Daily Life & Culture
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Daily Life & CultureThe Deciding Vote
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 -
Daily Life & CultureWe Cannot Sell New Dunlop Tires!
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 -
Daily Life & CultureSimply Out of Luck
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 -
Daily Life & CultureAn Example to Servicemen
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 -
Daily Life & CultureSeventeen Allowed to Purchase Tires
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 -
Daily Life & CultureA Day for Mourning as Well as for Thanksgiving
In November 1942 a New York Yiddish daily printed a column in English on its front page. It said the extermination of the Jews of Europe was underway, and that it had been checked. Elsewhere the same news ran as a letter to the editor.
Source · Der Tog (The Day), November 25, 1942, p. 1
