A Plastic Cream Colored Philco

A Plastic Cream Colored Philco

By: Larry E. Slaughterbeck

 

In the corner of our dark attic, a plastic ‘cream colored’ Philco radio,

Lay covered in dust and cobwebs… Now silent… In the forties, it was new and shiny…

The moments of the world it gave to us…

The romanticized music of Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller…

Then… On a quiet Sunday afternoon… The seventh of December…

It told us Pearl Harbor was under attack…

And for the next four years at our dinner table,

We tuned in the evening news… to listen to a world at war…

At night the young mother would sit by our bed, reading to her very young sons…

With folded hands… she prayed for the safe return of her beloved…

And for all the fathers and brothers and sons…

The thinking of others made her more beautiful…

That little Philco filled our home with music… Sometimes she would hold her sons

And dance… Sometimes the music brought tears to her hazel eyes…

And the news on the Philco reminded us… Precious blood was being shed in faraway places…

And those places became all too familiar… Guadalcanal, the Azores, Saipan, Normandy,

Anzio, Bataan, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Corregidor…

In December of forty-four, the little Philco gave us Bing’s “I’ll Be Home for Christmas”…

But, the Gold Star on our neighbor’s front window reminded all in Cygnet,

Their son would never return… his baseball glove hung limply on a hook…

Finally on a hot summer day in nineteen forty-five… That little radio let us know…

The War was over…

Today in the attic… I lifted the little Philco… Blew off the dust and just held it…

 

 

 

(2014 Poetry Contest, 2nd Place)

Amorette Renwand, WCCOA intern, pictured with Larry E. Slaughterbeck