Digital History
Wartime Childhood in Chicago
Digital History ID 4145

Author:   William Tuttle
Date:

Annotation: Historian William Tuttle, Jr., remembers his wartime childhood in Detroit.


Document: When we were not playing war in the side lot, we were doing so on the playground of the Peter Vetal School, three blocks from my home [in Detroit]. At Vetal, there was a deep division between the middle class children and the working class children. In large part, we in the middle class lived on one side of the school, while blue collar families, including recent arrivals from the southern Appalachians, lived on the other side. I got to know Tommy Fields, whose family had moved to Detroit from Kentucky. We were in the same class, and I visited his house on the other side of the school; I do not think he ever visited mine, but I never thought about it at the time.

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