With 16 million Americans in the Armed Forces, service was a communal affair. Everyone knew someone who was serving. During the war, people put blue paper stars in their windows to show that a member of the family was serving. When a member of the family died in combat, the families replaced it with a gold star. Many people wanted a more permanent way to honor the one they’d lost. Some people switched from a paper gold star to a metallic star attached to their building. One such was on a building at 55th and Dorchester. These gold stars in Hyde Park were lost to urban renewal.
Those with access to a parkway could set up a flagpole at the point of a concrete V for Victory. They’d place a plaque with the name on the flagpole. There once were many of these flagpoles throughout the city, but over the decades, the poles came down, the names were lost, and the meaning of the concrete V disappeared. The remnants of one still exist on the northeast corner of 56th and Blackstone.
Hyde Park’s V barely survived road crews in 2004. They smashed it up doing sidewalk work. Just as they were about to toss the concrete into the dumpster, a neighbor stepped up to save it. No one was sure exactly what it was, but the memory that it had something to do with V for Victory survived. Some claimed it was a tiny Victory Garden, though Victory Gardens were large plots of vegetables that fed whole families. Finally, a Hyde Parker who remembered the war, Damaris Day, wrote to the Hyde Park Historical Society to set the record straight. It was built by the janitor of the building at 5557 S. Blackstone in memory of his son. The janitor raised the American flag there every day and grew flowers inside the V to keep his son’s name alive.
The other personal memorial that survives is an aging concrete post on the northwest corner of 55th and South Shore Drive. I’ve been told that there once were a number of these concrete posts scattered around the street corners of Hyde Park. A few still survive elsewhere in the city, including two along Fullerton and one in Hegewisch. Some are cryptic concrete posts without a plaque. Hyde Park’s memorial pole survives because it is on a corner undisturbed by urban renewal in a parkway that’s well maintained. It even has its Gold Star plaque, dedicated to "Arthur W. Klein, Lt. USN, 1905-1944."
Arthur’s parents were Jewish immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian empire. His father, Jacob, opened a pawn shop in the Loop in 1885. Over the years, it grew into a successful sporting goods business. Arthur’s sister married Alderman Abe Cohen. Milton, Arthur’s younger brother, married, moved in down the street of his parents at 51st and Drexel, and went into the family business. Arthur became a lawyer with his own firm—Klein and Harrow—at 10 N. LaSalle. He was living with his parents in October 1940 when the order came for all men over the age of 18 to register for the draft. Arthur enlisted in the Navy right away. With his education and past ROTC experience in high school, he became an officer. He took courses in radio, electronics, and microwaves at the University of Chicago.
While he was away, Arthur’s mother died. Left on his own, Arthur’s father moved into the Shoreland Hotel on South Shore Drive, awaiting Arthur’s return. But Arthur didn’t return. He died in Washington, D.C., after four years in the Navy. Arthur’s memorial service was held at the Furth Funeral Home at 936 East 47th Street, where his mother’s service had been. Lee J. Furth was proud to donate memorial services to gold star families. Grief-stricken, Jacob arranged to set up the post in Arthur’s memory. It probably helped to have an alderman in the family to round up the rationed concrete and metal. It was near the Shoreland Hotel where Jacob could walk by his son’s name every day.
Grief and remembrance can take odd turns. While tracking down information about Arthur Klein, I discovered that his brother, Milton, has his own footnote to history. After the war, he built up Klein’s Sporting Goods into a large mail order business that, among other sporting goods, included guns. Milton worried about the unregulated sales, but guns had been part of the business since the pawn shop days. In 1963, an order from “A. Hidell” in Dallas came for a used Italian-made Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. It was Lee Harvey Oswald, who used the rifle to assassinate President Kennedy. Milton’s life lurched into the public gaze to his horror. The grief Milton felt led him to lobby Congress successfully to ban interstate gun sales in 1968, at the cost of his business.
This story appeared in the Hyde Park Herald, November 11, 2021.
