1939 AD to 1948 AD

 

1939 AD: My sister is born Geraldine Carol Sheehan in the state of Michigan on December 30th. She died in 2024.

 ~ Thailand changed its name from Siam.

~ Hewlett Packard was formed.

~ 40 hour work week established in US.

~ General Anthropology published by Franz Boas.

~ Benny Goodman's band brought a new style of jazz to popularity.

~ Cost of a gallon of gas(gasoline) in the US was 10 cents(no cent sign now available to me)

~ Average cost of a new house in the US was $3,700.

~ The film, Pygmalion, with Leslie Howard was widely viewed in US, but not as popular as was Gone With the Wind.

~ October 1st: Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China. Chaing Kai-shek and about 2 million Nationalist Chinese retreated from mainland China to the Island of Taiwan.

~ June: The Marshall Plan was instituted. It was the European Recovery Program, the softer side of US foreign policy. The program for rebuilding Europe.

~ Songs popular in the US: You Are My Sunshine, How High the Moon, The last time I saw Paris, When You Wish Upon a Star, It's a Big Wide Wonderful World, South of the Border, Blueberry Hill, Woodpecker Song, You Must Have Been A Beautiful Baby, Flat Foot Floogie(Floozy), September Song, A Tisket a Tasket.

~ The Unvanquished by William Faulkner.

~ Giant cyclotron built at the University of California at Berkeley for probing the infinitesimal within the atomic nuclei.

~ Japan installed a puppet government in Nanking, withdrew from the League of Nations and take Canton and Hankow.

~ Igor Sikorsky( Russian-American) constructed the first helicopter.

~ Joliet-Curie, Irene demonstrates the possibility of splitting the atom.

~ Picasso Showed his work, Night Fishing in the Antibes.

~ Roll Out the Barrel sung in England

~ John Dewey's work, Freedom and Culture was published.

~ Serge Chakotin's "The Rape of the Masses" was published. Chakotin was a Russian biologist, sociologist, and social democrat. He was interested in optical micro-surgery of the cell. He also became interested in theory of combating political propaganda. He than became interested in organization theory which centered on labor organization.

~ Heywood Broun, US journalist, died.

~ W.B. Yeats, Irish poet, died.

~ George S. Kaufman/Moss Hart's The Man Who Came to Dinner played.

 

1940 AD, US: Popular songs: You Are My Sunshine, How High the Moon, The Last Time I Saw Paris, When You Wish Upon a Star, It's a Big Wide Wonderful World, South of the Border, Blueberry Hill, Woodpecker Song.

 

1941 AD, US: On December 7th of this year the Japanese military attacked  the US at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The next day Congress declared war in Japan.

~ to 1945: World War II.

~ January 1st, USA: The "Little Steel Formula" took effect.

~ to 1945: WWII, World War II was the result of many tears and worse.

~ WWII: German invasion brings Russia into the the war on the side of the US and Allies.

~ to 1945, USA: Commercial fishermen used Salton Sea in the Southern California desert to supple millet to coastal fish markets after German submariners made ocean fishing hazardous.

~ April 10th, USA: UAW, United Auto Workers struck at Ford.

~ December, USA: FDR, Franklin Delano, Roosevelt announced no strike pledge for WWII. 

1942 AD, March 26th, USA: Paul Clifford Sheehan, Cliff, my father's younger  brother, died in Michigan. My father left Michigan and us before the funeral.

~ USA: Later, my sister and I and my pregnant mother left St Clements caught up with him and then stayed in a motel near Phoenix, a motel in Tucson, a ranch near Douglas where I rode a burro, fought a rooster, and avoided a long egg eating snake, another motel in Phoenix, a trailer in Hayward California, other locals I do not remember, a room over a liquor store near Skid Row in Seattle Washington, a simi-tent in Gabbs Nevada, an interesting old house in seattle, a comfortable duplex on Queen Anns Hill near Seattle and like that.

~ May 1st, USA: The Little Steel Formula ended.

~ November, USA: Equal pay for equal work was first discussed by the federal government.                                                       

1943 AD: Robert J. Sheehan was born  on  November 7th of this year and died, too early, with me in Desert Hot Springs, California on July 4th of  1963                                                                   

~ WWII in progress.

~ Nikola Tesla died.

~ Zoot suits(with a reet pleat) became popular attire among hep-cats. 

~ Popular songs of the year included: "Marzy Doats" and Oh What a Beautiful Morning. 

 

1944 AD: Gary Michael Sheehan was born in October of this year in the middle of the ending of WWII in a rapidly changing Southern California.

~ B29s  practice dropping dummy A bombs into the Salton Sea.

~ Our family moves a not very well baby Gary from a trailer court near LAX and  North American Aviation to a nice new house in nearby budding Westchester, California. 

~ D Day landing at Normandy. 

~ A couple of the most popular songs of the year were: "Accentuate the Positive" and  "Don't Fence Me In." These two may have been the start of my philosophy.

~ October 11th, USA: I received a good new brother. Gary was born in Inglewood. About this time we moved to Westchester. There was fateful partnership formed among Frank Bowren, Josephine Bowren(my grandmothers third husband), my father and mother.

November 7th, USA: My brother, Robert, became one year old.

~ to 1945, USA: B 29s from the US army 393rd heavy bomber squadron, commanded by Lt. Col Paul Tibbets made regular, but highly secret practice flights from Wendover Air Base in Utah and dropped dummies of a new bomb into the Salton Sea. On August 6th of 1945, Tibbets and his crew, in the Enola Gay, dropped on Hiroshima. Latter on a job at the Salton Sea with my father, we were shown where one of the dummy bombs missed that Sea

~ US: National Parks in the US were made part of the National Park and State Reserve System

1944 AD: North America: Many of the mound and earthwork archaeological sites centered mostly on the Mississippi and Ohio River drainage areas were made part of the National Park and State Reserve systems.

~ My family of origin and I lived in Inglewood in a trailer park near LAX and North American Aviation

~ October 11th, USA: Gary is born, and Robb is about 11 months old. My father begins a partnership with his mother's 3rd husband. We moved to Westchester about this time. I believed it was called a "trailer camp." My father worked at NAA and soon bought a house in Westchester.

~ 

 

1945 AD: End of WWII.

~ Christmas comet.

 ~ July 16th, US: At a site called Trinity in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico an atomic bomb using plutonium was tested.

~ August 6th: An atomic weapon carried by a bomber called the Enola Gay was exploded about 1,800 feet above the Japanese city of Hiroshima, full of Japanese men, women, children. Some lived.

~ August 9th, Japan: A Trinity type weapon was exploded above Nagasaki. The city was devastated. Some people survived.

~ February, Yalta, Crimea Peninsula now Russian, but until recently part of Ukraine.

~ Truman. Churchill, and Stalin met to "reconstruct" Europe. We can say that was also the beginning of the Cold War. 

1945 AD to 1991 AD, Russia: The boundaries of the USSR varied, but approximated those of imperial Russia.

~ We lived in Westchester, California. My father was using some of his skills in work at North American Aviation and life seemed to normalize a bit

~1945 AD to 1953 AD: The Democrat, Harry S. Truman was  president of the USA.

~ USA: Eddie Arcaro road his first Kentucky Derby winner, Lawrin.

~ USA: California wins Rose Ball football game against Alabama 13-0. 

~ Pop Song: "A Tisket A Tasket" a red and yellow basket?

~ Russel Crouse and Howard Linsay "Life With Father" played.

~ Robert Grave's "The Long Weekend" published.

~ Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf" complete English translation.

~ James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake published.

~ Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley published.

~ Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany and agreed to divide Poland between them. Stalin promptly ordered the invasion of Poland, Finland, the Baltics, and northern Bukovina.

~ Spain: January 26th Nationalists under General Franco capture Barcelona.

~ Czechoslovakia: March 10th Germany annexed Czechoslovakia.

~ USA: December 30th Gerry Hook born Geraldine Carol Sheehan in the US state of Michigan.

~ USA: Popular songs: God Bless America, Three Little Fishes, Over the Rainbow, Beer Barrel Polka, I'll Never Smile Again.

~ USA: President Roosevelt appointed William O. Douglas and Felix Frankfurter to the Supreme Court.

~ England: Women and children were first evacuated from London.

~ Frank Buchman re-forms Oxford Group as Moral Re-Armament

 Receiver from economic recession was noted.

~ Albania: Italy invades Albania.

~ US, theater: George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart  "The Man Who Came to Dinner."

~ W.B. Yeats, Irish poet died.

~ Heywood Broun, U.S. journalist died.

~ Serge Chakotin's, The Rape of the Masses was published.

~ England: Roll Out the Barrel was sung. 

~ Picasso shows his work "Night Fishing at Antibes."

~ Joliet-Curie demonstrates possibility of splitting the atom.

~ Population of the U.S. 132 million a 7.3% increase since 1930 which is the smallest increase since such statistics were begun in 1790 and that's including a 0.5% in immigrants!

~ US: Giant cyclotron built at the University of California at Berkeley for accelerating nuclear particles to high velocities to better produce radioactive isotopes that can be used for imaging procedures.

~ November 30th, USA: My father talks to me about having another child in the family. My mother suffers a miscarriage.

~ November, USA: A 113 day strike at GM, General Motors began. It closed 96 plants.

~ Rats spread Pulmonary Plague somewhere on Earth.

~ The United Nations was formed.

    

1946 AD: Cold War. U.S. occupies the Philippines and South Korea.

~ USA: 200,000 Electrical Workers struck nationwide, They had waited for the wart to end.

~ USA: My family of origin was in Desert Hot Springs, California and my father was breaking ground for our new home. $300.00 final check from NAA was not considered peanuts.

~ USA, January 21st, 30,000 steelworkers launched a thirty-state strike.

~ USA, March 19th: United Auto Workers won contract with General Motors after 113 day strike. 

~ USA, May 23rd: A Nationwide rail strike began.

~ USA, March 27th: Walter Reuther was elected as the third UAW president.

1947 AD: Cold War. U.S. occupies south Korea. U.S. forces land in Greece to fight Communists.

1947 AD: Beginnings of the Cold War.

~ US: The Truman Doctrine, President Harry Truman's Foreign policy expressed the harsher elements of "containment. US, "leader of the free world," The people anywhere threatened by internal or external communistic movements would be supported by U.S. Turkey and Greece would receive immediate military aid.

~ US: In June of this same year the Marshall Plan was instituted. It was the European Recovery Program, the 'softer side" of US foreign policy. It was the program for rebuilding Europe funded from1948 to 1952. It was also calculated to limit communist movements.

 

 

Go to 1930 to 1939 for more.

                                                                according to Richard