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Defending Baltimore Against Enemy Attack: A Boyhood Year During World War II
The year is 1942, and while America is reeling from the first blows of WWII, Osgood is just a nine-year-old boy living in Baltimore. As the war rages somewhere far beyond the boundaries of his hometown, he spends his days delivering newspapers, riding the trolley to the local amusement park, going to Orioles' baseball games, and goofing around with his younger sister.
With a sharp eye for details, Osgood captures the texture of life in a very different era, a time before the polio vaccine and the atomic bomb. In his neighborhood of Liberty Heights, gaslights still glowed on every corner, milkmen delivered bottles of milk, and a loaf of bread cost nine cents.
Osgood reminisces about his first fist-fight with a kid from the neighborhood, his childhood crush on a girl named Sue, and his relationship with his father, a traveling salesman. He also talks about his early love for radio and how he used to huddle under the covers after his parents had turned off the lights, listening to Superman, The Lone Ranger, The Shadow, and, of course, to baseball games.
Defending Baltimore Against Enemy Attack is a gloriously funny and nostalgic slice of American life and a moving look at World War II from the perspective of a child far away from the fighting, but very conscious of the reverberations.
With a sharp eye for details, Osgood captures the texture of life in a very different era, a time before the polio vaccine and the atomic bomb. In his neighborhood of Liberty Heights, gaslights still glowed on every corner, milkmen delivered bottles of milk, and a loaf of bread cost nine cents.
Osgood reminisces about his first fist-fight with a kid from the neighborhood, his childhood crush on a girl named Sue, and his relationship with his father, a traveling salesman. He also talks about his early love for radio and how he used to huddle under the covers after his parents had turned off the lights, listening to Superman, The Lone Ranger, The Shadow, and, of course, to baseball games.
Defending Baltimore Against Enemy Attack is a gloriously funny and nostalgic slice of American life and a moving look at World War II from the perspective of a child far away from the fighting, but very conscious of the reverberations.
160 pages, Hardcover
First published May 12, 2004
1 person is currently reading
134 people want to read
About the author
Charles Osgood
39 books11 followersCharles Osgood (born Charles Osgood Wood, III on January 8, 1933) is a radio and television commentator in the United States. His daily program, The Osgood File, has been broadcast on the CBS Radio Network since 1971. Osgood hosts CBS News Sunday Morning. He is also known for being the voice of the narrator of Horton Hears a Who!, an animated film released in 2008, based on the book of the same name by Dr. Seuss.
Source: Wikipedia.
Source: Wikipedia.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 53 reviews
October 28, 2015
First of all, I would like to say that the title of this book is misleading. There is very little of WWII in this book. A more appropriate title would have been “Memorizing Brainless Advertising Slogans and Playing Dumb Games With My Sister in Baltimore”.
Since I rarely watch CBS, I had never heard of Charles Osgood before. There is a photograph of him at the end of this book, and I noticed that he looks rather likable. Therefore, I have nothing personal against the author. However, taken from this memoir, I must say that as a 9-year-old, he definitely wasn’t very bright. I don’t wish to brag, but it is the naked truth that, considering all the senseless games he played and the stupid things he did at age 9, I had significantly more brain as a preschooler. I can only hope that Mr. Osgood’s intelligence rocketed when he grew older.
The first two thirds of the book are rather boring. The last third is written a bit amusing, at least, part of it. The most positive I can say about the book is that it is very short. It is actually more a booklet than a book. So I didn’t waste much time on it. The list price of the booklet is a proud $ 13.95. Am I ever glad I didn’t pay this amount. I obtained this little memoir for 10 cents at a clearance sale at Big Lots, a few years ago. So the investment was justifiable, and I didn’t suffer any financial damage.
I would actually rate this booklet 2 1/2 stars, but I rounded up because it kind of interested me how kids lived in America during WWII, while I spent my pre-school years in Hitler's Germany under less favorable conditions.
Since I rarely watch CBS, I had never heard of Charles Osgood before. There is a photograph of him at the end of this book, and I noticed that he looks rather likable. Therefore, I have nothing personal against the author. However, taken from this memoir, I must say that as a 9-year-old, he definitely wasn’t very bright. I don’t wish to brag, but it is the naked truth that, considering all the senseless games he played and the stupid things he did at age 9, I had significantly more brain as a preschooler. I can only hope that Mr. Osgood’s intelligence rocketed when he grew older.
The first two thirds of the book are rather boring. The last third is written a bit amusing, at least, part of it. The most positive I can say about the book is that it is very short. It is actually more a booklet than a book. So I didn’t waste much time on it. The list price of the booklet is a proud $ 13.95. Am I ever glad I didn’t pay this amount. I obtained this little memoir for 10 cents at a clearance sale at Big Lots, a few years ago. So the investment was justifiable, and I didn’t suffer any financial damage.
I would actually rate this booklet 2 1/2 stars, but I rounded up because it kind of interested me how kids lived in America during WWII, while I spent my pre-school years in Hitler's Germany under less favorable conditions.
June 28, 2021
“Defending Baltimore” is a phrase that one might more typically associate with the War of 1812, with Fort McHenry and Francis Scott Key and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In the case of Charles Osgood’s Defending Baltimore Against Enemy Attack, however, the historical context is not the War of 1812 but rather the Second World War, and Osgood is defending Baltimore from the homefront of his childhood imagination, recalling his boyhood certainty that “Hitler would of course make his first target [the northwest Baltimore neighborhood of] Liberty Heights” (p. 9).
Osgood, a radio and television journalist long associated with CBS, looks back on A Boyhood Year During World War II (the book’s subtitle) with a definite sense of nostalgia – something that will be no surprise to regular viewers of CBS News’ Sunday Morning feature program, for which Osgood as host always wore a bowtie that seemed to signal his appreciation for the values of earlier times. Osgood admits that this look back to his sixty-years-gone Baltimore boyhood is likely to be somewhat nostalgic – “memory has a built-in sugarcoater, and childhood is seen through the cotton candy of time” – but then insists that “I have always been certain that there was a genuine sweetness to the days when I was nine years old and the country was united in winning the last good war, if there could have been such a thing” (pp. 2-3). The sepia-toned cover photograph of Osgood as a boy reinforces that sense of nostalgia.
Osgood provides engaging details from his childhood in Baltimore – listening to radio programs like The Shadow in those pre-TV days; going with his father to Memorial Stadium to watch the old minor-league Baltimore Orioles, “a Triple-A team that often played Double-A ball” (p. 45); running away from home with his sister, only to end up at the Ambassador movie house watching Holiday Inn; responding to anxiety about an upcoming church organ performance by unplugging the organ; debating with a friend the relative merits of reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in its original version (took Osgood a week) versus reading The Hunchback of Notre Dame in its Classic Comics version (took Osgood’s friend ten minutes).
Such passages recall the avuncular tone of Osgood’s broadcasts for his Osgood File radio program, and they do well at capturing the long days of childhood, summer days when time seems to stretch out without limit, toward a horizon where life and childhood somehow go on forever. The photographs that Osgood includes, both from his own family's life and from the larger history of World War II, are also helpful.
My chief reservation regarding this fun little book relates to the way in which Osgood tends to use his reverence for the past to suggest that the past was somehow better than the present, as when he talks about differing attitudes toward childhood and play in the 1940’s vis-à-vis the 2000’s. It was clever, for example, when Osgood made fun of the modern practice of parents arranging “play dates” for their children by writing that “we never had a ‘play date.’ A play date was any date that you played. My play dates were 1939 to 1950” (p. 50). Witty, and well-stated: point taken.
Unfortunately, though that clever bit of phraseology is part of a much longer passage in which Osgood goes on at some length regarding his childhood as “a time of much more play than work, and the play almost always was merrily improvised, not organized by adults….In that innocent time, a soccer mom would have been a mother who played for Brazil. The lives of forties children weren’t organized as if they were wee CEOs: The kids weren’t driven in any way, neither pressured to be superkids nor chauffeured from one activity to another by a mother hell-bent on admission to Harvard, perhaps by the time the child was six” (pp. 49-50). That tone of a jeremiad or philippic seems strongly at odds with the nostalgic emphasis of much of the book.
Similarly, Osgood later bemoans what he sees as the loss of "the kind of mental discipline that seems to have almost disappeared from the American grammar school, where the teachers are tenderly concerned with whether their students feel good. In a forties grammar school, as long as you didn't have scurvy, the way you felt was considerably less important than the way you thought" (p. 124). Such sermonizing, especially in a book that is only 139 pages long, is not helpful - and it makes the book significantly less fun.
Like Osgood, I grew up in Maryland – though somewhat later in time, and in Montgomery County rather than Baltimore City. I enjoyed Defending Baltimore Against Enemy Attack as a memoir of a Maryland childhood, and as a look back at the World War II era. Osgood’s many fans are particularly likely to enjoy this book, especially if they share Osgood’s conservatism and his reverence for the past. Osgood even ends the book with one of his trademark songs, adapting an older pop song by providing a new set of lyrics that look back at his book’s content, just the way he used to do at the end of some episodes of CBS Sunday Morning. If such an approach to life and history sounds good to you, then read and enjoy. If not, then Osgood will see you on the radio.
Osgood, a radio and television journalist long associated with CBS, looks back on A Boyhood Year During World War II (the book’s subtitle) with a definite sense of nostalgia – something that will be no surprise to regular viewers of CBS News’ Sunday Morning feature program, for which Osgood as host always wore a bowtie that seemed to signal his appreciation for the values of earlier times. Osgood admits that this look back to his sixty-years-gone Baltimore boyhood is likely to be somewhat nostalgic – “memory has a built-in sugarcoater, and childhood is seen through the cotton candy of time” – but then insists that “I have always been certain that there was a genuine sweetness to the days when I was nine years old and the country was united in winning the last good war, if there could have been such a thing” (pp. 2-3). The sepia-toned cover photograph of Osgood as a boy reinforces that sense of nostalgia.
Osgood provides engaging details from his childhood in Baltimore – listening to radio programs like The Shadow in those pre-TV days; going with his father to Memorial Stadium to watch the old minor-league Baltimore Orioles, “a Triple-A team that often played Double-A ball” (p. 45); running away from home with his sister, only to end up at the Ambassador movie house watching Holiday Inn; responding to anxiety about an upcoming church organ performance by unplugging the organ; debating with a friend the relative merits of reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in its original version (took Osgood a week) versus reading The Hunchback of Notre Dame in its Classic Comics version (took Osgood’s friend ten minutes).
Such passages recall the avuncular tone of Osgood’s broadcasts for his Osgood File radio program, and they do well at capturing the long days of childhood, summer days when time seems to stretch out without limit, toward a horizon where life and childhood somehow go on forever. The photographs that Osgood includes, both from his own family's life and from the larger history of World War II, are also helpful.
My chief reservation regarding this fun little book relates to the way in which Osgood tends to use his reverence for the past to suggest that the past was somehow better than the present, as when he talks about differing attitudes toward childhood and play in the 1940’s vis-à-vis the 2000’s. It was clever, for example, when Osgood made fun of the modern practice of parents arranging “play dates” for their children by writing that “we never had a ‘play date.’ A play date was any date that you played. My play dates were 1939 to 1950” (p. 50). Witty, and well-stated: point taken.
Unfortunately, though that clever bit of phraseology is part of a much longer passage in which Osgood goes on at some length regarding his childhood as “a time of much more play than work, and the play almost always was merrily improvised, not organized by adults….In that innocent time, a soccer mom would have been a mother who played for Brazil. The lives of forties children weren’t organized as if they were wee CEOs: The kids weren’t driven in any way, neither pressured to be superkids nor chauffeured from one activity to another by a mother hell-bent on admission to Harvard, perhaps by the time the child was six” (pp. 49-50). That tone of a jeremiad or philippic seems strongly at odds with the nostalgic emphasis of much of the book.
Similarly, Osgood later bemoans what he sees as the loss of "the kind of mental discipline that seems to have almost disappeared from the American grammar school, where the teachers are tenderly concerned with whether their students feel good. In a forties grammar school, as long as you didn't have scurvy, the way you felt was considerably less important than the way you thought" (p. 124). Such sermonizing, especially in a book that is only 139 pages long, is not helpful - and it makes the book significantly less fun.
Like Osgood, I grew up in Maryland – though somewhat later in time, and in Montgomery County rather than Baltimore City. I enjoyed Defending Baltimore Against Enemy Attack as a memoir of a Maryland childhood, and as a look back at the World War II era. Osgood’s many fans are particularly likely to enjoy this book, especially if they share Osgood’s conservatism and his reverence for the past. Osgood even ends the book with one of his trademark songs, adapting an older pop song by providing a new set of lyrics that look back at his book’s content, just the way he used to do at the end of some episodes of CBS Sunday Morning. If such an approach to life and history sounds good to you, then read and enjoy. If not, then Osgood will see you on the radio.
January 3, 2014
I don't know how someone from another generation would feel about this but I'm old enough to have found every word a pure delight. It evokes WWII Baltimore so wonderfully well that I was carried back in a time machine into a sea of smiles. A view of the times through the eyes of a young boy and the contrast with our own times, far from clashing, fit together in Mr. Osgood's hands like interlocking puzzle pieces.
February 11, 2015
This was a cute story about an ideal childhood with a family almost as perfect as Beaver Cleaver's. Not having lived with such a family it was difficult to relate. I don't believe this should be called a book. It qualifies as a short story or magazine article that can be read in one sitting.
July 13, 2014
This non-fiction was funny at times and the author brought back memories of my childhood.
January 21, 2022
Nostalgic romp my mom would love.
October 17, 2013
I thought the book was a great, short, humorous read. Osgood describes 1942 Baltimore from the perspective of a young boy. I'd especially recommend this to those that are familiar with some of the old radio programs. This is a very light read, and had some great little stories. The comparisons of modern-day children are a bit like a rant at times, but I could appreciate them.
August 11, 2025
My boyhood friends from grade school through high school (and many still my best friends almost sixty years later), often talked about sports and sports announcers, mostly baseball play by play broadcasters such as Bob Prince, Harry Carey (with the St. Louis Cardinals), By Saam, Mel Allen, Chuck Thompson and others. During football season we listened to Thompson, Ray Scott, Lindsay Nelson, Keith Jackson, endured Curt Gowdy and his partners. There was one broadcaster we all enjoyed, who gave us the highlights of the NFL games on the CBS Sunday Evening News with a poetic flair. This was Charles Osgood.
Osgood was one of a stable of CBS newscasters who often reported stories with a tongue-in-cheek style --- colleagues included Charles Kuralt and Hughes Rudd. If his self-portrait is accurate, it all started in his first decade, with his sister Mary Ann as his primary audience and straight man.
I found a lot to snicker about; I was nine years old once. Radio was my passion in those days, too, although by the time I could understand anything coming out of that magic box, most of the dramas were gone. I remember my mother listening to the radio most of the day, with the music of Rosemary Clooney and Les Paul and Mary Ford dominating our local stations. I would like to think that Osgood and I were both listening, on CBS Radio, to the final Arthur Godfrey show. I was, on WCAU, Philadelphia.
All that aside, I loved this book for a number of reasons, first and foremost because Osgood lived in Baltimore, my birthplace. But even if the book had laid a big fat goose egg I would have given it at least four stars for one paragraph on page 119. Osgood is explaining what parsing is: the identification of parts of speech in a sentence. I'll admit it was not a familiar term to me. It would be akin to diagramming a sentence in my school years. Then came a brilliant observation which also addressed one of my pet peeves. The upper case of the text is my editing:
IT IS, OF COURSE, HARD TO PARSE THE SPEECH OF MANY YOUNG PEOPLE TODAY BECAUSE EVERY FOURTH WORD THEY SAY IS "LIKE,"...
Unfortunately, young people are not the only demographic guilty of this. I hear it far too often from adults, most notably from guests on National Public Radio, who also overuse the word "so" in answering questions.
Five stars
Osgood was one of a stable of CBS newscasters who often reported stories with a tongue-in-cheek style --- colleagues included Charles Kuralt and Hughes Rudd. If his self-portrait is accurate, it all started in his first decade, with his sister Mary Ann as his primary audience and straight man.
I found a lot to snicker about; I was nine years old once. Radio was my passion in those days, too, although by the time I could understand anything coming out of that magic box, most of the dramas were gone. I remember my mother listening to the radio most of the day, with the music of Rosemary Clooney and Les Paul and Mary Ford dominating our local stations. I would like to think that Osgood and I were both listening, on CBS Radio, to the final Arthur Godfrey show. I was, on WCAU, Philadelphia.
All that aside, I loved this book for a number of reasons, first and foremost because Osgood lived in Baltimore, my birthplace. But even if the book had laid a big fat goose egg I would have given it at least four stars for one paragraph on page 119. Osgood is explaining what parsing is: the identification of parts of speech in a sentence. I'll admit it was not a familiar term to me. It would be akin to diagramming a sentence in my school years. Then came a brilliant observation which also addressed one of my pet peeves. The upper case of the text is my editing:
IT IS, OF COURSE, HARD TO PARSE THE SPEECH OF MANY YOUNG PEOPLE TODAY BECAUSE EVERY FOURTH WORD THEY SAY IS "LIKE,"...
Unfortunately, young people are not the only demographic guilty of this. I hear it far too often from adults, most notably from guests on National Public Radio, who also overuse the word "so" in answering questions.
Five stars
September 25, 2023
One month and one day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Charles Osgood Wood III turned nine years old. This book is his documentation of all the things that happened to him during that year from his fourth grade in a small catholic school to his adventures with his younger sister in and around their neighborhood in Baltimore. I am amazed at his detailed memories of that year. I can remember very little about my 4th grade year. It is also interesting that rather than write about his whole childhood he isolated it to that one year. It’s a good look at society of that time and place.
January 27, 2018
A breezy memoir of one 9-year-old’s experiences on the home front. Actually, the war plays little role in this book. Osgood is witty, as might be expected, and perhaps more curmudgeonly than expected. His complaints about kids today wear a little thin after a while. Overall, this book lacks the poignancy we might hope for in a wartime memoir.
September 2, 2019
This was a fun, nostalgic read, enjoyable even though it was before my time. Charles Osgood is a great story teller and he does a great job of showing how it was to grow up in this time. He was a little hard on younger generations in his comments, yet it is true that life was very different and in many ways more innocent.
June 13, 2025
Charles Osgood sure has a good memory for all that detail in his 9 year old life! Some of it was nostalgic and sweet but then the author’s crabby side often came out when he compared his childhood to the kids from modern times, speaking disparagingly of video games, lack of penmanship, and the hovering of parents. Its also very short at 139 pages.
January 4, 2018
Ok, the title was a little misleading but the book was delightful and funny. I have 2 sisters who are the same age as the author, the stories he told were like the ones I have heard from my sisters over the years. I have pasted the book on to them and I know they will enjoy it and much as I did.
April 18, 2018
Pure entertainment! Very light. Laughed throughout much of it, for the humorous choice of words and author's animation. It's no wonder that Charles Osgood went into radio. Probably best listened to; I can't imagine that reading the hard copy would be nearly as entertaining.
March 13, 2019
Loved this short book about boyhood in Baltimore in the 1940s. Full of delightful childhood stories and tales of a boyhood love of baseball, it was a thoughtfully charming and incredibly enjoyable read!
November 23, 2025
Always enjoyed Charles Osgood as a host on CBS Sunday Morning Show. I was expecting a more in depth, substantial story from him, as I had always thought of him as a good storyteller.
It had its charmingly nostalgic moments, but it was light for an entire book.
It had its charmingly nostalgic moments, but it was light for an entire book.
August 22, 2014
“Defending Baltimore” is a phrase that one might more typically associate with the War of 1812, with Fort McHenry and Francis Scott Key and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In the case of Charles Osgood’s Defending Baltimore Against Enemy Attack, however, the historical context is not the War of 1812 but rather the Second World War, and Osgood is defending Baltimore from the homefront of his childhood imagination, recalling his boyhood certainty that “Hitler would of course make his first target [the northwest Baltimore neighborhood of] Liberty Heights” (p. 9).
Osgood, a radio and television journalist long associated with CBS, looks back on A Boyhood Year During World War II (the book’s subtitle) with a definite sense of nostalgia – something that will be no surprise to regular viewers of CBS News’ Sunday Morning feature program, for which Osgood as host always wears a bowtie that seems to signal his appreciation for the values of earlier times. Osgood admits that this look back to his sixty-years-gone Baltimore boyhood is likely to be somewhat nostalgic – “memory has a built-in sugarcoater, and childhood is seen through the cotton candy of time” – but then insists that “I have always been certain that there was a genuine sweetness to the days when I was nine years old and the country was united in winning the last good war, if there could have been such a thing” (pp. 2-3). The sepia-toned cover photograph of Osgood as a boy reinforces that sense of nostalgia.
Osgood provides engaging details from his childhood in Baltimore – listening to radio programs like The Shadow in those pre-TV days; going with his father to Memorial Stadium to watch the old minor-league Baltimore Orioles, “a Triple-A team that often played Double-A ball” (p. 45); running away from home with his sister, only to end up at the Ambassador movie house watching Holiday Inn; responding to anxiety about an upcoming church organ performance by unplugging the organ; debating with a friend the relative merits of reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in its original version (took Osgood a week) versus reading The Hunchback of Notre Dame in its Classic Comics version (took Osgood’s friend ten minutes). Such passages recall the avuncular tone of Osgood’s broadcasts for his Osgood File radio program, and they do well at capturing the long days of childhood, summer days when time seems to stretch out without limit, toward a horizon where life and childhood somehow go on forever. The photographs that Osgood includes, both from his own family's life and from the larger history of World War II, are also helpful.
My chief reservation regarding this fun little book relates to the way in which Osgood tends to use his reverence for the past to suggest that the past was somehow better than the present, as when he talks about differing attitudes toward childhood and play in the 1940’s vis-à-vis the 2000’s. It was clever, for example, when Osgood made fun of the modern practice of parents arranging “play dates” for their children by writing that “we never had a ‘play date.’ A play date was any date that you played. My play dates were 1939 to 1950” (p. 50). Witty, and well-stated: point taken. Unfortunately, that clever bit of phraseology is part of a much longer passage in which Osgood goes on at some length regarding his childhood as “a time of much more play than work, and the play almost always was merrily improvised, not organized by adults….In that innocent time, a soccer mom would have been a mother who played for Brazil. The lives of forties children weren’t organized as if they were wee CEOs: The kids weren’t driven in any way, neither pressured to be superkids nor chauffeured from one activity to another by a mother hell-bent on admission to Harvard, perhaps by the time the child was six” (pp. 49-50). Similarly, Osgood later bemoans what he sees as the loss of "the kind of mental discipline that seems to have almost disappeared from the American grammar school, where the teachers are tenderly concerned with whether their students feel good. In a forties grammar school, as long as you didn't have scurvy, the way you felt was considerably less important than the way you thought" (p. 124). Such lengthy sermonizing, especially in a book that is only 139 pages long, is not helpful.
Like Osgood, I grew up in Maryland – though somewhat later in time, and in Montgomery County rather than Baltimore City. I enjoyed Defending Baltimore Against Enemy Attack as a memoir of a Maryland childhood, and as a look back at the World War II era. Osgood’s many fans are particularly likely to enjoy this book, especially if they share Osgood’s conservatism and his reverence for the past. Osgood even ends the book with one of his trademark songs, adapting an older pop song by providing a new set of lyrics that look back at his book’s content, just the way he might do at the end of an episode of CBS Sunday Morning. If such an approach to life and history sounds good to you, then read and enjoy. If not, then Osgood will see you on the radio.
Osgood, a radio and television journalist long associated with CBS, looks back on A Boyhood Year During World War II (the book’s subtitle) with a definite sense of nostalgia – something that will be no surprise to regular viewers of CBS News’ Sunday Morning feature program, for which Osgood as host always wears a bowtie that seems to signal his appreciation for the values of earlier times. Osgood admits that this look back to his sixty-years-gone Baltimore boyhood is likely to be somewhat nostalgic – “memory has a built-in sugarcoater, and childhood is seen through the cotton candy of time” – but then insists that “I have always been certain that there was a genuine sweetness to the days when I was nine years old and the country was united in winning the last good war, if there could have been such a thing” (pp. 2-3). The sepia-toned cover photograph of Osgood as a boy reinforces that sense of nostalgia.
Osgood provides engaging details from his childhood in Baltimore – listening to radio programs like The Shadow in those pre-TV days; going with his father to Memorial Stadium to watch the old minor-league Baltimore Orioles, “a Triple-A team that often played Double-A ball” (p. 45); running away from home with his sister, only to end up at the Ambassador movie house watching Holiday Inn; responding to anxiety about an upcoming church organ performance by unplugging the organ; debating with a friend the relative merits of reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in its original version (took Osgood a week) versus reading The Hunchback of Notre Dame in its Classic Comics version (took Osgood’s friend ten minutes). Such passages recall the avuncular tone of Osgood’s broadcasts for his Osgood File radio program, and they do well at capturing the long days of childhood, summer days when time seems to stretch out without limit, toward a horizon where life and childhood somehow go on forever. The photographs that Osgood includes, both from his own family's life and from the larger history of World War II, are also helpful.
My chief reservation regarding this fun little book relates to the way in which Osgood tends to use his reverence for the past to suggest that the past was somehow better than the present, as when he talks about differing attitudes toward childhood and play in the 1940’s vis-à-vis the 2000’s. It was clever, for example, when Osgood made fun of the modern practice of parents arranging “play dates” for their children by writing that “we never had a ‘play date.’ A play date was any date that you played. My play dates were 1939 to 1950” (p. 50). Witty, and well-stated: point taken. Unfortunately, that clever bit of phraseology is part of a much longer passage in which Osgood goes on at some length regarding his childhood as “a time of much more play than work, and the play almost always was merrily improvised, not organized by adults….In that innocent time, a soccer mom would have been a mother who played for Brazil. The lives of forties children weren’t organized as if they were wee CEOs: The kids weren’t driven in any way, neither pressured to be superkids nor chauffeured from one activity to another by a mother hell-bent on admission to Harvard, perhaps by the time the child was six” (pp. 49-50). Similarly, Osgood later bemoans what he sees as the loss of "the kind of mental discipline that seems to have almost disappeared from the American grammar school, where the teachers are tenderly concerned with whether their students feel good. In a forties grammar school, as long as you didn't have scurvy, the way you felt was considerably less important than the way you thought" (p. 124). Such lengthy sermonizing, especially in a book that is only 139 pages long, is not helpful.
Like Osgood, I grew up in Maryland – though somewhat later in time, and in Montgomery County rather than Baltimore City. I enjoyed Defending Baltimore Against Enemy Attack as a memoir of a Maryland childhood, and as a look back at the World War II era. Osgood’s many fans are particularly likely to enjoy this book, especially if they share Osgood’s conservatism and his reverence for the past. Osgood even ends the book with one of his trademark songs, adapting an older pop song by providing a new set of lyrics that look back at his book’s content, just the way he might do at the end of an episode of CBS Sunday Morning. If such an approach to life and history sounds good to you, then read and enjoy. If not, then Osgood will see you on the radio.
February 14, 2017
A short, lovely book about a precocious nine year old boy during 1942 in Baltimore (the author). Very nice read. I had a smile on my face all the way through.
November 11, 2022
Reminiscences of the author's 9th year in 1942. A happy kid with a carefree childhood.
April 28, 2023
Sweet book if a stroll down 1940s memory lane is what the reader is looking for. From radio programs, films, Baltimore neighborhoods are the focus.
May 25, 2025
Sweet, funny, charming, delightful - and more. At times laugh out loud funny and always upbeat and honest. Just like Charles Osgood is/was. Super-highly recommended.
March 8, 2017
This book had nothing to do with the title.
It is his 1 year life as a nine year old and it just happened to be 1942. That is about it. His story is really hey this is what happened to me when I was 9...lame.
The writing is bad, I mean bad. I can't believe he won awards in the past on his writings... It seems like he wrote this when he was 9 or 12.
Just a waste of time.
It is his 1 year life as a nine year old and it just happened to be 1942. That is about it. His story is really hey this is what happened to me when I was 9...lame.
The writing is bad, I mean bad. I can't believe he won awards in the past on his writings... It seems like he wrote this when he was 9 or 12.
Just a waste of time.
May 21, 2014
Charles Osgood Wood wrote this memoir about when he was 9 years old in 1942. He remembers life when America was newly into World War II. He paints a picture of childhood in Baltimore. Delivering newspapers, school, victory gardens, neighborhood kids, baseball, radio programs. My parents are about his age and would have had similar thoughts and experiences, in a more rural sort of way. I enjoyed learning about life in the early 40's from his perspective. It helped me understand some of the stories I heard from my folks. I listened to it on CD. It is a fast listen, and Charles read his own story in his inimitable radio style. I would recommend it.
January 22, 2012
This is a short and easy read memoir of life in the early 1940s, the war years. Osgood reminisces about his favorite sport, baseball; quirky commercial jingles; radio programs; Catholic school; music; and,flights of imagination. Probably more meaningful to people of that generation who can recall some of these same memories; but, appealing to those who yearn for a simpler, pre-technology lifestyle.
January 13, 2013
My father loved this book. He's nearly blind, and he listens to many audiobooks provided for the blind though the Agency for the Blind. I read it because I love him. Charles Osgood was a child somewhat in the same time period my dad was a child. Some of the memories that Osgood had were also memories that my dad had. It was short, fun and easy to read. I especially liked being able to talk with my dad about those memories.
August 29, 2007
I liked it, my mother liked it and my daughter liked it. The books on tape version is great if you like to hear Charles Osgood speak (I do). He brings to life an age so different from this one, but so believable that my teen-age daughter dropped her cynicism for curiosity (a miracle). Also short enough to hear completely in one 4 hour journey.
May 25, 2011
This book is about Charles Osgood's memories of being a 9 year old boy during the World War II years. He was a happy, quirky young man who had a close relationship with his family. There are tales of going to a Catholic school (where he got into trouble more than once), of giving his mother fits at times and of his love of learning and music. It was a delightful read.
February 2, 2012
This book caught my eye because of the title. If Osgood had just written a memoir of the year when he was 9 (1942), it would have been a good read. Instead he made constant demeaning remarks comparing his 1942 year as a nine year old to kids' lives today. I finished it only because I cannot abandon a book!
August 19, 2008
This was a really cute book by Charles Osgood. He is the same age as my parents, and since I'm writing their personal histories, it helped me remember questions to ask them. I would recommend listening to this, as I enjoy the Osgood Files.
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June 28, 2011I was disappointed. I hoped to hear about Baltimore, but very little was specific to the city. The "kids these days" editorializing was unjustified. On the positive, the quality of reading was high, as you'd expect.
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