Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Mills Brothers performing there classic World War II song, Paper Doll.
Delores LeBlanc never dreamed, never dreamed in a million years, that she would be sitting every week in the War Relief Office with the blue-haired ladies of Olde Saco darning, darning socks, for the boys across the sea struggling to get rid of that mad man Hitler from the face of Europe, and maybe the world. She hoped that at least one pair would get to her brother, her older brother Jimmy, who was with the 1st Division (Army, nicknamed “The Big Red One,” but what would Delores, a mere girl just graduated from Olde Saco High School and thinking about going to secretarial school down in Boston in the fall in order to break out of the Maine ocean trap know of such things). Each pair she darned and completed was accompanied by a wish that the pair go to Jimmy, or at least to an Olde Saco French-Canadian (locally called F-Cs) friend of Jimmy’s, or barring that some Olde Saco F-C boy like the ones she had gone to school with, had dated, and had enlisted early. Beyond that she would not go in her wish list.
So there she was, week after week, uncomfortably sitting there in that dank office (formerly used to store some of the town’s ever-ready and ever necessary winter plowing gear) used now each Tuesday and Thursday evening for darning socks for the boys along with the old ladies gossip grapevine of the town. The rest of the week during the day it was used by an alphabet soup’s worth of agencies for war relief programs, and for doling out the towns’ rations of gas, sugar, and whatever else the local board (on orders from Augusta and Washington) decided needed to be rationed to support the war effort. She knew little of the ins and outs of those decisions except she resented, resented like hell, the shortage of nylons (for the war effort or not)r that she was forced to endure (and cursed each and every time she had a run in her now ragged pre-war pairs).
Our Delores, it seems, also resented that the old ladies (and the few other just out of high school girls that they could recruit on the basis that since they were foot-loose and fancy free, not married, not working at the Bath Shipyard producing a ship a day that it was their duty to darn socks for the boys across the seas) while doing their patriotic duty were prepared, no, inspired to rip apart the reputations of every man or women in town who came within their grapevine cross- hairs. And the leader of the pack (and the woman who “recruited” her to the task at hand) was one Yvette Leblanc, her mother.
Now for those not in the know the great majority of the population of Olde Saco in those days were F-Cs who had come down from Canada to work in the textile mills of the town back around the turn of the century or something like that. So the grapevine had two components, one, it was mainly times a spoken French communications network (except when the whole town, the whole womanhood of the town, was in an uproar over something, or somebody), and, two, it was directly connected with Ste. Brigitte’s (her parish) or one of the twelve Gallic Roman Catholic churches in the town whose “spy” network controlled what was what in town.
One night, one Thursday night the ladies were livid, were out of their minds with wonder and malice. Apparently the very married Jim MacAdams, young son of the owner of the biggest mill in town, MacAdams Textile Mill, was heard to be running around with someone not his wife. Most definitely not his wife from the informant’s description. Naturally, after checking to see who was darning that night, and seeing that all were proper F-Cs, they ladies began to speak the patois.
And here is Delores description of what she heard them say. Of course a heathen (meaning anybody who was not an “in grace” F-C, a protestant like the MacAdams’ in other words) would have nothing but the morals of an alley cat and what could you except from “them.” Moreover, the girl was probably one of those heathen Irish protestant girls from across Atlantic Avenue, from the cold-water flats near the railroad tracks from the description of her. (The Irish Protestants pre-dated the F-C invasion of Olde Saco by about twenty years but no quarter and no credit was given on that fact.)You know how they are. And from there the speculation went down home fast.
Delores reddened, reddened several times during this lurid conversation while the blue-haired ladies talked their increasingly sex-maddened talk but held her tongue. See, she knew, knew very well, that Jim MacAdams was seeing one Lily Genet, her best friend, whose mother was sitting right next to her mother just then and leading the charge on the loose morals of the Protestant Irish.
She quietly finished yet another part of socks. Delores wished, as always, that this pair would go to Jimmy. But her next wish was that the pair would go to one of the many Irish Protestant boys from the town who had clamored to enlist once the war started and were just then taking heavy loses, according to the daily casualties reports posted in the Olde Saco Gazette, with the Third Army in fighting that mad man Hitler.
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