Remember 1976? Oh, you don’t. Well, to be fair, nor does Chris Carr, since that was the year he was born. It was also the year the first Zaks American diner opened in Norfolk. And it was the year this Chevy van rolled off a production line in the USA. The fates of all three have been intertwined ever since. But actually there’s another date that is perhaps more important.
In 1942 the county of Norfolk became known as ‘Little America’, due to the influx of 50,000 American servicemen, many of them in the USAAF Eighth Air Force. They brought with them things wartime Brits had either never seen or had forgotten about: peanut butter, donuts, racial segregation, jitterbug, Coca-Cola, nylons, STDs and chewing gum among them.
Spread over 17 air bases in just Norfolk alone, this was a cultural invasion, albeit a fairly friendly one. By the end of the war they left behind some of that culture, although they also carried some back with them – it took two
