I remember being certain the combat would be over before I was old enough to be in it. I was a student at Grafton Street Junior High School, and 15 years old, when the United States entered the war. I grew up in a working-class neighborhood of Worcester. His widow, my grandmother, Sarah Melnikoff, lived with my family for the next 35 years and was like a second mother to me. He had been a bookbinder and, by all accounts, a wonderful man. I was called Noah in memory of my mother's father, Noah Melnikoff, who had died only a few months before. In a flat on Providence Street in Worcester, Massachusetts, on Armistice Day, Robert Gordon's wife, Rose, gave birth at home to their second child. Bread was nine cents a loaf, and a gallon of gas cost a dime. Henry Ford set the price of his Model T at $350, and people were buzzing about the first moving pictures with sound- "talkies." The average annual income in America was $1,313. In Italy, dictator Benito Mussolini brought back capital punishment. In Germany, a man named Paul Joseph Goebbels was appointed head of the Berlin branch of a nondescript political group, the Nazi Party. Al Smith was elected governor of New York, and many people hoped he might become the first Catholic President of the United States.
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