I want to give you a bit of background with today’s memories.
Mailboxes along the roads 
and old barns set back in fields overgrown with weeds often served as landmarks in rural Montana where I grew up. These landmarks told us where we were, and how far we had to go. Sometimes they signaled “home” and the end of the road. At other times, barely visible through swirling snow, they told us we had miles to go.
When I started compiling these memories, I realized they were like those mailboxes and old barns from my memory–identifying places in the road over all our years. Here’s one for today, first published on the Treehouse in February 2011.
Because of the anger and fear I’ve experienced as our nation goes through so much upheaval, my thoughts have gone back to the Yalta Conference of 1945, what my parents knew about Yalta and when they knew it. Here’s why:
My brother was 12 and I was 10 in March of ’55. We were accustomed to hearing the 9 pm news from WHO, Des Moines, Iowa. Loud and clear over the Montana prairie we’d hear Gabby Heatter’s classic opening line, “There’s good news tonight, folks!” even when there wasn’t. Radio, with Fibber McGee and Molly on Saturday night, was the center of our world on short winter days.
As we flew through the kitchen after pounding up the stairs that particular March morning, the unusual daytime scene of Dad and Mom standing in front of the kitchen radio listening intently didn’t register. So along with our clatter, we chose that moment to do our version of “Did not!” “Did, too!” Mom’s angry glare quickly silenced us. Seeing our parents listening to the news in the middle of the day was foreign ground for us. A little frightened, we just stopped and stood there.
May I describe to you some of my mother’s Mailboxes and Old Barns? Being aware of what they were may soften the edges of this Portrait of Angry Mother.
In 1915, when she was ten years old, her Danish-born mother tried to explain to her why 
the Turks were murdering the Armenians. Granny told her that the Danes were trying to help the Armenians. She had cried because it scared her. A year or two later, her one older brother (in a family of 11 girls and two boys) came back from the trenches of France after being gassed by the Germans ~~ he was never the same again.
Grandfather (the only emigrant from his Danish family) died of heart failure near the end of the depression after losing his homestead farm and land because he couldn’t pay the taxes: no rain/no crops/no money. My Granny, also the only emigrant from her Danish family, lived through the anxieties of silence, slow news and slow mail on the Montana prairie during the war, waiting for a once a month or so letter from her family: Was Denmark still safe? No, it wasn’t. Would Hitler’s armies come? Yes, they would. In April of 1940, the five year occupation of Denmark began, and they waited for scarcer news: were Grandmother and Grandfather’s families in Denmark safe? Have you heard anything? Are they still safe?
In the early 1940′s when my three oldest brothers were still in high school, the older sons of other farmers went off to fight in the Pacific and in Europe. As time passed, Dad and Mom attended the funerals in the little country church for three of those farm boys who didn’t come home. My childhood church memories include a small dark blue banner hanging in the little church. It’s bordered with red fringe and displays one gold star for each of those three
farmboy lives. Then my oldest brother served as a combat photographer during the Korean War from 1950-1953. So Mom feared for his life when I was 6. And when I was 7. And when I was 8.
The 1945 Yalta Conference had opened as Germany lay open before the advancing Allies: the Brits and the U. S. Army from the west. The Russians from the east. So the Big Three (Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill) met at Yalta, a resort on the coast of the Black Sea, in Soviet territory, to carve up the pie called Europe.
Franklin Roosevelt’s foolish confidence in Stalin, that “…if I give him everything I possibly can and ask for nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything” ….failed the test of events almost immediately. By 1946, Churchill had famously described Stalin’s behavior after Yalta as “dropping an Iron Curtain across Europe”…. and 
so the Cold War began, Stalin’s murders continued and the exhaustion of Eastern Europe went on until 1991~~all a part of the catastophe called Yalta.
The results of the Yalta Conference were held in tight secrecy until, as reported in Time Magazine in the March 28, 1955 issue, “In a sudden, historic move the U. S. Department of State last week released the text of official documents relating to the ill-fated meeting of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in the Crimea. The documents were crammed with illuminating (and often appalling) details of the mood and manner in which the Big Three sliced up the world.”
Several days before that Time Magazine issue would have showed up in our rural mailbox, a summary of Yalta is now, finally, to be broadcast~~thus my parents are “listening to the news in the middle of the day” and now they hear it: Eastern Europe is legally… internationally…intentionally… officially… abandoned. Now they learn that during the very same hours in 1945 that Polish soldiers had been cheered as liberators in the streets of Italy’s Piedimonte, Ancona and Bologna…their homeland had been signed away to the Soviets. Now they know that the plight of East Germany is open-ended. Now they know that Stalin actually did get away with murder. (Gen. Władysław Anders and Gen. Harold Aleksander are talking in a Polish camp in Italy amid soldiers from the 2nd Polish Corps, 1945)
Their worst fears are confirmed…and my brother and I understand nothing. As the broadcast ends, the two of us are still standing there as Dad grimly goes down the stairs 
and silently returns to his farm chores. The screen door at the bottom of the stairs closes behind him 
and Mom snaps at us, “We’ve waited years to hear about Yalta and then you had to make noise!”
The harshness of her comment stuck with me. All I had remembered from that day was “We’ve waited years to hear about Yalta….” As an adult I had pieced together the historical events, but not until this past week did I go back and put it all in the context of her Mailboxes and Old Barns and now I see what happened: She was wondering….how many more lies? She was tired. She was angry. And she was afraid.
We aren’t the first generation to walk with a certain courage, but get worn out anyway;
we aren’t the first generation to have bad memories of things gone wrong;
we aren’t the first generation to be lied to by national leaders;
we aren’t the first generation to be sickened by confirmation of things we already know;
we aren’t the first generation to feel fear and anger because of these things;
but by the grace of God, neither will we be the first generation to fail to fight for what is good and true and right.
Oh, Dear Sharon. What an amazing, insightful piece. I hope you’re writing a book. These recollections of a forgotten America cannot get lost to us. This is especially true of your life in that particular, very unique place. There are millions of stories from the northeast, the deep south and California from the same period, but I can safely assume that rural Montana is vastly under-documented for this period, especially as it concerns the pure recollections of a child. If nothing else, deposit your notes with the University of Montana’s people’s history project. A researcher one day will thank you mightily.
My similar recollections concern Sputnik. I was but three at the time, but I can remember laying out on the warm hood of my dad’s ’55 Ford and watching the tiny orb streak by silently through the rural nighttime sky. Mostly, I remember the fear, the quiet angst of my parents and many other grown-ups. The TV news was a time to be quiet, as my parents hung on every word.
Much of my fascination for all things Russian stems from this time. As a small child, I was taught that they were 10-feet tall, horrible and wanted to kill us in our sleep. When I finally went there, just after The Fall, it was both with a sense of trepidation and incredible curiosity, both planted by the very wonderful parents who raised me. Maybe my interest and outreach to that part of the world is overcompensation, but as I grow older, I think it’s the need to assuage those fears planted by the reality of Sputnik in 1957.
I had the great fortune to be in Moscow in 2007 for the 50th Anniversary of the Sputnik launch. It was business, but at dinner, we talked about the launch of the first artificial satellite. The Russians are still very proud of that. Our Russian friends and hosts were absolutely spellbound as me and a colleague, who is eight years older, explained how it felt to live in the immediate post-Sputik world. “In the light of a Communist moon,” as LBJ put it.
Gotta love the 50s, huh?
Your memories of Sputnik remind me of Homer Hickam’s accounts in “Rocket Boys”. In his case, it led to building rockets in his West Virginia hometown, then going on to work for NASA. Of course, he’s older than you are!
elvis, thanks for the suggestion about the history project….I hadn’t thought about that. Yes…I do have enough for a book, and have done a pre-format edit that tells me it would be about 45,000 words at this point, made up of essays that are about this length–some a little longer. I get hung up on the details of self-publishing. There are reams of pragmatic programs with a certain bit of generalized marketing built in to them, and I know the small towns around the area where I grew up would use some–many of those towns have developed their own little museums.
Your comments about sputnik are so part of my memory as well–we would lay blankets out on the crested wheat grass that surrounded the house, lay there on that bumpy stuff, and watch Little Sir Echo pass. Just amazing stuff. And then, to cap it off, that you were in Moscow to be able to visit with those who experienced it on that end of history! I’ve always been completely intrigued with the Russians as a people….good grief, they have a national and cultural history that is tragedy and drama all over. The Russians as a people and the their political experience the last 125 years is something I never get tired of trying to get my head around. Without a lot of success, but the process is profitable to me.
Where we live now in the Willamette Valley in Oregon there is a significant population of Russians, who got out after the wall went down. They have a strong agricultural presence right around us here, and I can’t wait until the day I get acquainted with one of them so that I can say, “Would you be willing to have some conversation with me?” Then I will show up with my questions and a large map.
They will do that now. As a gesture, bring them bread and salt when you visit. There will be places where nearby you can buy the Russian black bread (not pumpernickel). Their hospitality is great, their manners generally impeccable and most are very well educated. Dry, dry wit and a measure of cynicism – sometimes detrimentally so – rounds out the typical Russian character. And, be prepared to drink vodka.
Also, almost without exception, Russians who’ve become Americans, as fiercely conservative and often, very vocal and blunt, owing to the character of their language.
Yeah…. I’m a Russophile. I admit it.
Sharon, it is always a treat to read a MBOB on Sunday morning, made even more so because I missed them for so many months! I don’t remember the particulars of the Cold War during the early fifties, but I do remember “duck and cover”, and thinking how lucky I was to live in the United States, and not in Russia!
Thank You Sharon for Your Story.
Yalta, one of my favorite ‘who FDR really was’ episodes. Forgotten is the agreement between FDR and Stalin that the US and Britain would forcibly repatriate to Russia thousands of Cossacks, ethnic and their families who’d been allied with Germany during WW II. In return Russia would return to the US and Britain some 25,000+ US and British POWs who were in stalags the Russians overran as the advanced through what would later become the Bloc countries. Much to our shame we returned the Cossacks and the others, along with their families, and almost all of them were executed by Stalin. For whatever reason(s) the Russians kept and NEVER RETURNED well over 20,000 British and American POWs from the the stalags. FDR just let the matter drop, with the US government lying to the families of those POWs to this day. The Germans kept meticulous records of the POWs in the camps and those who fell into Russian hands were known by name. Even as reports of US WW II POWs filtered into the DIA and DPOM the official course was to explain them away as ‘mistaken’ sightings. Yalta was easily one of the major turning points of government-as-master in the 20th Century
One of the many truths my late dad imparted to me before he left this sphere – “Never, ever – EVER – trust a Russian.”
67 years later and we are still confronted with the same prog level of inneptitude and insufferable stupidity…. Roosevelt 1945, Barack O – Ron Paul 2012…. same/same
Freedom ain’t free !
I was forced to agree to things I didn’t agree with at Yalta for fear Russia would make a separate peace. Plus, there was a chance that Stalin would back out of the forthcoming United Nations Organization. I told Senator Vandenberg that Stalin was a snake and Lend-Lease payments to Russia should be cut off the moment Germany surrenders. Vandenberg, a Republican, quipped, “I thought you were a devoted fan of Lenin-Lease.” I was. I rammed it through Congress in ’41.
Stalin’s spies in the U.S. informed him early on of our work on the Atom Bomb. but what he didn’t know was our intent to drop it on Japan. There were so many Communists in my Administration, I was surprised Stalin didn’t know the plan. Truman, the pacifist Baptist, hesitated at dropping Fat Man and Little Boy, but he was convinced that it would make his job as President easier if Stalin saw the power and devastation.
(Ok, ok…)
Stalin wants me to remind everyone that both he and I were poisoned with warfarin. It caused each of our strokes. Mine in ’45 and his in ’53. I never really recovered from getting influenza in Teheran on November 29th, 1943. Sorry, I’m rambling.
In 1944, Father Coughlin said, “Karl Marx is going to win this war.”
His forecast eventually came true… in 2008.
Well. You and I can celebrate da bomba tomorrow. I assume ya’s like yer coffee hot?
WeeWeed, it’s August again already? Gee, yime drags a bit down here.
Well then…Na Zdorovje!
Now you know why you’re in hell, bro
That’s “time”… not yime. Bad lighting.
Frankie, saw you this mornin’ on CBS’ Sunday Mornin’. They had a story ’bout ya up at Camp Portobello in Canada. Nice little place up there. If yer startin’ to cool off down there, you can come to TX for a couple weeks. You should feel right at home.
August 1921. I was 39. That was not a good summer on the island.
Thanks, Sharon. So interesting. The seriousness of what is going on around the world today is lost on most people; however, I think many are finally waking up and taking note. I wish more would wake up and maybe we could at least take our own country back and set her on the right track.