This summer, I replaced some rotting wood siding on my 1910 worker’s cottage. Finding an old newspaper in the wall was a reminder of how inflation, lack of affordable housing, and race relations were issues in Chicago then as much as today.
Now the village code requires house wrap, a thin plastic weather barrier such as Tyvek, under clapboard siding. But in the old days, contractors used tar paper for wind and moisture resistance.
And sometimes, as at my house, a poor man’s sheathing was a newspaper.
That’s what I found under my rotting siding, a newspaper dated June 10, 1946. It turned out to be a time capsule of stories about life in Chicago in the immediate post-World War II period.
Most stories focused on the disruptions caused by returning soldiers after WWII ended. In the 1940s, Oak Park’s population was 66,000, higher than today’s 54,000. People had doubled up in existing housing, especially before the suburban building boom took off later in the decade.
So in 1946, the owner of my little worker’s cottage subdivided her small single-family home into a two-flat. She was Alma Banthin, a longtime employee of Frank Lloyd Wright’s family as nanny and cook.
Banthin divided the house so that a tenant could live in a one-bedroom apartment on the first floor. She moved into three small rooms on the second floor. Her unit had no bathroom or kitchen. She cooked on a hot plate and shared the downstairs bathroom with her tenants.
She also added a screened porch off the back of the house — where I found the newspaper in the wall.
A 1946 editorial cartoon featured a worried-looking chicken sitting on a “savings nest egg” which was being shrunk by post-war inflation. An editorial titled, “Housing by Spasm,” criticized then-Chicago Mayor Ed Kelly for suspending construction of 3,000 units of temporary housing for returning soldiers unless the federal government picked up more of the costs.
The editorial said, “Nothing can justify the spasmodic planless manner in which the city has plunged forward and reared backward” on its housing plan.
There were advertisements about real estate lots for sale in a new suburb called LaGrange Park. “Select your site now. Build your home later.”
And race relations were in the news. An article said that the first repercussions were felt from a new U.S. Supreme Court decision holding that a Virginia law requiring racially separate seating did not apply to interstate bus travel.
The plaintiff had been represented by an attorney, and later U.S. Supreme Court Justice, named Thurgood Marshall. The article described how 23 white army draftees would not ride in a Greyhound bus with black passengers who refused to give up their seats.
We may see the turmoil and issues of our day as unique. News clippings in a wall tell a different story.