I’ve always wanted to write a book, but thought that I lacked one of the essential requisites. Writing ability, you say? Well, perhaps, but lots of books have been written by people with little or no writing ability. What I lacked was an appropriate photograph for the back of the book jacket. You know the kind … the very settled, sophisticated guy in a cardigan sweater holding a pipe.

Well, I was rummaging through an old scrapbook recently and found just the thing. No sweater, no pipe, but a plaid wool shirt with a red-tailed hawk sitting on my shoulder. Beats a pipe any day.

Now, the question became, what would I write about? I’ve been told that you can really only write about things that you have actually experienced. Of course, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote 26 Tarzan books without ever visiting Africa, but maybe that proves the point. Some have suggested that I write about my experiences at the Oatland Island Education Center: the well-publicized great wolf escape, the totally unpublicized panther escapes.

Perhaps some day I’ll do that, but I’ve always wanted to write the definitive history of World War II. As a child in the early 1940s, however, I was never privy to global strategies, barracks life or battlefield reports. Having my grandfather interpret H.V. Kaltenborn’s radio broadcasts every evening helped but was not enough.

I did have wartime experiences and contributed to the war effort, not least by being chubby. After dinner each evening, my job was to jump on empty tin cans to flatten them for the scrap drive. Cans leaving our house were flatter than most. I also had a Victory Garden; I planted lots of vegetables, but the only things that ever came up were radishes. Well, you have to stick to the things you are good at. I’m sure my radishes shortened the war or that the Axis powers held summit meetings to figure out ways to stop that kid on Gaston Street from growing them.

Rationing, I remember, but not in the sense of really being deprived of anything. I remember the ration books and especially the little red and blue OPA (Office of Price Administration) cardboard coins. Dealing with all of that was a problem for my parents, but for me it was an adventure.

Tuesdays and Fridays were fish days, and that had nothing to do with religion. You could only get one pair of shoes a year and had to turn in the old ones to get those. That was OK; I didn’t care about shoes, but my mother had to:

Everything was rationed: meat, gasoline, shoes. All anyone could talk about was coupons. “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” became a detested question everywhere. With a big family, we had plenty to eat. We even had leftover meat coupons, but shoes were a real problem. Dad (her father-in-law) said he had enough shoes. Tim (her husband) was hard on shoes and had to use his coupons. I wore shoes with cardboard and wooden soles, anything that wasn’t rationed, and saved my good ones for special occasions.

Four little boys(a fifth would arrive later), on the other hand, outgrew shoes so fast and wore them out so fast that I had to work out an agreement with childless friends to swap meat coupons for shoe coupons.*

(*Before she died in 1990, I asked my mother, Enid Cope, to tell me about her memories of the war years. She wrote them down so that I would have them to treasure, and they appear here in italics.)

We collected essential items that would be sent to people in the United Kingdom. These “Bundles For Britain” included sweaters and other bits of warm clothing, but my mother remembered very specialized items:

We were given a strange kind of yarn and asked to knit bandages for wounded soldiers there. American women knitted yards and yards of bandages. Then we were asked to knit long woolen stockings for use in Britain. We carried this knitting around in nice, neat little navy-blue silk bags with “Bundles For Britain” on the sides.

During the winter my mother took us to Sarasota, Fla., for several months. At Southside Elementary School, students collected scrap paper and were awarded chevrons for each 50 pounds turned in. Since there were a lot of Southside kids in my neighborhood and since we had a limited area to collect in, paper was at a premium. Morning newspapers were often collected before they were read.

I collected more than 300 pounds of “scrap”paper, and at that point you were supposed to get the chevrons and a blue cardigan sweater to put them on … a miniature high school athlete with jacket and varsity letters. Well, I never got my sweater and always felt cheated. Someone in Sarasota owes me a sweater. If they send it, I will wear it.

I bought 10- and 25-cent stamps which, when enough were accumulated — I think $18 worth — would buy a War Bond. About 120 years later you could cash the bond in for $25. I don’t know what happened to the six or seven bonds that I bought. I may be a very wealthy person.

I also remember sitting around with friends separating the tin foil from chewing gum wrappers so the foil could be used to build tanks, or so we thought.

We lived at Tybee Island during the summer. Winters in Sarasota, summers at Tybee; not a bad life while it lasted. Anyway, in the sand dunes at the foot of 8th Street, our street, there was a machine-gun nest manned by four or five soldiers. But 7th Street had the biggie — a radar installation in the dunes. At least that’s what we thought. It wasn’t a gun of any sort, and it was certainly bigger than our machine gun.

Billy Waite, Ann Seiler and I would sneak up through the sea oats, then race over the top of the sand dunes firing cap pistols, an activity that kept the soldiers on their toes. If there were such a thing as a Tybee Theater of Operations Medal, those guys would have earned it.

Tybee was an exciting place during the war: convoys of trucks filled with troops being brought to the beach for R & R, blimps and patrol planes over the beach every day looking for U-boats. Sometimes, my cousin, Alfred Cope, would be flying a blimp. He was commander of the Glynco Naval Air Station at Brunswick. I learned a lot about blimps from him, but I never got to ride in one. Maybe because I wore glasses and would have had trouble spotting a U-boat. 4F at age 7.

Tybee was an exciting place for my parents too, but for different reasons. My mother remembers:

The war had reached Tybee, too. Fort Screven was locked up like Fort Knox. No more riding through or crabbing at the jetties. The gates were up, and guards stood by their sentry boxes. The old fort had hidden gun emplacements facing the sea.

The little movie house, the only one on the island, was closed to the public, and one could only attend if invited by an officer who sent your name to the sentry. An escort then took you to the officers’ section of the theater.

The beach was off-limits after six o’clock, and armed guards patrolled with orders to shoot anything that moved.

Especially kids with cap guns.

The beach in the daytime was amazing. Each morning you’d go down to see what had washed up during the night. There was a real war going on just a few miles offshore, and a tremendous variety of debris from torpedoed ships greeted each new day: crates of cargo, sometimes a life ring, often life jackets … then you thought about people dying in the war.

I was lucky; I didn’t have a relative or close friend killed in the war. Those life jackets were as close as I came to the real meaning of war. Once, a body washed up, I think around 5th or 6th streets. My parents saw it, but I wasn’t allowed to look.

Our teachers at school tried to make us aware of the war. At Massie Elementary, just across the street from our downtown house, every student packed small white cardboard boxes with toothbrushes, handkerchiefs, razor blades, soap, candy and other items to be sent to the troops. My best friend, Boo Hornstein, and I worked together to fill a lot of those boxes. I never met anyone who said they received one, but we sent hundreds.

My father didn’t have to join the Army. He and my grandfather owned a fertilizer factory, and that was considered a vital defense job. One day he came home with a white helmet, the kind our troops wore early in the war, an armband and an official walking stick with a strap handle. He had been appointed a “block warden” and assistant air-raid warden. His job was to go around each evening and check to make sure that all blackout curtains were drawn and that no light was showing that would guide German bombers to our neighborhood.

I don’t remember him wearing that helmet, but I did, whenever friends came over. I was proud of him and his official duties. I still have the helmet, but rarely put it on for friends anymore.

Our house was heated by coal fireplaces in each room, so even after the lights were turned off, the fires caused a problem. Once, the block warden for our street, who did wear his helmet, banged on our door and raised hell with my parents about the fires and curtains not completely covering the windows. I was very careful with those in the room I shared with my younger brother, Dick. I wasn’t going to be responsible for a U-boat in the Savannah River finding our house.

Early on, my mother became a nurse’s aide, and every day we watched with pride as she rode off on her bicycle to one of the hospitals to which she was assigned. It’s her story:

Daily the war grew worse; the news of the casualties increased. Suddenly, nurses were gone from the hospitals and the Red Cross was training aides to take their places. Nurse’s aides wore Red Cross nurses’ uniforms…starched blue linen with white bibbed aprons and blue caps with white bands and Red Cross emblems on the left sleeve and on the caps.

We worked a full nurse’s schedule and then went home to our family duties. We received a coupon to buy a wartime bicycle with hard rubber tires and a basket on the front, to get us to work and back. I also used mine to cart groceries home.

I worked at St. Joseph’s, Telfair and Candler hospitals. For two years I worked on the surgical ward at St. Joseph’s under Miss Alphonse. There were almost no RNs available. We couldn’t give medicines or medical treatment, but we did everything else. Those few nurses would have been bogged down without our help. We cleaned beds — carbolized them, cleaning springs with little brushes, a carbolic solution and kerosene. We made beds, bathed patients, emptied bed pans, fed and cheered patients, took temperatures and pulse rates, even cleaned rooms and washed windows, and when time allowed or illness demanded, sat by bedsides. I think we filled a desperate need and being unpaid, overworked and always footsore, were some of the unsung heroes of the war.

During the summer my mother and Ann Seiler’s mother, Helen, manned an observation tower at Tybee’s south end. Again, she takes up the story:

My neighbor, Mrs. Seiler, and I spent long hours sitting in a tower, “RUBY 18,” walking around the catwalk with binoculars, reporting anything that moved by air or sea. Once, I reported two planes flying high from the northwest to the southeast. As they came into range they flapped their wings and flew off. I had reported two turkey buzzards. By that time planes were in the air from Paris Island, Hunter Field, Camp Stewart and the Glynco Naval Air Station. The air was thick with them. Twice, we reported submarines at sea, which brought on a “Red Alert” and great excitement.

We took a bucket of Cokes and some homemade pickles for refreshment and took turns spotting and reporting, although after the buzzard episode I did more phoning in, and Helen spotted. We did see a plane go down on the beach at Ossabaw with smoke pouring out behind. We promptly got help for the pilot, so I guess we also served.

I was in Sarasota when President Roosevelt died. At Southside, the principal brought us out and stood us in front of the school by classes, arranged as platoons in company formation. I felt very military and very important. I would have felt even more important if I had had that sweater. It was announced that the president had died, and the flag was lowered to half-mast. All very solemn and very sad.

I don’t remember much about V-E Day (Victory in Europe day, May 8, 1945). We were in Sarasota for that, too, so I’m sure that I celebrated with Donnie Burquest, my next-door neighbor and best friend there. Lots of others celebrated there as well, knowing that their morning papers would no longer disappear before they could read them.

V-J Day (Victory in Japan day, Aug. 15, 1945) came during the summer when we were at Tybee. We built a big bonfire on the lawn by the Seilers’ house and burned images of Tojo (Hideki Tojo was prime minister of Japan when the attack on Pearl Harbor took place) and Japanese flags drawn with crayons on bed sheets. It seemed as if every car on the island joined in a long parade up and down Butler Avenue and around the south end, with all the kids sitting on the fenders and every horn honking. The war was over, and we would soon be able to get Fleer’s Double Bubble Bubble Gum again. At the age of 7, your priorities are a bit different.

A lot of the excitement of growing up in Savannah — the secret decoder rings in Wheaties boxes, “Sky King” and “Jack Armstrong, The All-American Boy” on afternoon radio, Pinkies Confectionary across the street, and the 1947 Savannah Indians baseball team — was still ahead of me, but that’s another story … or several. At that time, August 1945, I’m almost 8 years old, with enough wartime experiences to write a book.