Free Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley, Ron Powers

and Rene Gagnon made as much out of the snow as John Bradley or Franklin Sousley did. The town fathers used to block off hilly Sagamore Street with wooden horses after a snowstorm, and hang out kerosene lanterns for illumination, and people would come there with their sleds. Mostly children, but some grown-ups, too. On a good night or weekend afternoon maybe two hundred boys and girls would be flashing down the hill in stocking caps on their Flexible Flyers.
     
    When Rene was old enough, Irene brought him to the mills in his free time so they could be together more. He worked alongside his mother and many other women in the same vast room, performing the same repetitive tasks day after day. He was a “doffer.” Doffers took care of the bobbins. Bobbins were cylinders, placed on spindles to receive the cotton thread as it spooled during the mechanized weaving process. There were about 700,000 spindles, servicing some 23,000 looms, humming along in the rows of buildings during the Manchester mills’ peak years. When a bobbin was fully wound with thread, the doffer would lift it off its spindle and replace it with an empty cylinder. It was unchallenging work Rene could do.
     
    Irene was happy with her secure life in the mill and her tidy home. She sang the praises of this life to her son and encouraged him to come to work with her whenever he could. Rene began to join his mother during her lunch hour, abandoning his friends in the school cafeteria. After two years of high school, he dropped out so that he could concentrate on being a doffer full-time.
    Rene worked alongside his mother and her friends now. Having her boy by her side night and day must have pleased Irene. But there were other women there, younger girls who were attracted to her dark, handsome boy.
    Irene was particularly concerned by a young, aggressive girl who had her eye on Rene. Her name was Pauline Harnois and she seemed to cast a spell over Irene’s boy, ready to take control, which she was used to having. As her sister Anita later remembered, “Our dad got sick at a young age and my mother had to work in the mills. Pauline was the oldest in a family of four and she had to take a lot of responsibility at a young age. She liked to be in control. Her position in the family, her responsibility formed her. She was always in control.”
    Like a leaf in the tide, Rene was swept along with whatever current took him and he spent more time with Pauline than Irene would have liked.

    One December afternoon when he was sixteen, the world beyond the mill town broke through the routine clip-clop and spindle-hum. A bunch of the guys were all in somebody’s den, listening to a football game on a big Halson radio, when the voice of President Roosevelt interrupted and started talking about a date that would live in infamy. The next day the Manchester Union-Leader paperboys were brandishing editions whose headline was just one word: “WAR!”
    Rationing began not long after.
    Rene Gagnon listened to this news, read about it, shrugged, and went back to the mill and his mother and Pauline Harnois. It was all beyond his control. He kept on working. Life went on: the mill, his mother, Pauline, the bright lights along Elm Street.
    Rene Gagnon kept on working right up until his Army draft notice arrived in May of 1943. Then he enlisted in the Marines and submitted to the third large, outside influence that would mold his life.
    Irene didn’t want to lose her boy, but she thought it would do him good to get away from that Harnois girl. What Rene didn’t tell his mother was that he had already made a fateful decision. At the age of seventeen he comforted the sad Pauline with the promise that he would marry her when he returned from the war.
    Mike Strank: Franklin Borough, Pennsylvania
    He was the enigma: the immigrant who became the ultimate fighting Yank; the cerebral little boy from the tough mill town who grew up to be the protosergeant; the physical intimidator who