Dorothy Clovish and WWII

            The person I chose to interview was Dorothy Clovish. She was 16 when World War II started and living on a farm with her family.

People were given rations of food and gas at that time, and if you ran out of anything and food stamps you went without it that week. When her family ran out of food stamps they didn’t starve because they had animals and gardens to get food from.

She attended Meridian High School. Sometimes she would go up into the tallest tower with her friend and report any planes they spotted to the school offices below, but luckily they were never attacked.

The war had made it hard for anyone to go to high school games. The rationing of gas limited people, but she was able to go a few times from a nice guy who always seemed to have gas, and he’d pick up her and her schoolmates and take them to the game.

One day she was sitting at home listening to the radio and the incident of Pearl Harbor came on. Her mother was the only one who really worried about it for Dorothy’s brother was eligible to be drafted. Luckily he never was.

After the Pearl Harbor incident many people weren’t as friendly with any Japanese. She had a family of Japanese living next to her and their two kids went to school with her. One day she learned that they were being forced to go live in a camp in California. There were many tears that day from her classmates, for they were really liked in school. After that day, she never saw them again.

Dorothy agrees with the Hiroshima bombing. If it never happened, she says it would have probably been our lives and not theirs.

Dorothy is now 87 and lives with her husband, Junior Clovish.

Interviewed by Sheri Nickell.