Bob Dann

Robert (Bob) Dann is my grandpa; he lives in a small town outside Sacramento in northern California. He was born in 1931 putting him at age 10 around 1941. He was never in WWII but remembers the impact it had on his family and how it altered his lifestyle.

He went to a minority school where everyone there was either Indian or Mexican. He lived 20 blocks from the school and had to ride his bike to school everyday. On September 7, 1941 he was at the movie theaters with his mother when the movie shutdown and several sentences scrolled across the bottom of the screen. “At 6:05am Pearl Harbor was bombed by enemy Japanese aircrafts and that we are under attack”. The theater was quiet and he felt fear and was completely shocked.

Shortly after in spring 1942 he and his family moved to Tucson, Arizona. They had an old four-door station wagon and he could only bring one thing along, which his dad advised him to take his bike. This forced my grandpa to move out of their nice house in California into a trailer park were they had to share the telephone with four other families. They lived there because his dad worked on base building B-24 bombers.  His mother was a dispatcher there and communicated with the pilots. He never saw much of his parents because they were need on base from 6am to 6pm.

Dropping the Atom Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a great a accomplishment by the U.S. “It saved many American lives” and then he saw what it really did when he was in the Korean war around 1951. At the end of WWII my grandpa’s most lasting memory was how happy he was when it was finished. “I knew that my two nephews were coming home safe and that they have not been injured or killed”

By, Jarrod Snavely