The GI Generation: A Memoir

Tom Brokaw calls them “The Greatest Generation.” But how did the men and women who came of age during the Great Depression become a fighting force the likes of which the world had never known?

Frank Mathias was born in Maysville, Kentucky, (pop. 7000) in 1925, and grew up in nearby Carlisle (pop. 1500). The people of his small town were much like those all across America. They were unsophisticated yet aware, peacefully patriotic, optimistic despite the Depression, biased concerning religion and race, gossipy to a fault, and naive in their belief that World War I had been the “war to end all wars.”

Much of community life focused on the local high school, which, in Mathias’s case, was a tiny one with no library, no chemistry courses, no drivers’ training, no guidance counselors. Yet the one hundred students who graduated from 1942 to 1944 became university professors, top executives, military commanders, successful investors, lawyers, and physicians. They also served faithfully and honorably in World War II, a conflict they never imagined could occur.

A vivid portrait of a bucolic Kentucky boyhood, G.I. Generation takes readers back to an era when boys rustled watermelons under the hot summer sun and young lovers danced to the sounds of farmhouse bands. Whether describing the unfortunate (but delicious) end of his brother’s pet chicken, Don, or the ominous clouds of war, Mathias writes with humor, honesty, and compassion.

“This memoir is an important reminder that urban life is not the only life: it reveals, for instance, that for people living close to their needs and far from the command-posts of the cash economy, a thing like the Great Depression could be largely irrelevant. Frank Mathias respectfully renders small-town history as a worthy piece of something larger: ourselves. America.”—Barbara Kingsolver

“An insightful look at what the ‘Greatest Generation’ was like before they fought and won the war.”—Maysville Ledger-Independent

“A well-received collection of memoirs about what is being called the Greatest Generation.”—Kettering-Oakwood (OH) Times

“A sensitive and respectful balance between the stories of his childhood and the realities of war.”—Ohioana Quarterly

“A trip down memory lane. Filled with amusing and often poignant stories, it presents a picture of a kinder, less sophisticated, more moral society.”—Bowling Green Daily News

“A memoir about the wondrous variety of daily life, even during the Depression years, that shaped the men and women of the era.”—McCormick (SC) Messenger

Frank F. Mathias, professor emeritus of history at the University of Dayton, is the author of G.I. Jive: An Army Bandsman in World War II.