Cohassett Beach Chronicles: World War II in the Pacific Northwest
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By Kathy Hogan
Edited by Klancy de Nevers and Lucy Hart
1995. 256 pages. Illus. Index.
ISBN 0-87071-398-1. Paperback. $19.95.
Table of Contents
Introduction
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In 1940 the
Grays Harbor Post in Aberdeen, Washington, introduced
its readers to "The Kitchen Critic," a new column chronicling
life in nearby Cohassett Beach. Within a year the U.S. was at war, and columnist
Kathy Hogan's weekly dispatches turned to soldiers, rationing, and the barbed
wire that lined the sand dunes around her weathered cottage.
Fifty years later, Kathy Hogan's writings provide a window onto how one
Pacific Northwest community responded to World War II.
Cohassett Beach
Chronicles, a collection of Hogan's columns from the war years, offers
a remarkable social history of the war at home.
The attack on Pearl Harbor brought U.S. troops to
Cohassett Beach and to towns up and down the West Coast. With wit and perception, Hogan writes
of civilians valiantly coping with this friendly occupation and wartime
scarcity. Her neighbors--loggers, commercial fishermen, Finnish cranberry
farmers--learn to live with blackouts, blimps, and a ban on beachcombing.
Hogan's weekly descriptions of life on the home front capture America's
wartime mood. Together, her columns document the war's tremendous impact
at home, from the internment of Japanese Americans and the spread of government
regulations to the changing role of women. They also reveal that in spite
of the war effort life, in many ways, continued as it always had. There
was still time to pick blackberries, gossip at the local tavern, and attend
the occasional Friday night dance.
"These columns...are really quite memorable. Kathy Hogan was a woman of such
talent."
--Scott Simon, National Public Radio
"Cohassett Beach Chronicles is the best kind of unburied treasure--brilliant,
unexpected, and functional. You can open it to any page and find
something interesting . . . In my book, no one except Studs Terkel has captured the
mood of wartime America as well as Hogan."
--John Hughes,
The Daily World,
Aberdeen, Washington
About the Editors
Klancy de Nevers, the dauthter of Kearny Clark, is a writer living in Salt Lake City. Her most recent book is
The Colonel and the Pacifist (University of Utah Press, 2004).
Lucy Hart is a writer and artist in Seattle.
As children, the editors spent summers in the Cohassett Beach cottages that still, in the late 1940s, bore scars of the Army's occupation.
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