When my grandmother passed away in the mid 1980’s, I was tasked with my nearby relatives to clean out the house and prepare it for selling, a job that’s taken on by many families across the country through the years. It’s part of life.

My grandfather was an admiral in the Navy and on both sides of the family, we had many links to the military, so the house just outside of Old Town Alexandria was full of Navy memorabilia. As we cleaned out closets and divided up some of the things, everything had a touch of military.

I was down in the basement in a musty closet, clearing old glassware off one of the shelves when I noticed an old newspaper being used as a shelf covering. I cleared the dust off and saw the headline: 250,000 NAZI CHUTISTS PERIL EGYPT, it read. It was a newspaper they brought from their last residence in San Diego called The San Diego Union, dated June 23, 1942. I was amazed at this gripping artifact, but other family members, not so much. “What do you want that for?” they asked, as I tucked it away.

At that point in the war, June 1942, Germany had momentum and things looked pretty bleak on the warfront for our country. Rationing was impacting everyone, people were dying on the battlefield, and the United States had a war in the Pacific too, so everyone was involved. My grandfather had been an officer with a ship in Pearl Harbor when it was bombed 6 months earlier, so after that, they moved to San Diego and read The San Diego Union for their news.

The rest of the front page was covered with WWII news. Other items included a story on paratroopers in Italy, the Royal Air Force bombing German General Erwin Rommel, the Japanese launching some shells into Oregon and the war on the Russian front where 10 million Germans were killed. There is a photo on the front page of a soldier in Oregon talking to two young children who had a piece of a Japanese artillery shell that landed near their house. The cutline read “Donna Jean Heffling, 3, is shown handing to Col. Carl S. Doney a piece of shell fired by an enemy sub off Oregon. Her sister Jean, 9, looks on. The shell burst near their home. (A.P. wirephoto)”. What happened to Donna Jean and her little sister? Who knows.

At that time, a paper cost five cents, and the Sunday edition was 10 cents. How things have changed, not only in cost but style of writing and formatting.

I found this newspaper at my grandmother’s house 40 years ago and kept this bit of history through several moves, hanging it on my office wall from location to location. It’s world history woven into family history with a touch of newspaper history all wrapped into one.

Is The San Diego Union still around? Yes, surprisingly, but somewhere along the way it must have merged with a paper known as “The Tribune” so now this San Diego local daily is “The San Diego Union-Tribune.” In today’s dwindling newspaper world, that’s a good thing.

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