The Boston Globe Magazine
By 1944, Emma Bushee’s sons were serving on six continents. At home, she waited for their letters – and tried to pray them home safe.
On Mother’s Day 1945, World War II was still raging in the Pacific. The flag proudly hanging in Emma Bushee’s living room window in Melrose displayed eight blue stars, one for each son serving in the United States military. She’d arranged framed portraits of each of them above her fireplace — they stretched the width of the mantel. On the wall in the front room, she’d hung a photograph of her hero, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had died the previous month.
The Bushee family lived in a modest, three-story rental at 40 Main Street, not far from the tracks of the Boston & Maine Railroad. Emma and her husband, Charles, were French-speaking immigrants from Nova Scotia, where they had grown up in poor fishing villages. In Melrose, they were parents to a sprawling family of 12 sons and three daughters.
Charles worked as an industrial plumber at the Monsanto Chemical Company plant in Everett, steadily pulling the Bushees up the economic ladder. Then the Great Depression struck, and the older sons dropped out of school to work in factories, bringing paychecks home to help their parents.
By 1940, no one could ignore the newspaper headlines about the war in Europe, and America instituted its first peacetime draft. On a cool morning that October, the four eldest Bushee sons — Will, Ernie, Tommy, and Ray — walked the mile from their home to Melrose City Hall to register with draft board No. 99. All four drew high lottery numbers that made service unlikely, and Emma must have been relieved. But in just over a year, everything would change.
Dawn in Melrose on Sunday, December 7, 1941, broke sunny and cold. Emma, then 52, began the day as usual in the kitchen — her proud domain — wearing her flowered apron as she prepared breakfast. Charles, 59, was looking forward to a leisurely day off from work. It was the last peaceful morning America would enjoy for four years.
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