Dodgers acquire pitcher; Barkley sent to St. Paul for Clay Smith – Vaughan doubts he will play next season
By John Drebinger
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Based on Roosevelt signing of bill ending Army ban – L-131 change necessary
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Lists variety of items; washing machines, electric appliances, nylons cited – building boom forecast
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Tower: 89,100,000-ton total is 70% greater than the combined Axis figure
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The Pittsburgh Press (December 31, 1943)
Yank and British armadas pound France; raid on Paris reported
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San Vittore declared in hands of 5th Army
By the United Press
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Walker overrules trial board recommendations to declare magazine is lewd
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Washington (UP) –
Senator Walter F. George (D-GA) proposed today that soldier vote legislation provide absentee ballots for nominating primaries as well as the general election.
Senator George, whose home state hopes to be the first to authorize ballots for members of the Armed Forces, told reporters he believed the entire question could be solved by the states except for transporting ballots around the world.
Five governors have called special sessions of legislatures to provide for soldiers’ votes and three others are planning such a call in the near future, a United Press survey has indicated.
The soldiers’ vote will also be considered at the regular sessions of seven other state legislatures early in 1944.
Survey shows Americans want to help starving even after war
By George Gallup, Director, American Institute of Public Opinion
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But ‘labor pains’ mount, with Russia serving as the ‘midwife’
By William Philip Simms, Scripps-Howard foreign editor
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By Mrs. Walter Ferguson
It’s a pleasure to say goodbye to 1943. Are all such fateful years of history so filled with heartaches? Anyway, for you and me there is only one logical New Year’s resolution – to resolve to be worthy of the boys who have died for us in the last 12 months.
Are we worthy when we think only of self at the food markets and shops? Or when we indulge in petty political bickering, or when we show intolerance, or let the small irritating human qualities hide the greatness of ordinary people?
For these boys who died were ordinary boys, from ordinary families. Peter and Bill and Tom grown a little taller – that’s all. They used to belong to the neighborhood gang. Mothers up and down the block yelled to them to stop teasing the cat or to wipe the mud off their shoes before stepping a foot in the house.
Yet those boys had within them the material of heroes. We couldn’t see it then any more than we can see the soul stuff of the people sitting next us on the bus. For great events are needed to bring forth greatness in human character. This year has proved that our men and women can stand any test. But it has proved also that many of those who stay home do not live so as to deserve those boys’ sacrifices.
Our scrambles after money and profits, our ration chiseling, our petty malices, ill become a people who have sent their boys out to fight for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Is it not true that while they give their life for our liberty, far too many home folks are concerned chiefly with the pursuit of happiness?
Aviation’s biggest job is still ahead, writer says
By Max Cook, Scripps-Howard staff writer
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Not 1944 in Central time yet 
lol
I’m a New Yorker. 
Many of us in the United States are observing this first day of the New Year as a day of prayer and reflection and are considering the deeper issues which affect us as part of the family of nations at a crucial moment in history. It is fitting on this day that we direct our thoughts to the concept of the United Nations which came into being on another and infinitely bleaker New Year’s Day two years ago.
It was but three weeks after Pearl Harbor that the Declaration by United Nations was promulgated at Washington. Twenty-six nations subscribed immediately, eight more have adhered subsequently, all pledging themselves to stand together in the struggle against common enemies.
Two years ago, the United Nations were on the defensive in every part of the world. Today we are on the offensive. The walls are closing in remorselessly on our enemies. Our armed forces are gathering for new and greater assaults which will bring about the downfall of the Axis aggressors.
The United Nations are giving attention also to the different kind of struggle which must follow the military phase, the struggle against disease, malnutrition, unemployment, and many other forms of economic and social distress.
To make all of us secure against future aggression and to open the way for enhanced wellbeing of nations and individuals everywhere, we must maintain in the peace to come the mutually beneficial cooperation we have achieved in war. On the threshold of the New Year, as we look toward the tremendous tasks ahead, let us pledge ourselves that this cooperation shall continue both for winning the final victory on the battlefield and for establishing an international organization of all peace-loving nations to maintain peace and security in generations to come.
I know but had to point out in Minnesota it was yet lol
The New York Times (January 1, 1944)
Bright lights add to joy; many greet 1944 in churches, where day of prayer asked by President is begun
By Meyer Berger
Times Square crowds moved into the New Year last night with the same spirit that moved the Allied world everywhere – with singing hearts and with hope that the New Year may bring victory in Europe, increased pressure against the enemy in the Pacific, as Allied military leaders predict.
The crowds were gayer, greater than they were last New Year’s Eve. The whole picture seemed to have changed since then, from dark foreboding to the certainty of victory, and this was reflected in the singing, the general laughter in the street, in the din of horns and in greater happiness written on faces.
Where Times Square had been dimmed out a year ago, the streets last night were aglow with almost pre-war brightness. Where theaters, shops and restaurants shrank away from the building line in comparative gloom a year ago, they radiated brilliance with the approach of 1944.
Lights dimmed at 10:00 p.m.
At 10:00 p.m. ET, the theater and hotel marquees went dark, restaurant and hotel signs were switched off, but the din only increased and the sounds of revelry – the insistent blare of horns, the clank of cowbells – swelled in volume.
Traffic kept moving north and south, east and west. It was thinner than in recent years, but every cab, every private car, was loaded with servicemen or with civilians and with women dressed in gay evening attire. Traffic flowed until shortly after 11:00 p.m.
Then the crowd grew more restless. The silhouetted hosts surged over into the avenues, despite police pressure, and gradually filled all the empty spaces. Overseas and garrison caps and sailors’ flattop gear showed against dimmed store windows in great numbers. It was predominantly a service crowd.
Police regulated the flow smoothly. The hosts moving northward kept to the east side of the Square, those headed south kept to the west. Except for the few lights behind boarded shop windows, the only outstanding lights in the Square were the traffic lamps, glowing alternately red and green.
Powder flashlights shot by photographers standing at high windows in office buildings facing on the Square, exploded like distant cannon. The crowds roared and cheered each heavy boom. Bits of paper released from skyscraper windows turned and twisted in the dark and a few streamers writhed in the half light, but the amount of paper was piddling compared with other years.
There was no glowing globe in the New York Times Tower to indicate the split second of the new year’s entry and of the old year’s end. This seemed to confuse the crowd. The stroke of midnight brought a brief silence. Then the thousands jammed in the Square screamed, roared, cheered, blew their horns, shook their rattles.
The demonstration was brief. Within five minutes, the crowds moved again, north and south, but the cheering steadily diminished.
Watch Night in the churches
Only in the city’s great churches and cathedrals, where more sober, thoughtful souls congregated for Watch Night services, was the atmosphere graver. In the Holy Hours at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and at Trinity, men and women bowed their heads in prayer, as the President had asked them to do, seeking divine aid for peace.
The White House proclamation set forth:
At the beginning of the new year 1944, it is fitting that we pray to be preserved from false pride of accomplishment and from willful regret of the last measure of public and private sacrifice necessary to attain final victory and peace.
The prayers echoed this sentiment.
From across the Atlantic, at the same time, word came that Nazi spokesmen could extend to their people for the new year only predictions of further gloom, defeat and hardship. Even as the years pivoted, bombers started up from England’s dawn to continue their battering of Germany and the occupied countries.
Here, the gaiety exceeded anything the city has experienced since Pearl Harbor.
Until 8:00, the crowd seemed fairly thin, but at that hour it curdled clogged and moved sluggishly north and south through the square. It was a far gayer crowd than were the revelers of a year ago. There were more horns, more rattles and there was more laughter.
Temperature drops slowly
The noon that had hung over Broadway vanished behind sullen clouds soon after 8:00. The stars disappeared and light fog reflected red neon the length of Broadway and in the side streets. It grew damper and colder. The temperature dropped slowly to 40 degrees.
More than 2,000 policemen, commanded by Chief Inspector O’Connell, were prepared for a long and crowded night. Mounted men lined the curbs and discouraged overflow into the Street. Patrolmen in groups of four herded the carefree at street junctions. Traffic kept moving with a fair degree of ease up to 10:00 p.m.
An unusual assemblage of emergency Police and Fire Department equipment and several ambulances waited at the curbs, prepared for any emergency. There were emergency trucks, squad cars, wreckers, and a few motorcycles.
Optimistic howlers arrived early in the square, whereas there were next to none a year ago. The noise-making devices were chiefly paper substitutes for the big-mouthed tin types, yet they got metal prices. One huckster of small tin horns, stationed near Schrafft’s, offered “pre-war horns, all tin,” at 25¢. The same horns sold for 10 and 15¢ in 1941.
The chief factor in lifting public spirits, though the merrymakers were probably not conscious of it, was the revived marquee, hotel and restaurant lighting. Marquees blazed in neon and incandescence, in old color vat brilliance, along the main stem and in the side streets. Last year they were dimmed.
Theaters had great queues long before 9:00 p.m., though prices were unusually high. First-run pictures were asking – and getting, without question – as high as $2.20 for seats. Some charged only $1.65, some $1.50, but wherever the doors were open, the crowds assembled. The Paramount used a line of giant ushers, linked to one another with stout straps to hold off frontal box-office attack.
The usual rebates for servicemen seemed to be off for the great celebration. Houses that charge a soldier or sailor only 28¢ any other night, were exacting full price last night, and getting it. Prices everywhere, on everything, were higher, but the money flowed freely.
The crowds seemed in a singing mood, civilians and servicemen alike. This was in striking contrast to the crowds of the previous year. Servicemen and civilians let 1942 pass without music, without gaiety. In side streets and main streets last night, soldiers and civilians made building walls ring with happy chorus.
An Army truck stopped in Times Square, in front of the Paramount Theater shortly before 10:00 and a large detail of Military Policemen, armed and banded, jumped out. Tipsy servicemen at the curb greeted their arrival with good-natured boos and catcalls. The MPs dispersed around the square.
Some bars closed at 10:00 p.m.
There were comparatively few alcoholics in the early crowds in the Square though the bars were busy everywhere. Times Square bars and many along 6th and 8th Avenues and in the side streets shut down around 10:00, pleading they had run out of whisky. Actually, they were saving some of their supply for the new year.
In the city’s railroad and bus terminals, earlier in the day, traffic was heavy but not so heavy as at Christmas time. In Grand Central Terminal and at Pennsylvania Station, the peak seemed to come around sundown as servicemen, businessmen and weekenders moved countryward for the weekend. Railroad officials figured traffic was around 20% above normal.
Airlines were solidly booked, but comparatively little of this traffic was holiday traffic. Government priorities still accounted for more than nine-tenths of the seating as military men and other federal workers and executives moved on war errands. Most civilian traffic seemed headed southward, principally toward Florida.
Transportation executives said the great strain on railroads, buses and other common carriers will come tomorrow, as students, men on military furlough and weekenders move homeward or back to camp after a week of festivity. The number of men in furlough was extremely large.
