For the Duration: The War Years by Tomie dePaola

Chapter One

    This afternoon, Mr. Conklin, the music supervisor, came to King Street School. It was going to be the first rehearsal for our Special Choir, which will sing at the Memorial Day assembly at the end of the month.
    Memorial Day is also called Decoration Day. It is the day when people decorate the graves of the men and women who fought in all the wars, with flowers and small American flags.

    All the kids bring cut flowers from our moms’ and dads’ gardens to school the morning before Memorial Day. At King Street, Mr. Walters, the janitor, always puts pots and containers filled with water in the front hallway of the school. The kids put the bunches of flowers in the pots and later on some workers come in a truck to gather them all up and take them to the cemeteries around town. This year we’ll bring the flowers to school on Friday because Memorial Day is on Saturday.

    Mr. Conklin chose twenty students for the Special Choir, four from each class, starting with the second grade. He chose the ones whose voices he liked the best from the music classes we had had all year.
    I was picked from our class with my best friend, Jeannie Houdlette. A girl named Sylvia was picked from the other second grade (she has a beautiful soprano voice) along with another boy who I didn’t know too well. We all met in the music room upstairs on the second floor of the old part of the school.
    You could tell where the old part was because the wooden floors squeaked more than in the new part.
    Miss Mulligan, the fifth-grade teacher, came into the music room with a pile of music sheets in her arms. One of the older students passed them out. Miss Mulligan played the piano at all our assemblies.
    â€œNow, girls and boys,” Mr. Conklin said, “we will sing a medley, which is what we call a collection of songs that are sung one after the other. Our medley will be four songs that represent the four branches of the service: the Army, the Navy, the Marines, and the Army Air Corps.

    â€œAnd,”Mr.Conklin added, “we will sing in PARTS!”
    Miss Mulligan called out our names and told us which section we would be in. I had a nice high voice, so I was in the soprano section. Two third-grade boys were in the soprano section, too. Jeannie was an alto. She could sing a little lower than me. And she could read music because she was learning to play the piano. I didn’t really know how to read music, but I was told I had a “good ear” because after hearing a melody just once, I could remember it. And I had what Mr. Conklin called “perfect pitch.”
    Miss Mulligan sat down at the piano and played the first song in the medley. It was the U.S. Army anthem. The beginning words were:
    â€œOver hill, over dale,
We have hit the
dusty trail
And the Caissons
go rolling along.”
    (A caisson is a wagon that carries ammunition.) “Very good,” Mr. Conklin said. “Now we’ll try the second song in the medley, which is ʹAnchors Aweigh,‘ the U.S. Navy anthem.”

    We sang:
    â€œAnchors Aweigh, my boys,
    Anchors Aweigh.
    Farewell to college joys,
    We sail at break of day-ay-ay-ay.”
    â€œNow, Miss Mulligan will play the alto parts for both songs,” Mr. Conklin told us.
    The altos practiced, then the tenors and basses, who were all the older boys whose voices had changed—or who could at least sing lower.
    We went on to practice “The Marines’ Hymn.”
    â€œFrom the Halls of Montezuma
    To the shores of Tripoli,
    We fight our country’s battles
    In the air, on land, and sea.”
    â€œWe will now practice the last song in the medley, learn the parts, and try to put them all together,” Mr. Conklin said. “It is the Army Air Corps anthem.”
    Miss Mulligan began and we sang:
    â€œOff we go into the wide blue yonder.”
    I started to feel funny. I started to think of my cousin Blackie, whose plane was shot down. I couldn’t