My name is Phyllis Elliott. It is currently 1945 and the War in Germany is still going on. I was born on May 7th 1928 and I am 17 years old. I was born in San Francisco, California before my parents decided to move south to a small suburb called Alhambra. I am 3rd generation American with German and Irish descent. I am a part of the middle class but I am also a working class teenager. I am a high school student with hopes of continuing my education at a college or university. I and my family are a part of the Catholic Church and we have Democratic views on the political system. I consider myself a liberal because I know times are changing. I am living on the home front making the best of what the War hasn’t taken away from me.
Location during the 1940s
I live in a typical small middle-class suburb. The two main streets are Main Street and Valley Boulevard which run parallel through the town. Streamline electrical Public Service buses are how I get around if I’m running errands or taking my brothers and sister out. The buses also take other passengers, shoppers, and workers from the suburbs into the Los Angeles downtown area. There are big department stores like Woolworth’s and McCory’s dime stores but our town has its own shopping center with five-and-ten cent stores and movie theatres. Most of the small shops are family owned and of a Mom-and-Pop variety. There is Franklin’s Bakery–whose rolls you can smell five blocks away, the corner butcher with the best smoked ham, a dry-goods store, and Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlor. The best thing about that place is that it looks like a carnival through red curtained window. When you get inside, the room shines and sparkles from the glossy dark-wooded paneled walls with inlaid Deco mirrors and bright stained-class wall sconces. The perfect summer afternoon is sitting at a booth sharing a big banana split with my brothers and sister and listening to my favorite bandleader-singer, Vaughn Monroe, from the Wurlitzer...