I was quite surprised at the Orlando Sentinel's Letter Writers Forum in October when I was introduced as a member of Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation. What an honor!

Most of us know what The Greatest Generation did, but where, as folks would say in modem parlance, do we "come from"? What was our life like? What made us think the way we did?

Many of us were born during the "Roaring Twenties." Times were good. My dad had enjoyed a good job ever since he got out of the Army in 1918. We even had an automobile.

Then came the stock market crash in 1929, There were no food stamps, welfare checks, medical supplements, or- credit cards. Relatives took you in if you couldn't make it. If you needed something, you scrimped and saved until you had the cash.

Kids raked neighbors' leaves, cut grass, shoveled snow, baby sat, washed dishes or did whatever other odd jobs were available to help make ends meet. The family was not made up of parents and "teenagers"; the latter term wasn't yet in wide use. We were a team.

Our boyhood gang was definitely not out of West Side Story. We built shacks, club houses and tree houses in the woods; swam sans suits in the swimming hole (and in the highschool pool); and played sandlot baseball and football without adult witnesses. Any attending would've been thought daft.
Each of us owned a .22 rifle or shotgun and a hunting knife. We shot game for the larder and ran trap lines and sold the skins to augment the family income.

The thought of ever using a weapon against any other human being never occurred to us. Disputes were settled with fists, using "Marquis of Queensbury" rules for fair play. No two or more individuals, ever ganged up on any other person.

Inured by the hardships and deprivations of the Great Depression, we had no difficulty accepting parental or institutional discipline.

Most moms didn't work. They stayed home and nurtured the kids, cooking delicious fried rabbit, mouth-watering squirrel pie and homemade cakes and pastries before the days of Betty Crocker and Duncan Hines. Everything was made from scratch.

These were definitely not "the good, old days" because the minimum wage was so low: 25 cents an hour. Bread was 10 cents a loaf, hamburger 15 cents a pound. Movies were 15 cents for kids and 35 cents for adults. Gasoline was 18.5 cents. By those standards, a gallon of gasoline today would cost $4.14.

Automobiles weren't really common until after World War Il. Adults paid 10 cents to ride a bus or streetcar to and from work. Kids paid 5 cents or 4 cents for special school tickets. We walked a lot. Moms budgeted everything, even 1-cent buttons.

Air-conditioned homes?

Forget it. Only some of the modem theaters and businesses had air-conditioning.

Life was simple, and
we were very thankful
and proud to be
American.

Thermostats and gas- or electric-heated homes?

Nope. Coal was delivered by the ton outside the basement window, where we shoveled it into the bin before firing the furnace. The heavy, leftover ashes went into short garbage cans to be carried up the basement steps and out to the sidewalk for pick-up.

Life was simple, and we were very thankful and proud to be Americans. We were deeply patriotic but idealistic and naive; our idols were Medal of Honor winners Eddie Rickenbacker, the World War I ace, and Sgt. Alvin C. York, the heroic Tennessee infantryman.

Most of us had no idea where Pearl Harbor was when we heard the Japanese had attacked on Dec. 7, 194 1. Some of us were still seniors in high school.

There were 12,500,000 men in our Armed Services during World War II - some volunteers, some drafted. We all volunteered. It's said that only one of 10 men in the service ever sees combat. There were six of us. One was a B-17 tail gunner one a Navy pilot, three were Marines fighting the Japanese in the Pacific, and I was a 19-year old B-26 Marauder combat flight leader.

Unlike in Vietnam, ground troops didn't return to the United States at the end of one year. They, stayed and fought, campaign after campaign, until they were hors de combat, killed in action or the war ended.

Two of our three Marines didn't make it home. A lingering Japanese sniper on Guadalcanal killed Bob HeImbrock in the summer of '42. He was 20. It was the first American land victory in the Pacific since the debacle at Pearl Harbor and prevented the Japanese invasion of Australia.

For the Marines, hopping from island to island, every beachhead was like Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan. Bob's brother, Don, survived the savage fighting on Okinawa, but our third Marine, Judd Graeser from across the street, died on Tarawa in the bloodiest campaign of me war.

I've never met a member of The Greatest Generation who ever regarded himself as a hero We are merely the survivors.

The heroes are the ones who sacrificed their lives willingly, proudly and courageously so that all of us living today may enjoy our existence as Americans in the greatest country in the history of the world.

It's an honor to have known and served with such men.

I salute them.

John W. Sorrelle jr. of Belle Isle is a former Air Force pilot who enlisted in 1942 and retired in 1975.