Three days before Pearl Harbor, the Waterbury chapter of the America First Committee sent a delegation to Hartford to hear Senator Nye argue against the war. Twelve days later it voted itself out of existence and gave its treasury to the local boys already in uniform. The papers recorded the reversal almost day by day.
Five weeks before the President wrote that he hoped night games could be extended, the commissioner of baseball had personally cast the deciding vote against them. The letter was addressed to him — and he called the meeting that would decide how far the leagues would go.
Source · Evening Star, December 11, 1941, p. 2
On New Year's Day 1942 the government stopped the sale of new automobiles. The Evening Star carried the alarm on its front page the next day and sent readers inside for the order itself — where three Washington dealers counted up what it would cost them, and the paper set out the wrong order.
Source · Evening Star, January 2, 1942, p. 1
Congress gave one city statutory rent control a month before it gave the country the power to impose it. The day the District's office opened, the first complainant heard was a registered nurse who said her landlady had turned off the heat. Nearly seven hundred people reached the office before the day was out.
Source · Evening Star, December 17, 1941, p. 1
Washington adopted an air-raid warning in December 1941. The next day's test barely drew notice; ten days later wardens still couldn't hear the sirens. The Evening Star had predicted the problem before the first blast.
Source · Evening Star, December 12, 1941, p. 25
Before sugar, there were tires. Days after Pearl Harbor, Washington froze new-tire sales. What followed appeared in dealer ads, empty shops, congressional hearings and classifieds as Americans discovered what rationing actually meant.
Source · Evening Star, December 12, 1941, p. 63
On July 6, 1944, the Ringling Brothers big top caught fire in Hartford in the middle of a Thursday matinee. The papers counted 146 dead the next morning and 168 by late September; state police at the morgue estimated that two-thirds of the dead were children. The State Armory held them, an Army air base sent doctors and blood plasma, and five circus officials were arrested within a day. When the year ended the trial had been put over to the January term, the fire marshal's and the coroner's investigations still unfinished.
Source · The Evening Star, July 7, 1944, p. 3
In 1945 the Willow Run bomber plant emptied. The government interviewed nearly all seventeen thousand workers on their way out; then, in the columnist's word, they melted away. When the plant came back in 1946 as the Kaiser-Frazer automobile works, the story had names — two industrialists, a banker, a magazine, fifty-three million dollars. This is the gap between what a place remembers by name and what it remembers by the thousand.
Source · The Ypsilanti Daily Press, March 2, 1946, p. 5
In the winter of 1944 the East Hartford Gazette reported that a boom town could not buy cigarettes. There was no ration book for them, so the shortage went by advantage — connections, cash, standing — and the clerk behind the counter decided who counted as a regular. The war workers who had come to build the airplanes were, the paper wrote, simply out of luck.
Source · The East Hartford Gazette, December 15, 1944, p. 1
In 1945, with the major leagues emptied by the draft, the St. Louis Browns brought up a one-armed outfielder. The sportswriters called Pete Gray an example to wounded servicemen, a gate attraction worth touring, a one-armed star. Across roughly two dozen pages in sixteen papers, over two seasons, Gray himself speaks once — two words, to a child.
Source · Detroit Evening Times, June 16, 1945, p. 18
On May 5, 1945, a woman and five children were killed near Bly, Oregon, by a Japanese balloon bomb. The country had not been told the balloons existed. Seventeen days later, the government lifted the ban and told it everything.
Source · The Daily Alaska Empire, May 31, 1945, p. 1
On the night of February 24–25, 1942, Los Angeles fired hundreds of anti-aircraft shells at the sky for an hour. The next morning the wire told the country it had beaten off waves of Japanese planes. Then the Navy said false alarm and the War Department said fifteen aircraft. The fear was real; the enemy was not.
Source · The Waterbury Democrat, February 25, 1942, p. 1
Washington's rationing rules decided who was essential enough to buy a tire — a physician, a food truck, and, after February 1942, a minister. The rules did not make tires. In two counties, unpaid neighbors sat where the widening list of the essential met the shrinking supply, and decided who got them.
Source · The Wilmington Morning Star, May 31, 1942, p. 7 Browse all 28 in the CollectionOne home-front story from the archive, told from the source. In your inbox.