Shuttering-in By Abraham Lincoln

When I was small, the homes on our town all had workable shutters on the outside of the windows. Some homes still had shutters on the inside of their windows.

It was then that every household had some sort of lace curtains hanging up on the windows and all had dark green window blinds that could be rolled up to let light from outside inside the room, or rolled down to keep outsiders from seeing in the room.

People shuttered themselves in at night. The doors were locked and the skeleton keys were left in the locks to they could not be picked.

Mother would, sometimes, pull a chair over and put the back up under the door knob – jammed there – to prevent anybody from pushing the door in.

My mother didn't seem to be afraid of anything but she would close the doors and bolt the doors with dead bolts, and lock them, leaving the keys in the locks.

During World War II, we were warned that no light would be permitted to leak out of any doors or windows. So the keyholes were taped over, if the keys were removed, so that not a ray of light could leak out and bring on a swarm of Japanese to bomb us as they did at Pearl Harbor. Somebody in town was supposed to go outside and look up and down their street to see if they could detect any light leaks.

I never once heard anybody say the Germans would be overhead and bomb us. We didn't think the Germans were bad people like the Japanese who were fond of beheading people and pushing splinters under fingernails.

None of us ever heard about the atrocities of the Nazi party and places like Auschwitz and the killing of 6 million Jews. That came as a shock to me as it did to the rest of the world outside the influence of Hitler's Germany.

I don't really know why we had to be shuttered-in but we were. As an adult, today, I can't imagine Gordon, Ohio was a target by any stretch of the imagination during World War II.

The search light emanating from Arlington, Ohio, that went round and round, stopped for a time. I didn't know it then but that searchlight was actually a locator beacon enabling airplanes to fly from Indianapolis, Indiana to Dayton, Ohio and beyond. The searchlight was along old US Route 40.

In the morning, the man of the house, if there was one at home, too old or feeble for the Draft, would go outside and unlock the closed shutters; opening them wide and folding them back to twist the shutter lock to keep them open and not slamming open and closed when a wind came up.

Sometimes the blinds in the house would remain drawn until mother wanted to see something in a darkened room and she would let the blind go back up.

I was always fascinated by the sun that streaked in the house after the blinds were pulled up. There would be these particles of dust floating around through the light disappearing in the shadows. I looked for the odd shaped ones to see if they would reappear. They never did.