The O'Brien Girls

I grew up with the O'Brien girls. We were in school and church together. You know how it is with classmates; you may know each other but not really spend that much time with them. When Butch and I returned to Jefferson we were in touch with several people who had done the same thing thus giving us a common bond accentuated by knowing them from our youth. So now they are in "our group" of closer friends we have in Jefferson. Readers of this blog are well acquainted with Colleen. Well, Colleen has a sister Denise who is every bit as talented. The girls, as their mother called them, are a year apart in age. Denise is 6 months older than I am and we were in the same grade in school. Colleen is 6 months younger than I am and we didn't know each other very well until many years later. They also had a younger sister Jeanie who they lost to cancer a few years ago. These girls are all remarkable in many different ways but also carry similarities such as a special love of color and being writers.
Denise wrote this article for the Iowa Living magazine and after some finagling, I was able to get it copied and pasted for the blog. Enjoy!
Barb B.

LOOKING BACK
Front pages were full of war news
By Denise O’Brien Van
Local papers during WWII

When Mikki Schwarzkopf and I were researching
what the World War II home front had been like
in Greene County for the program we did at the
museum last November, we read more than 500 editions of the
Jefferson Bee and Herald. We came to understand the important
role local newspapers played during wartime.
Those Bees and Heralds were the epitome of good old-fashioned
local journalism. The articles gave the readers the basics
of journalism: the who, the what, the when, the where, the why
and the how. It wasn’t personal journalism, although longtime
Bee editor Vic Lovejoy did put in his two cents worth in his
front-page “Seasonable Sermons.” His was the only by-line. It
was community journalism, journalism for the community.
It wasn’t unusual for the front pages of both papers to have
more than 20 stories, although there were few photographs.
The editorial pages always had comments by the editor, as well
as reprints from other Iowa papers and from national publications
such as Wallace’s Farmer. On the inside pages, there was
news from all the towns in the county and dozens of items
about clubs and socializing in the “personals” columns. The
inside pages also contained informative stories about conserving
energy and food, about good agricultural practices, and there
was sports coverage, including box scores.
The papers were rich with advertising. Local newspapers
then were one of the few outlets where small-town merchants
could advertise.
All this news and information helped bring the community
close during the war years, as readers throughout the county
learned of births, deaths and marriages, of accidents and parties
and, of course, about what was happening to “the boys,” which
is how the papers referred to Greene County men in the armed
services.
The newspaper traveled the world with those boys.
In a May 2, 1944 Bee interview, Staff Sgt. Clyde Crow of
Dana — who had spent seven months and seen 49 days of battle
“in the wilderness of Burma” — said, “All the boys like to read
the newspapers from home. It’s a touch of the U.S.A.”
We looked through the Bee and Herald issues from 1941
through 1945, bound in huge books that the historical society
saved from destruction when the local papers were sold a few
years ago. In 1941, there were one or two stories about preparing
for war. As the conflict accelerated, the front pages were
full of war news. Finally, on the Bee’s Nov. 27, 1945, front page,
three months after the end of the war with Japan, there was not
a single war story.

The author, Denise O’Brien Van of Jefferson, is a
volunteer for the Greene County Historical Society.
You can write her at dovan@netins.net.