It was 1942. The rush to the suburbs that made Warwick one of the fastest growing towns in the country was more than 10 years away. Farms dotted the city and neighborhoods like Conimicut, Cole Farm and Oakland Beach were predominately seasonal communities.

Yet Warwick had its industry. The mills of Apponaug, Pontiac and Hillsgrove were still operational and one – the Elizabeth Mill – that will soon fall to the wrecking ball, even played a role in World War II. The distinctive mill tower, that the city had hoped to save as a signature building and link to Warwick’s industrial history, was used to look out for German bombers and monitor training flights from the nearby Hillsgrove Airport, later named for Senator Theodore Francis Green.

“It was the highest place around,” said Graham Mann.

Mann came to the Beacon office Friday with a letter and a framed award that had been presented to his mother, Virginia Coddington Mann. (The middle name, explains Mann, is an effort to preserve the historic lineage of the family. The Manns are direct descendants of Roger Williams, Samuel Gorton and William Coddington, the first governor of Rhode Island.)

But Mann hadn’t come to talk about family roots, or growing up on Holmes Road in Lakewood, and we got around to Virginia and her work as a volunteer of the Air Force, which prompted the citation given to her.

Mann said stories about the mill and it coming down brought back memories to when he was a boy of 12 and 13. The war was gearing up and, in a small way, Mann played a part in it because of his mother and the time she spent in the Mill tower. It made him the surrogate mother for his sister, Jocelyn, who was nine years younger.

“We were like joined at the hip,” says Mann.

Jocelyn would join Mann and his friends when they played football or baseball in their fenced-in yard, although, at three years old, she wasn’t a player. He put her in a basket with a pillow to go places on his bicycle. She was by his side for the daily chore of lining everything up for dinner; from putting potatoes in the unlit oven to putting the sausages in the pan; and setting the table so that everything was ready to cook when his parents returned home.

Mann’s bond with his sister was formed in those years. He remembers when he started dating and Jocelyn would insist on coming along. On more than one occasion, he recounts with a laugh, she demanded to sit between him and his date at the movies.

During the war, Airport Road was still called Occupastuxet Road and it was blocked at either end with sandbags and machine guns. The airport was the base for squadron of planes and training was a part of the mission.

From the mill tower, there was a clear view of the airfield and the surrounding area. Mann said his mother worked every day at her post in the tower. It was open to the weather and she worked with two or three other spotters, each taking a quadrant to scan.

The fear was that the Germans could launch an attack from carriers offshore. The observatory was a good place to monitor training operations. One day, his mother returned from her watch to report they had seen one of the training flights go down.

Mann said the family never had much money but he wouldn’t trade anything for growing up in Warwick. He was into sports, especially football, and he and his friends would have pickup games in the yard. The ball didn’t always stay in the yard and sometimes ended up across the street, in the yard of a grumpy man who would call police. After two or three visits, the police stopped coming, but that didn’t diminish the neighbor’s complaints. One Halloween, Mann and his friends finally took their revenge. They filled their pockets with beans and armed themselves with their bean shooters and procured a very long rope. Then in darkness, they circled the house with the rope, tying the doors shut. They stationed themselves around the house and started shooting beans at the windows. As soon as the man came to one window, they would stop and start peppering a window on the other side of the house. After discovering he couldn’t open the doors, the neighbor escaped through the basement, but by then Mann and his friends had climbed into the upper branches of a huge oak, choking back their laughs as their victim yelled epithets and searched the yard for his tormentors.

Mann remembers his father, Charles, who worked as a supervisor at the Wansuck Mill, delighted to bring home a Christmas tree and then discovering it was too big to get into the house. The tree ended up at the Lakewood Baptist Church. During the summer, they went swimming at Arnold’s Pond, but only until Aug. 1. A spring-fed pond with no draining stream or brook, it was feared the waters could be the source of polio. In the winter, it was not uncommon for police to cordon off hilly streets so kids could go sliding.

After graduating from Aldrich High School, Mann attended the Rhode Island College of Pharmacy and Allied Sciences in Providence. He married Barbara his last year in college.

The day of the wedding, Mann questioned whether it was going to happen. His friend Thomas Duckworth, who went on to become fire chief, agreed to pick Barbara up in Pawtucket but he got lost and delivered Barbara to the church almost an hour late.

Soon after graduating, Mann was drafted as an Army medic. Although stationed in Texas, he did make it home for the birth of their first child by hitchhiking. On one trip, he lucked out. He got a flight from Louisiana to New Jersey after a couple of sergeants from a nearby air base went out of their way to get him aboard.

After completing his Army tour, Mann worked for Liggett Drug for five years, then moving on to drug sales, where he could make more money. On the side, he moonlighted in a Woonsocket pharmacy, with that money being saved for family vacations.

Mann’s wife and sister are now deceased, although, from his accounts, they are very alive in his memory.

So, too, his mother and her devotion to watching over this country from a tower built in the 1870s at a mill named for Elizabeth, the wife of industrialist Thomas Jefferson Hill.