by Stephen P. O’Connor

My late Uncle Bill never took a drink. I asked him once, “Did you ever, drink?”  He said, “No.”  Then he paused, and added, “Well, I did drink once.”

“When was that, Bill?”

“It was V-J Day.”

For any Inside Lowell readers who are under a certain age, VJ Day was Victory in Japan Day, and signaled the end of World War II. If you were ever going to drink, by God, that was the day to do it.

Just before he died, Jay Pendergast edited a book of photographs of Lowell. One of those photographs is entitled simply “VJ Day in Lowell.” A throng of revelers fills Kearney Square, immobilizing buses and cars on Merrimack Street, as confetti and streamers rain down on the crowds from the windows above. It is New Year’s Eve in broad daylight, though Pages’ clock says, on its two visible faces, only twenty minutes to ten.

The buildings in the photo are familiar to me, but they bear strange signs that I’m too young to remember:  Lee’s Chop Suey, the Waldorf Cafeteria, and A. Schuler Cigars, whose sign proclaims: “Soda, Luncheon, and Telephone Booths.” It is not only the signs on the buildings that have changed. It is the people. Old men wear suits and fedoras, the women and young girls wear dresses or skirts.

There are a few young boys on the fringe of crowd, also in suit coats. They’ve never seen adults in such a frenzy. I doubt whether any work was accomplished on Wednesday, August 15^th, 1945. I’ve studied this photograph carefully, with a large magnifying glass, looking for clues to the period, about Lowell, and about that day in particular.

There are interesting details: two cops leaning on a shiny Packard, stranded in the middle of the sea of Lowellians, talking to someone in the back seat. There is a sign for the Lowell USO club; women are pulling each other by the hand, as if afraid they’ll lose each other in that mass of humanity. Naturally, there are not a lot of young men in the picture, but they will be coming home soon. One senses the excitement of that moment on Merrimack Street 77 years ago – victory – the long war is over. Happy days are here again.

On the day the war had begun for America, the day that “will live in infamy,” December 7^th, 1941, my father had just come out of the Keith Theater, and heard a Lowell Sun paperboy crying “Japanese Attack Pearl Harbor! Our Navy winning!” Within hours the shocking truth was known, and it wasn’t long until my father was on a troop ship headed for the South Pacific. The war would cost 418,000 American lives, end Fascism as a political and military force in Europe, define a generation, and create a new world.

Once, in a post office in Belgium, an old man began to speak to me while I waited for my Belgian friend to mail a package. I shook my head and repeated my memorized phrase, “I don’t speak Flemish,” which was something like, “Sorry. Dat begrijp ik niet.” The man said something else which I was pretty sure meant “Where are you from?” I said, “American.”

He got very excited and took my hand. To my surprise, he began to speak to me in halting English. “I am in concentration camp. Almost dead. Then come the Americans, and I am free forever. Thank you. Thank you.” And then he started to cry. I shook his hand and patted him on the back, and by that time I was getting pretty juiced up myself. My friend Geert came over and asked “What did you say to the old guy? He’s crying. Oh my God, you’re crying too!”

So, when I look at the old photograph that records the end of that horrible war, I remember that old man, and I remember the endless rows of white crosses not so far from where I met him, that mark the poor remains of many a young man, who might have been in the Keith Theater or about some other innocent business just a few years before.

Sometimes, riding in my car, I find a station playing the music my father used to play on the hi fi on Sunday afternoons, Glenn Miller, Louis Armstrong, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, The Andrews Sisters. I try to imagine myself, a young man of eighteen or twenty years in 1941, excited by the new sounds. Moonlight Serenade. Pardon me boys, is this the Chatenooga Choo Choo? I got a girl in Kalamazoo zoo zoo.

Photo Courtesy James V. Roy

I listen to that music in the same way I look at the old photographs. I feel that it has secrets to reveal. Who were those people frozen in that faded photograph? I try to sense their world view in the films they saw at the Strand and the Keith Theaters, where characters actually said things like, “You think I’m licked. You all think I’m licked. Well, I’m not licked. And I’m going to stay right here and fight for this lost cause, even if this room gets filled with lies like these.”

The people in the photograph before me were young a little over seventy years ago, and yet it was another world entirely, as difficult in some ways to imagine as a foreign country one has never visited. Bill Nangle’s wife, my aunt Betty, worked in Woolworth’s Five and Dime on Merrimack Street in those days. One afternoon two high school chums from the Highlands spotted her behind the counter, stopped, and sang “I Found My Million Dollar Baby in the Five and Ten Cent Store.”

“I was mortified!” she said.

How could such innocence have existed in such a turbulent world? Over sixty-two million people had died in the Second World War. Great cities of the world lay in ruins, from Europe to Asia. Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers would never return. The inhabitants of that time had every reason to be cynical, and yet the strongest emotions that filter down to me from the period are always of optimism, innocence, and joy.

No man is a failure who has friends.

I know that America had a long way to go in areas such as women’s rights and race issues, but I think it’s possible to admire what was good while recognizing what was wrong. And there was a lot that was good.

Here, in the old photo we see the day the wheel of war came full circle, and even the sober Bill Nangle was drinking in a bar in San Francisco near the wharf where his battle-damaged ship had crawled in for repairs. He remembered a fountain full of drunken sailors. It was definitive victory, purchased, as Churchill had said, with “blood, sweat and tears,” and it triggered a euphoric, if bittersweet, international delirium. In Times Square, a sailor and a nurse met, kissed spontaneously and became icons. Bells rang out in European capitals.

We can imagine what it was like to be young on that day, but there are few left who know, and only those few remember.

Stephen P. O’Connor is a native of Lowell, Massachusetts, where much of his writing is set. He is the author of “Smokestack Lightning,” a collection of short stories and the novels “The Spy in the City of Books,” “The Witch at Rivermouth” and “This is No Time to Quit Drinking; Teacher Burnout and the Irish Powers.”