'Home Front Girl': 7 stories from a real WWII-era diary

Listening to President Roosevelt on the radio, going to the theater to see some movie called "Citizen Kane" – Joan Wehlen Morrison's diary, kept between 1937 and 1943, gives readers insight into the daily life of a girl living on the home front in the United States during World War II. Here are seven of the stories from "Home Front Girl," recently published by Morrison's daughter, Susan Signe Morrison.

(Excerpted from "Home Front Girl" by Joan Wehlen Morrison. Copyright Chicago Review Press, November 2012)

1. May 6, 1937

"The German zeppelin Von Hindenburg crashed not three hours ago at Lakehurst, New Jersey. That great new sister ship to the Graf Zeppelin!! Just burnt up like that.... The Herald Examiner said 100 people were killed, but as it's a Hearst paper, 50 is a safer guess. They always exaggerate!" [The death toll of the Hindenburg disaster was actually 36 people.]

1 of 7

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.