This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2006, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
At age 13, she was reading the Sunday funnies when her family got word of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Perhaps because the world seemed to grow so dark after the telephone call, the early-morning hours before the phone rang now seem so idyllic.
"It was just such a comfortable Sunday," Carolyn Anderson says, remembering the morning of Dec. 7, 1941. "My father was home, and everything seemed so wonderful. He had the newspaper spread out, and we were reading the funny papers. And mommy was fixing breakfast."
And, then, the telephone rang with the news: the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.
"We turned on the radio, and oh, my God, we all sat there wondering what was going to happen now," says Anderson, who was 13 when the United States entered World War II. "And by Monday morning we knew: The world had changed."
For Anderson, now a 77-year-old retiree who lives in Sandy, the attack that President Franklin Roosevelt promised would "live in infamy" marked the start of her understanding of the misery brought by warfare - and a sad recognition of the evasiveness of peace.
Anderson recalls seeing young men lined up at recruiting offices, train stations filled with departing soldiers and parlor windows filled with blue- and gold-starred banners.
And she remembers the day she learned her future husband's brother, Richard Anderson, was declared dead in the Pacific theater.
The depth of that loss troubles her to this day.
"He was such a beautiful, intelligent young man," she says. "He was going to the university, he was a member of Sigma Nu, and he was engaged to be married."
Carolyn Anderson also looked on as her sister fearfully awaited word of her husband, Bob McGregor, who was captured by the German army and held as a prisoner of war for 14 months.
When World War II finally ended with Japan's surrender Aug. 15, 1945, Anderson was a freshman in college. The next spring, an influx of returned GIs swelled the classrooms at the University of Utah. Anderson married and, together with her husband, Bob, began to rear a family in Salt Lake City.
It was as if the idyllic days she remembered from before Pearl Harbor had returned for good.
"I thought, 'Now everyone in the world has seen what war can do; nobody wins and everybody loses, so why would we ever do it again?' '' she says. "And I'll be damned, then the Korean War came along, and there was my husband, who had lost his brother a short time before, being drafted."
Bob Anderson narrowly avoided conscription into the Korean War (Carolyn was pregnant), but she would face the same fear again the next decade as her two eldest sons received draft notices for Vietnam.
These days, Anderson wonders how her country's leaders seem to have managed, war after war, to forget the suffering and death that battles bring. And she worries about whether her grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be called upon to fight.
Today, nearly 65 years after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Anderson is as unsettled about her nation's future as she was the morning of Dec. 7, 1941.
"These men play with the young men's lives like they were playing a game of chess," she says. "We've had the golden rule for a couple thousand years. I wonder why it can't set in."
Carolyn Anderson
Age: 77
Born in Salt Lake City, lives in Sandy.
Graduated from East High, attended the University of Utah.
Worked as a technical illustrator, real-estate agent, secretary and homemaker.
Married to Bob (died in 1992); three sons, Ryan, 54; Brandon, 52; Corbin, 44; and one daughter, Jody Zur, 48; 14 grandchildren, two great-grandchildren.