Just as it is difficult to avoid news of the economy, war in Ukraine and tensions with China and Russia in 2022, the same could be said of news locally with World War II during 1942.
Oftentimes, entertainment parallels the news of the day, and that was true in Oneonta. Starting in late July and into early August, the war theme came to the Oneonta area.
A full page of “news” and advertisements was seen in The Oneonta Star’s July 31 edition, devoted to a new movie, “Mrs. Miniver.”
“A story of high courage, devotion and abiding faith is M-G-M’s ‘Mrs. Miniver,’ screen adaptation of Jan Struther’s novel, in which Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon are teamed. It is a story of an English woman of the middle classes and her family facing the terror of war on the home front and carrying on life with valor in the face of air raids, attacks, grief and peril.”
Interestingly, Greer Garson visited Oneonta in 1952 to promote Hollywood movies playing at the time. Garson and other Hollywood stars had lunch at the New Windsor Coffee Shop at 48 Chestnut St., where NBT Bank is today. That coffee shop was 10 years old, as it opened on Aug. 11, 1942, as advertised in The Star.
While “Mrs. Miniver” was popular, real life news was happening on the Oneonta home front.
As The Star of Aug. 26 reported, “With the war only eight months old, Oneonta has already sent more men into service than it did during the entire World War I, Edwin R. Moore told the Kiwanis club in a talk on ‘Oneontans in Service,’ at Hotel Oneonta yesterday noon.
“Frederic Snyder of Kingston, well known traveler and lecturer, a guest of Dr. Albert E. Fitzelle at the meeting, speaking briefly, declared ‘This is not going to be a short war, it will last at least four or five years yet.’ He said that even after the major engagements have been ended, there will be 60 or 70 ‘little wars’ all over the globe.
“Pointing out the significance of words with nine letters … Mr. Snyder said that the nine letter word needed now is offensive, and that so far, ‘America is fighting this war with her little finger rather than her whole fist.’
“Still another nine letter word needed, he said, is sacrifice, but most of all is Christian, ‘as this is a contest between the iron cross and the wooden cross.’”
Sacrifice was a word being used locally, as residents were finding old scrap metal, paper and other materials, to be given toward the war effort. However, as Star readers found out on Aug. 11, there was a bit of a tiff going on between federal and city officials.
“Pointing out that the cost to the city for removal would be more than ten times the scrap value of the metals to be recovered, Mayor Daniel Franklin yesterday declined on behalf of the city a formal WPB (War Production Board) request that rails abandoned in city streets be recovered to support the war effort.” Oneonta covered over its trolley tracks when that service ended in the 1920s.
Mayor Franklin said the cost to remove the rails was $42,000 — at taxpayer expense, but the WPB was unaware of this. Oneonta’s response, it was reported said, “Mayor Franklin, in his letter, assured the WPB that ‘Oneonta is ready and willing to make any justifiable contribution to the war effort, and offers to make available all of the rails to any government agency which wants to take responsibility for the removal and the restoration of our streets.’”
The rails remained under the surface for decades to come, eventually being removed during street reconstruction projects.
On Wednesday, news of comings and goings in August 1977.
Oneonta City Historian Mark Simonson’s column appears twice weekly. On Saturdays, his column focuses on the area before 1950. His Wednesday columns address local history 1950 and later. If you have feedback or ideas about the column, write to him at The Daily Star, or email him at simmark@stny.rr.com. His website is www.oneontahistorian.com. His columns can be found at www.thedailystar.com/opinion/columns/.
