This was a lamp, hung over the headboard, with an empty hot lamp socket. When I took them to task, the first assumption was that someone told me. The problem was that there was only a black lady and I there, and there was only one time she stayed with me, when my brother graduated from HS. So, essentially, only she and I knew about it, until I brought it up as a matter of contention. (She had come running and had apparently told them.) I have many rich memories of the WWII era. For some reason, I never developed
childhood amnesia, so I retain those memories while most don't. OTOH, Selma remembers everything else...
Your Pearl Harbor story always fascinates me.
My Mom doesn't have MY memory, but she does have a very GOOD one. I've brought up some things to her where I knew a lot of details surrounding stuff, and she knew I was small, but she affirms what I'm saying. These days are admittedly sporadic in my VERY early youth, but they include the date of my brother's birth (I was 33 months old) as well as some specific events that happened on the news. Sometimes I can isolate the date with outside help. For example, I remember VERY vividly spending an entire day playing with my red truck and blocks and in heavy anticipation of a Thanksgiving episode of "The Waltons" that was two hours long. An online look shows the episode aired on Thursday, November 15, 1973, a few weeks after I'd turned four. You know kids - I got kind of bored by it after waiting all day! And, for example, we have pictures of the first snowman I actually remember building in Missouri.
Here's how I can isolate the date.
1) I was not yet in school (I began kindergarten in September 1974)
2) my brother was old enough to be quite mobile (he was born in 72, so that means it HAD to be March 1974
3) I vividly recall it snowing on us driving in - and we always went to Missouri early during spring break (verified by Mom)
4) A check of the weather shows that it snowed 4 inches on March 23, 1974 (Saturday) and four more on March 24 (Sunday) then stopped.
So it was one of those two days we drove there, and it was CLEAR until about 1/2 hour from home, so we drove in on March 23; we saw my aunt, who was a car hop at one of those Sonic-like places. (Uh, she had her child - without the husband, a scandal back then - on September 1 that year, so she wasn't showing but was pregnant).
I even know that I stung by a bee on the left mandible (the skin ya know) on Friday, August 29, 1975 EARLY in the am in Lanett, Alabama (it was dark and the bee zinged me getting into the Mercury; even recall eating Apple Jacks for breakfast that morning). We went out of town for the Labor Day weekend (school back then didn't start until AFTER Labor Day) to see my aunt and uncle in NC. I was terrified - remember, I was five - because they kept looking at me for swelling but they'd keep saying my face "has a hole in it," which you can imagine is pretty upsetting for a five-year old. We had lunch on Sunday after church in a restaurant in lower Virginia with a couple that would die the following year in a car accident together. When I relayed the details of that lunch and conversation from a five-year old some 20 years later, my mother was absolutely stunned - because she knew what i was talking about.
Anyway, I'm getting away from the subject, but to the OP - YES, conflation does happen even among some HSAMers; I'm apparently not the "norm," ha ha.
