I’ve enjoyed watching “All Creatures Great and Small” on PBS this winter. It’s a new production of James Herriot’s classic tales of his experiences as a veterinarian in the Yorkshire Dales.
As I watched the final episode, I suddenly realized that the year in the series is 1939. Mrs. Hall, the housekeeper for the practice, is listening to the radio. Hitler is on the move. Chamberlain is trying to make peace. Rumors of war are everywhere.
Her face falls. She has a son who could be drafted. Her husband returned broken from World War I. It’s the last thing she wants.
A few days after I watched that show, Russia invaded Ukraine. And in a headline worthy of 1939 (in a throwback “Final Daily Edition,” to boot) the New York Post proclaimed: “War in Europe.”
1939: It’s not a good year to be echoing.
Yet there was a sterling moment in Maine that year. Twelve-year-old Donn Fendler walked into a remote hunting and fishing camp near Stacyville after wandering, lost, on Mount Katahdin for nine days. He was covered with bug bites, was dehydrated and had lost 12 pounds, but was otherwise unscathed.
The search (at one point 400 people were out looking for him) was front page news across the country, but especially in the Bangor Daily News.
I know all this because, just before the invasion of Ukraine, I spent a week talking about Donn Fendler with middle school students in my role as a school librarian.
Their community read (everyone reading the same book) this year is “Lost Trail: Nine Days Alone in the Wilderness.” It’s the graphic novel version of Fendler’s “Lost on a Mountain in Maine,” which was written shortly after his ordeal.
The students were creating their own “front pages,” based on the BDN stories, by writing new headlines and “ledes” and choosing a reproduced photo. Each class recreated the saga: Fendler lost, the search, and Fendler found.
But first we had to talk about 1939. How did people get their news before cell phones and cable outlets? I held up a copy of the Kennebec Journal, in case they’d never seen an actual newspaper before. I showed them a photo of my grandmother from the 1940s, sitting at her kitchen table in Massachusetts, intently reading the Fall River Herald News.
When she and my grandfather retired and moved to Maryland, my father took possession of their old radio set. It was polished oak, five feet high and four feet wide. One side had a turntable that played 78 rpm records. I grew up hearing Dad, who was a couple of years younger than Donn Fendler, telling stories about listening to the radio. “We’d look at it,” he’d say in wonderment. “But there was nothing to see.”
In 1939, both “The Wizard of Oz” and “Gone with the Wind” premiered. Batman made his first appearance. And Hitler’s tanks rolled into Poland.
On July 21, 1939, the headline on the lead story in the Bangor Daily News read: “New Plan Decided Upon as Search Enters Fifth Grueling Day At Mt. Katahdin.”
To the left, a few inches below: “Peace Talks Grow More Pronounced. Nazi Government Is 100 Percent Optimistic.”
Two months later…
As I watched the news on Feb. 24, it was hard not to think of 1939. Vladimir Putin wants to expand Russia’s borders. He wants to return to what he perceives as the glory days of the Soviet Union.
I was home on February break and making a chicken pot pie. I had CNN streaming on my phone. I felt I was witnessing history.
But the next day, I had to turn the news off. I felt overwhelmed. It was too much bad news, all at once. I thought of 1939, of print newspapers and radios, when it would have been impossible to reach news overload. Reading about traumatic events is far less, well, traumatic than viewing them in action. I listen to public radio and once in a while have to turn off a disturbing story, but it happens far less frequently than when I’m watching TV news.
Even the newsreels of 1939 would have been less disturbing, because the upsetting images would be diluted once Dorothy and Toto started down the Yellow Brick Road.
After a day or two, I realized that the story had shifted, and that’s why I had to switch it off. Coverage of the invasion initially focused on explosions and descriptions of military maneuvers. The second day was more about people who were trying to escape. People who were wearing multiple layers of clothes in order to take as many possessions as they could.
As Anne Frank did when she and her family left their home to hide in the Secret Annex.
Nope. I couldn’t watch.
But one of the messages of Donn Fendler’s story is resilience. He was just a kid, but he managed to keep faith and a clear head. The BDN stories tell us hope for a happy ending hung by a thread the day before Fendler showed up at Lunksoos Camp.
The Ukrainians, as I write this, are proving they have tremendous grit. They are fighting back. Putin’s plans don’t seem to be going as smoothly as he had hoped. I join those who are praying for the Ukrainians and cheering them on. The world doesn’t need another 1939.
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