and research assistant at Rice. Wolfrum videotaped the students as they conducted their interviews. “It was amazing to the students that people who played such an important role in American history attended the same school as they did,” she says. “The project really got the kids interested in history.” The quality of the work was no surprise to Douglas E. Barnett, assistant director of the Texas State Historical Association, who served as an adviser to the project. “We knew middle school students could do quality work if given structure and opportunity,” he says. “It’s a matter of getting the students involved in doing, instead of just reading. The project showed them that the community they live in is a valuable historical research lab.” Barnett is the managing editor of the New Handbook of Texas History Online and hopes to create a link to the students website. Other community projects are under way in the classrooms at Hogg. Suzanne Sanderson, an art teacher, has had students study the area’s architecture and paint a mural in one of the school’s main hallways depicting the Heights between 1891 and 1925. Again, the students researched the period and interviewed older residents, including some who had participated in the World War II project. Attending the Rice Summer Institute spurred Sanderson to develop the idea for com bining the study of local history with art. Through their research, the students located old photographs of the Heights including three buildings that are still standing, two late-nineteenth-century grocery stores that are now nightclubs, and a 1910 fire station that has been turned into the community’s civic center. The mural shows the students’ depictions of ten old buildings and includes a 1910 Oldsmobile and a Model T Ford. “I didn’t know if the kids would connect to this idea— most of them are from Hispanic families who didn’t come here until the 1960s,” says Sanderson. “But they did connect—it’s where they live and it meant something to them.” Another project at the school creates computer-generated calendars with family birthdays and anniversaries listed along with important dates in the community’s history. Still another project in social studies, involves research on the area’s former trolley system. “We want teachers and students to become historians, for the students to engage in the process of research—to teach them that history is something you can do,” says Miller. She compares it to a hands-on teaching approach to science. “We believe in hands-on history,” she says. “When the students become engaged in their own research, it brings to life the pages of a history textbook.” Maggie Riechers is a writer in Potomac, Maryland. The Community in History program has received $216,072 in NEH grants for educational develop-ment. The online version can be found at http://wwii.rice.edu/.
Humanities, July/August 2001, Volume 22/Number 4 |