As a four-year-old when World War II began in 1941, my understanding of the enormity of it all escaped me. I was busy perusing comic books at the time, intrigued by Superman jumping tall buildings in a single bound. It was his “bounding,” I’m thinking, that caused my lingering gazes at real skyscrapers a few years later during my first visits to Waco and Fort Worth. During my pre-school years, our lone “skyscraper” in Brownwood was the tallest building I had ever seen. With 12 stories and 216 rooms, Hotel Brownwood seemed to scrape the sky on days when clouds hung low.