By Nick Higgins
The life of John Kerrigan started in 1938 when he was born in Liverpool two years before the start of WWII. His father, who sailed ships from Liverpool to New York, was very sick when the war started and never fully recovered. John remembered as a small child the excitement of the war. His biggest memory as a kid was when his dad dug eight feet into the ground and built a shelter in case of a bomb hitting them. He remembered looking up out of the shelter with his dad standing at the top with his rifle and a red sky behind him, with bombers flying over and spotlights everywhere. John counted the buildings that had fallen over on the way to school everyday hoping his school had fallen over. One day his wish was answered: his school had fallen over, but instead of being “school-free” he had to transfer to another school.
During a big part of his childhood John saw the U.S. military with all of their troops and tanks. During WWII there were scarce supplies; they only got to eat a certain amount of food a day. A great deal of children lived on the streets because they thought it was better to live on the streets than get poorly fed and beaten by their parents. John’s friends stole from stores when he was a kid because they didn’t have enough money to buy the things they wanted. Once he stole too, just to show them he wasn’t a coward, but then he returned what he had stolen to the shelves.
John Kerrigan became an engineer. During that time period you weren’t given a choice of what job you wanted; you just had to live with what you got. His life changed with technology. He was so interested in the computer that he wanted to write a book using it. Although he didn’t have very much interest in history when he was a child, he decided to write history books because he had lived the history. One of the books that he wrote was The Gateway to America. John Kerrigan retired at the age of 69, but he still spends his time uncovering untold tales about the history of Liverpool and its people.
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