Source H: This is a quotation taken from an interview with Mike Royko, who became a journalist in Chicago.I was nine years old when the war started. It was a typical Chicago working-class neighborhood. It was predominantly Slavic, Polish. . . . In those days they put out extras. I remember the night the newsboys came through the neighborhood. . . . Germany had invaded Poland: ’39. It was the middle of the night, my mother and father waking. People going out in the streets in their bathrobes to buy the papers. In our neighborhood with a lot of Poles, it was a tremendous story.Suddenly you had a flagpole. And a marker. Name went on the marker, guys from the neighborhood who were killed. Our neighborhood was decimated. There were only kids, older guys, and women. Suddenly I saw something I hadn’t seen before. My sister became Rosie the Riveter. She put a bandanna on her head every day and went down to this organ company that had been converted to war work. There was my sister in slacks. It became more than work. There was a sense of mission about it. Her husband was Over There. . . .There was the constant idea that you had to be doing something to help. It did filter down to the neighborhood: home-front mobilization. We had a block captain. . . .The world was very simple. I saw Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo: those were the villains. We were the good guys. . . .What can you learn from the Royko quotation?
