The story was then jumped on, big time, by Schmid's hometown papers. On April 10, The Inquirer sponsored a "hero parade" for Schmid, and thousands of cheering Philadelphians turned out.

The newspaper presented Schmid with a gold medal and a $1,000 check. It called the event "one of the most heartfelt tributes ever paid a man for extraordinary service to his country."

Anxious crowds

On the home front, the reborn factories and shipyards were going nonstop.

The bustling wartime economy was good for most local businesses, including the city's four daily newspapers: the Evening Bulletin, the Record, the Daily News, and The Inquirer.

The Inquirer, by war's end, was selling 1.1 million Sunday papers (at 12 cents apiece), and 547,000 papers (at 3 cents each) on weekdays.

With overtime and six-day weeks, workers saw more cash than ever before - with fewer ways to spend it. Gasoline and tires were rationed. So were coffee, sugar, and many other foodstuffs. Women could not find stockings to buy.

Philadelphians put up with the small sacrifices the war required. Only when red meat was to be rationed did people lose their patience.

On March 26, 1943, a few days before meat rationing was to go into effect, 1,000 people crowded outside the Lancaster County Farmers Market in Germantown an hour before it opened. Police had to keep order as customers jostled for the last scraps of beef and pork.

Come March 29, the start of actual rationing, the fridge was already bare. An Inquirer headline read: "Meat Ration Opened With No Meat Here."

One pleasure that persisted was going to a ball game. But even that experience was not immune from war jitters.

On June 23, 1943, as 8,000 fans sat in Shibe Park watching the Athletics play the Boston Red Sox, the dull roar of heavy bombing planes could be heard approaching from the south.

Air sirens went off, and the entire city quickly turned out the lights, plunging the stadium into darkness.

After a little while, the fans learned that it was an air-raid drill - the biggest civil defense exercise of the war, according to The Inquirer.

A strike at home

By midsummer 1944, Rome had been captured. Since the D-Day invasion of Normandy on June 6, almost one million men had landed in France. U.S. forces were advancing in the Pacific.

More than ever, industry needed to work at top speed.

Then came Philadelphia's great embarrassment of the war, a stain still remembered in the history of civil rights. On Aug. 1, the city's all-white transit operators walked off the job to protest the hiring of eight black men as trolley drivers.

Within hours, plants and shipyards felt the impact of absent workers.

There was fear of violence. At 3 p.m., Samuel ordered bars closed. The Phillies game was canceled, "to avoid the dangers incident to the assembly of any large crowd," as The Inquirer reported it.