As a
child growing up in Chestertown in the 1940s Thomas Davis experienced the
impacts that World War II had on the town firsthand. He vividly remembers being at a radio station
in Centreville with his father when the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor
broke. Soon after his father would move
the family to Chestertown and took a job at the newly opened Kent Defense Plant
which manufactured hand grenade parts for the war effort.
While his father was
doing his best to contribute to the war effort, young Thomas Davis was a paper
boy and was constantly reminded of the ongoing conflict in the headlines of the
papers he delivered. Through this and
the news reels shown at the movie theatre Davis was stayed informed about what
was happening overseas. He even kept a
map of Europe and the Pacific in his bedroom where he would track the advancing
troop movements of the Allies against the Axis powers. I was surprised by just how closely he
followed the war and how informed he was, especially at such a young age.
Davis also helped shed
new light on the black market in Chestertown.
We had heard that there was illegal goods being sold to circumvent the
federally mandated rationing but we didn’t have specifics. Davis told us that and his friends were
exploring around the Custom House when they found a pile of illegal tires being
sold behind a neighboring house. While
Davis didn’t go into further details it was still fascinating to finally get a
firsthand account of what the black market, which we’d been hearing so much
about, looked like.
Overall, the interview
with Thomas Davis provided us with many compelling stories of life on the home
front. We came away with a much more
vivid picture of what life was like in Chestertown during the tumultuous years
of World War II.
--Joseph Swit
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