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 Darkness ends
By Mike Gordon
Advertiser Staff Writer
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| John Mellen was an 11-year-old in Long Beach, Calif., when the war ended. He and his friends were happy to join the celebration.
Deborah Booker | The Honolulu Advertiser
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On the day the war ended, John Mellen watched a street party erupt all around his Long Beach, Calif., neighborhood. He was only 11 years old, but he and his friends decided to join the celebration.
People were jumping up and down. Cheering, hugging and drinking, too.
"The city went wild," he recalled.
Mellen had felt the weight of war in his defense industry town. Air-raid alerts. Rationing. Army bombers roaring over his elementary school almost every afternoon.
They had lived with blackout curtains on their windows, living with "total darkness" outside each night, he said. He had never seen a neon light.
"You couldn't have a night fire," said Mellen, now 70 and a Kaimuki resident. "You couldn't have a weiner roast."
The Japanese surrender affected everyone that day, and the air filled with celebratory noise.
The neighborhood kids would not be outdone, Mellen said.
"Me and my friends got on our bikes and tied tin cans to them," Mellen said. "And we put buckets on our handle bars and tore up paper and threw it in the bucket so we could go around like everyone else throwing it out of their windows."
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