Only Through the Innocence of Children…

July 6, 2012 by  
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Our friends at HistoryBuff.com recently posted a newsletter which included an article regarding an early 20th century newsboy.  Please enjoy!

Only Through the Innocence of Children
A Memoir of a Newsboy in 1939

The following is a personal memoir of Stanleigh Nettleton written in 1987. Unfortunately, he died a number of years ago – but his memoir lives on!

About 1939 I was working the complaint desk on the Chicago Herald-American one Sunday morning. The complaint desk was simply where people call in that missed their paper and I would call the branch manager and he would send a kid over there with another paper. However, it was also the message center for 7 district managers and 91 branch managers who were supervising 3000 carriers delivering over 100,000 home delivery papers in Chicago.

About 6:30 I got a call from Freddy, the branch manager in 158. He called in and simply said, “The boss is looking for me, tell him I’ll call him when I get back. I just got a call from Austin Avenue Police Station that they are holding a couple of my kids out there, so I am going out there now to see what the beef is.”

Well, about 8:30 Freddy calls and he says, “I’m back and everything is OK.” I asked “What about the kids the cops picked up?” He says, “Well, that’s a long story. I’ll tell you Tuesday when I come in the office.”

Come noon Tuesday Freddy comes over to the desk and says, “Let’s go eat.” As we ate lunch Freddy tells me about the carriers.

Out on Wilcox Avenue in Chicago’s West Side there was this big apartment building that was entirely occupied by Jewish families. In one of these apartments was an old Jewish fellow who managed to flee the Gestapo and came to live with his son in Chicago. One Sunday morning the father goes out into the hall to pick up the paper and as he turns to come back in the apartment, he freezes with fear, for right in the center of the door was a big “X” mark made from white chalk. This was exactly the way the Gestapo would mark the houses in Germany when they took the Jews away to the concentration camps.

He finally stopped shaking enough to go in… (Unfortunately the original link to this story is no longer active. -If anyone can find an online printing of the story, please let us know and we will update the link.)

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Comments

2 Responses to “Only Through the Innocence of Children…”

  1. Arnold Moore on February 16th, 2024 8:58 pm

    My great uncle was the author of this memoir. I’m very interested in seeing all of it. Unfortunately, the link to the full document is broken. Is there any way I could access the entire thing?

  2. GuyHeilenman on March 12th, 2024 8:52 am

    I am very sorry. I have done a fair amount of searching in an effort to locate another link but have yet to be successful. If you ever find a copy of the memoir, we’d be appreciative if you would pass it along.

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