“It seemed everybody was outdoors’ War’s end unleashes Mainers’ passions

Judy Bean Lundwall was with about 100 campers and counselors at Camp Natarswi at the foot of Mount Katahdin. “Campers were called to the ‘Big Rock’ in the middle of camp by the gong of the dinner bell. We were told to get out our mess kits and to line up. The counselors were given pots, pans, spoons, et cetera, from the kitchen. We paraded from one end of the camp to the other, banging and clanging those pans. The sounds echoed [through] the pine woods and across Togue Pond. The sound still rings in my ears. After the march we gathered round a campfire and sang songs, thankful that the war had ended.” Lundwall lives in East Greenwich, R.I.

Doug Gerrish of Rockland rode around in a friend’s car that had no tires on the rims because of wartime rubber rationing.

Warren Tibbetts, then of Millinocket, was with a U.S. Marine Corps detachment on the Pacific island of Guam. “They told us that we would be part of the plan to invade Japan, and then the bomb was brought in to save thousands of American and Japanese lives.” Tibbetts lives in Whitehall, Mich.

“It was a clear, warm day, and around 5 or 6 p.m. we heard that the war was over,” said Dorice S. Lamoray. “We were the Small sisters from Carmel, married, and our husbands were in the Navy. The three of us hitchhiked to Bangor (back then you could trust people). Everyone that owned a car was on Route 2, headed to Bangor, and it was absolutely mobbed. There was hardly room to move and, of course, very noisy. … It was a night that one could never forget – plus, it was the one and only time I ever hitched a ride.”

Perley J. Thibodeau had just turned 5 when he joined a group of children parading across Exchange Street in Bangor “with a flag, wooden slats for batons from a house that was being torn down, banging tin cans together, and jubilant that the war was over.” He said the older kids decided to march farther, but he was “too little and too much a hindrance” for the older ones. “So they ran and hid in Betty Koritsky’s barn on Hancock Street … until I gave up and went home.” He lives in New York City.

“I was visiting my grandparents Ross and Maerea Conner in Castine. … Cadets at Maine Maritime Academy marched around town while military music played,” said Jan Brown Dougherty of Phoenix, Ariz. “It seemed everybody was outdoors, congregating in groups, and radios could be heard from indoors. I have never felt the same degree of extreme happy excitement since. My grandfather let me sit in his car and blow the horn along with many other ‘horn blowers.'”

Paul “Gil” Merriam was 10 years old and attending a baseball game at Deering Oaks in Portland. Over the loudspeaker he heard, “The war’s over and so is this damn ballgame.” People starting making their way toward Congress Street but wound up in a traffic jam. “Portland was a big Navy town. [People] were happy.” Merriam lives in Rockland and is co-author of “Home Front on Penobscot Bay: Rockland During the War Years.”

“My dad and I were in the Bangor House [hotel] barbershop as he was the barber there, and I was the 12-year-old shoeshine boy,” recalled John “Pope” Levesque of Las Vegas. “Dad had just finished with his last customer, who happened to be Father Nelligan, our pastor at St. Mary’s. We were listening to the radio (no TV in Bangor in 1945); the commentator kept saying, ‘We are waiting for the official announcement.’ So the three of us sat there in the barbershop. Finally, the announcement came that the war was over. When the three of us walked out onto Main Street, there was a huge party already in progress. I had never seen so many happy people really enjoying themselves. “