When There Was Dancing in the Streets: Revisit 1945 on V/J Day
- Jann Alexander
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
80 years ago, the headlines called it: PEACE. See it through the eyes of someone who lived it, on August 15, 1945, when Victory Over Japan was declared to end the second world war.
With Victory Over Japan, there was dancing in the streets, in Austin, Texas (below), and in my historical novel, Unspoken, where Ruby Lee Becker recounts the joy in the mythical town of Hartless, Texas:
"We jammed into hog-wild throngs and grabbed the arms of airmen in sweat-stained khakis who whirled us around. We clasped hands with strangers and hugged neighbors in the surging crowd. We guzzled the beers pulled from pockets and shared in paper sacks, all of us cavorting with fresh-faced recruits, reveling in the news, overcome and shouting in the first full-throated belly laughter any of us had allowed ourselves for five long years. We danced and reveled long into the night, until tears dried salty on our cheeks, later washed off in an unexpected downpour that felt like a long-overdue double dose of good fortune."
—Ruby Lee Becker, Unspoken (A Dust Novel)
But another headline, less flashy, caught Ruby Lee Becker's eye. Reading it killed all the joy: "U.S. Fighting Ship Goes Down With All On Board."
The ship was the USS Indianapolis, carrying the boy she loved, though she didn't yet know his fate. Ruby narrates:
"I downed my coffee, noticing the USS Indianapolis list continued to the back page under the heading Survived. My eyes raced down the names. I found none I knew, not Will nor Earl, Clay nor Red, until I reached the final column: Status Questionable.
"And there he was. 'Oris Burton Hubbard. Believed to be among 316 survivors transported by USS Tranquillity (AH-14) to Guam on 8 August 1945. Two survivors died en route; names withheld pending notification of kin.'
"Red vanished without a trace, as promised. Or had he survived days adrift at sea, only to die after his rescue? It was too much to bear.
"My stomach knotted. The café was so crazed nobody noticed my tears spilling as I muscled my way out. All the losses of the war, layered onto who the drouth claimed, the flood’s victim, my State Home family, and the one I took real hard—Amelia Earhart’s disappearance.
"Losing Pa, who’d lost his lifelong dream. Pa and the farm so interchangeable I couldn’t imagine one without the other. Yet Pa was dead and the farm was mine to lose.
"What of the Hubbards—would I ever know? Would the Becker brothers make it back to see the farm? I couldn’t bear to contemplate Momma, the darkest blow of all, which I kept buried the deepest."
—Ruby Lee Becker, Unspoken: A Dust Novel
Learn more about Texas Dust Bowl history, and beyond
In a mythical town named Hartless in the Texas Panhandle where nobody knows how to fix air you can't breathe, one tenacious girl vows to stake her claim and face what's Unspoken.
Unspoken, the first book in The Dust Series, is new historical fiction featuring strong Texas women who face the worst the Great Depression, drought, the Dust Bowl, and world war can throw at them, yet persevere.
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