Maj. Gen. Philip Hayes of the Army's Third Service Command appealed to the strikers to go back to work.

"Production of radar equipment, heavy artillery, heavy trucks, incendiary bombs, flamethrowers, and many other critical items needed by our fighting men is being held up because of the inability of Philadelphia war workers to get to their factories and workbenches," he said in a statement published in the papers.

But the strikers wouldn't budge. The Inquirer excoriated their action, not so much for its racism as for its lack of patriotism.

On the third night of the walkout, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the Army to take control of the Philadelphia Transportation Co.'s 1,932 streetcars, 564 buses, and 59 trackless trolleys, plus the Broad Street Subway and Market-Frankford El.

Five thousand troops on their way to France were rerouted to Philadelphia. Three thousand others from Camp Pickett, Va., were called in.

Fifty years later, in 1994, William Barber of Southwest Philadelphia, one of the eight black drivers, could still remember his astonishment at what had happened.

The transit workers had been striking, Barber recalled, "because of me."

Roosevelt mourned

In 1945, Roosevelt was in his fourth term and had been in the White House for more than 12 years, guiding his country through the Depression and to within 31/2 weeks of German surrender.

Reporting his death from a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945, fell to William C. Murphy Jr., of The Inquirer's Washington Bureau.

"President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died today and Vice President Harry S. Truman succeeded to the office of Chief Executive and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the Nation at war," he wrote.

FDR had been president since 1933. His had been the confident, jaunty voice in radio "fireside chats" that had lifted American spirits during the Depression. He had voiced his country's anger after Pearl Harbor and had prayed with the nation on D-Day. And now, so close to victory, he was gone.

The anguish, here and nationally, almost pushed the war out of the newspapers.

At 2 a.m. April 15, when Roosevelt's funeral train passed through Philadelphia en route to his family home in Hyde Park, N.Y., tens of thousands of mourners lined the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks along the way.

At 30th Street, 5,000 people waited to glimpse the train as it rolled through. For safety, police closed the stairway to the platform.

"But still they came," The Inquirer wrote, "tumbling off trolley cars which halted in front of the Market Street entrance, alighting from automobile after automobile in the driveway to the west, and converging upon the terminal on foot."

Like Abraham Lincoln, Roosevelt seemed a martyr. The war, which had broken so many, had broken him, too.

Tolls large, and small

For more than three years, one of the biggest stories of World War II had been taking place in complete secret.

On Aug. 6, 1945, the White House announced that the United States had exploded an atomic bomb. Inquirer reporter John C. O'Brien in Washington struggled to make sense of the little information given to the press.