During the WWII years, there was no television, mega sports, big automobiles, or manicured lawns. There was instead radio, movies, high school sports, the Clinton Industrial Baseball League, where men too young or too old to go to war played for the fun of it. Clintonians had victory gardens instead of manicured lawns, drove old jalopies because Detroit was making tanks and jeeps for the war, and no new cars, took the bus, or rode their bicycles to work. It was a time when the four faces of the magnificent Clinton County Courthouse clock chimed on the half hour, and threw a metaphorical shadow over young people's lives. This made certain they would not be late for meals made from victory garden staples. The courthouse neighborhood had most stay-at-home mothers in two-parent families. Few parents managed to get beyond grammar school, nearly all worked in Clinton, Iowa's factories or on the railroad. Divorce was as foreign as an ancestral language. It was a time in hot weather that people slept with their families in Riverview Park, left windows open, doors unlocked, bicycles on the side of the house, and if they had automobiles, keys in the car, knowing neither neighbor or stranger would disturb their possessions. In winter, schools never closed, even when snow banks were four feet high. This is a narrative snapshot with core neighborhood activities of young people against the backdrop of the Clinton County Courthouse, St. Patrick's School, Riverview Stadium, downtown Clinton and uptown Lyons, Bluff Boulevard, Hoot Owl Hollow, Mount St. Clare College, Mill Creek, Beaver Slough, Joyce Slough, the churches, schools and hospitals throughout the city, U. S. Army's Schick General Hospital, which brought the war to this place, tending battlefield casualties, the USO, Chicago & North Western Railway, Clinton Foods, Dupont, and many other industrial work places, which were working hard toward the war effort as seen through the impressionistic eyes of the author as a boy from eight to thirteen.