As it did all over America, World War II touched many families on North Euclid Avenue in Pittsburgh's East End. My friend Jackie Glover's dad, who couldn't swim, spent years on a destroyer.

Roy Pelkey, my neighbor across the street, served in the Airborne, then came home to be a tough Pittsburgh firefighter. Joe Rutledge came back from the South Pacific with an arm full of tattoos. My visiting uncles Bob and Arnie wore Navy and Army uniforms respectively.

Our good neighbor, Joe Michelotti, kept our rapt attention during evening porch chats recounting his experiences leading a range battalion across Europe. And my father filled a basement closet with lead mold battleships, destroyers and cruisers, and black Lucite airplane models that had been used to train naval spotters. I played with them until their paint wore off.

More ominous was the poster in that cache depicting a sailor at the end of a dock from which a rodent-caricatured Admiral Tojo crawled. Its headline warned, "The Slip of a Lip may Sink a Ship!" That war had been pervasive, all-encompassing, a worry to everyone every day. A frightening yet exulting time.

Korea was different, an orphan war -- hideous, no doubt, for those who served, but we were too busy watching Lucky Strike's "Your Hit Parade," "Captain Video" and "Ozzie and Harriet." As I remember, only Billy Edwards, our next-door neighbor, was called to fight -- mostly against the Chinese Communists who now, ironically, hold a preponderance of our country's debt.

Every once in a while, during that time in 1953, when a bunch of us were curb-sitting, someone would yell, "Ohhhh, let's play Movie Stars!" It was simple enough. One person would give out initials and a few hints, and everyone else would try to guess who the star was. The person who succeeded would then get to give out the next set of mystery initials.

I particularly remember one soft, cricket-stroked summer evening. We were sitting on the steps in front of Peggy Serky's house in the glow of a street light. One of the kids playing was a girl named Shirley who lived two doors up from the Serkys.

I found her blonde good looks very exciting, but she was an age-old 15 and I felt kind of dumb (read "inadequate") being around such a mature girl.

Shirley lived with her mother in a second-floor apartment. She hadn't seen her father in a long time, she said once, with an ache in her voice and a watering of her eyes. Her apartment was sad, too, and terribly temporary -- probably because they had moved around a lot.

Anyway, we were shouting out our guesses when we suddenly became aware of a soldier walking down the sidewalk toward us. (The Korean War had just ended.) He seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, and when he got close to us, the streetlight bouncing off his khaki uniform, he asked us if we knew where the Smiths lived.

Before we could say a thing, Shirley screamed, "DADDY!" and rushed into his arms, and they stood there hugging for as long as I guess it would take to start making up for all those separate years.

Shirley, her face aglow, introduced us to her father, and then they walked, arm in arm, toward her house. We returned, somewhat dazed, to the steps in front of Peggy's house. I remember we had a long and quite absurd argument about whether the patch on her father's sleeve was from the Tank Corps or Airborne or what, with some of us showing off the knowledge we had gleaned from wartime bubble gum cards that depicted armed forces insignias.

Our reduction of that scene to an argument about patches was, no doubt, like our reduction of all those movies we'd seen to a game about movie stars' initials. I suppose we were just too young to simply sit, silently, and appreciate a scene that was, as I think back on it, as poignant and dramatic as anything we had ever seen at the tiny Cameraphone, the classy Regent, the Sheridan Square, the flag-fronted Liberty, or the massive Enright Theater.

Looking for more from the Post-Gazette? Join PG+, our members-only web site. You'll get exclusive sports content, opinion, financial information, discounts from retailers and restaurants, and more. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.