(H)our History Lesson: Tempe, Arizona: Comparing and Connecting WWII Home Front Cities

1. Create Comparison Matrices for your students to use. To compare two cities, create a one-page sheet with three columns and four rows.  Label the left column Theme/Topic and the other columns City 1 and City 2.  For a Comparison Matrix for three cities simply add an additional column. 

2. Create two Single-Point Rubrics to assist students’ self-assessment. One is for assessing proficiency in meeting teacher-selected standards. One is for assessing proficiency in meeting objectives. 

3. For the rubric on standards, create a one-page sheet with three columns and four rows of content. Label the first column “Areas for Improvement,” the second column, “Proficient (Meeting Standard),” and the third column, “Areas of Exceeding Standard.”  Leave the first and third columns blank.  In each row of the second column identify a Standard and indicate a space for noting the evidence for meeting the standard.  Include a space at the bottom of the page for assigning points for each column. 

4. For the rubric on objectives, create a one-page sheet with three columns and four rows of content. Label the first column “Areas for Improving toward Objective,” the second column, “Proficient (Meeting Objective),” and the third column, “Areas of Exceeding Objective.” Leave the first and third columns blank. In the four rows of the second column identify these four objectives:  

• Describe World War II home front military training in Tempe and impacts on higher education.  
• Summarize the contributions and volunteerism of diverse Tempe civilians to home front wartime efforts, including that of youth. 
• Explain the role and impact of the Papago Park prisoner-of-war (POW) camp in Tempe. 
• Optional: Describe similarities and differences of Tempe and other Heritage city(s) / World War II home front(s). 

Include a space at the bottom of the page for assigning points for each column. See the last photo of this lesson for reference.

Teacher Tip: The following oral history excerpt can be used to connect to themes from all three lessons prior to this lesson: The Arizona State Teachers College / Falcon Field (Lesson 1), agricultural contributions (Lesson 2), and the Prisoner of War Papago Camp (Lesson 3). The excerpt can be used to show the variety of home front topics connected to Tempe. Have students consider what it would be like to work and live in the area as a civilian or service member at the time using Dorothy Webb’s narrative. 

Dorothy Webb: Oral History

This excerpt is from “Dorothy Webb Oral History, Part 1/2," from an interview on February 15, 2011. The interview’s full recording is available through the Arizona Memory Project (Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records) The following transcript excerpt highlights living in and around Tempe during the war. 

Dorothy Webb, Interviewee:  . . . Then the war came nearer and nearer, and ROTC boys were being called up. The draft was on; friends, fellows were volunteering and leaving. 

So, we decided we’d better get married, because we didn’t know what was coming. And we got married in June 1941 and lived in Tempe, because he was working for Tovrea (Meatpacking Company). So, ASU was just down the street from where we lived, and I always knew... In fact, I had made application to go back to Tucson (at the University of Arizona) and graduate with my class the second semester. But I didn’t want to leave my husband for one semester. So finished at Tempe and got my teacher’s degree. And then we went to the ranch in Globe, his family ranch, and lived there... I graduated in ‘42... lived there for one year. Except I lived in Globe and taught school, and he was on the ranch, and I would drive out every weekend. 

Then at that time, they were encouraging ranch people to stay on the ranch because they needed the beef for the army. They were building up herds, and the help was short, so, he stayed on the ranch until he was drafted, and then he came to Phoenix and they put him at Falcon Field. He always felt kind of bad about it, but he spent the rest of the war at Falcon Field. We lived in Tempe, and I taught one year in Phoenix.  

Kathleen Garcia, Interviewer: Which school did you teach at? 

Webb: Balsz, and it's no longer there. There’s still a Balsz District... but this was... I can’t remember whether it was Forty-fourth and Washington, or Forty-fourth and Van Buren, but it was an elementary school. The superintendent lived in Tempe, and I had known him through... Rotary or Lions Club or something, and I had met him. And so I taught 7th grade and coached the girls' softball team, and that was the most fun of all. I don’t know how long the school was there, but it was an old school. The greatest part that I remember about teaching that year at Balsz... 

The first year I taught in Globe I got twelve hundred dollars a year, a hundred dollars a month. The next year I got a little over twenty-four hundred a year to teach at Balsz. That was a big raise. But my roster of students, I never could get them all on one roster, because the beginning of the year they wouldn’t be there; they were picking cotton. Well, they were there: when their parents moved here to pick cotton, they would come to school. Then when the cotton picking was done, the family would move to California pick oranges or grapes or something else. So, I had this wave of students all through the year, coming and going. Very few of the children were the same ones during the whole year. And that was difficult for the teacher and I’m sure was much harder on the child. . . .  

Garcia: Dorothy, could you tell us a little more about when your husband was at Falcon Field during the war and what it was like to live in Tempe and the valley at that time?  

Webb: Well, it was wartime, and we were rationed on sugar and meat and gasoline and tires and cars. You couldn’t buy a new car unless you had a really good reason for doing it. My husband was at Falcon Field, and he made a lot of good friends out of the English pilots, who, it was an English training school there. In fact, he took several of them to the ranch at Globe when they would have a long weekend. And he found a couple of them who were from farm families in England and we enjoyed their company very much. The internment camp at Scottsdale had an officers’ club and we used to – we could go... 

Garcia: This was the German prisoners of war?  

Webb: German prisoners of war, yes.  

Garcia: At Papago park, right? 

Webb: That’s where it was. We often went there for Friday night parties or Saturday night parties. It was a nice club. And the German waiters would wait on us in their dining room. I don’t remember what I thought about that.  

The war was still going on, and we were losing a lot of friends, and we were always looking to see what was going on. I just don’t remember all the details.  

We had our first child in ‘45 but that was right after the war was over. During the war, my husband, when he had time would still go back to the ranch in Globe, where his father was trying to hold things together, and help. I didn’t work except for teaching that one year at Balsz school, because I was having ...  

Well, I’ve forgotten something. We also at that time were trying to think about what we wanted to do after the war. And we didn’t think the ranch in Globe was big enough to have maybe two boys come back to and make a living on. So, we bought a dairy – we bought 80 acres of land south of Tempe and bought some dairy cows. And my husband had a man who knew dairy business, and so we formed a partnership and had the dairy farm until we bought a ranch later. But my husband was always thinking about ranching – cattle ranching. So finally, when the war was over and he was discharged, and we had the dairy, a man approached him to go into the real estate business selling farms and ranches, which my husband knew from the ground up.  

Garcia: About what time was this?  

Webb: That was 1947. That’s two years after the war ended in 1945. . . .  

We had put all my school teaching money into U.S. bonds. We cashed those in. And we bought this little ranch in Skull Valley. . . 

Excerpt from: “House Report 115-998, “To Direct the Secretary of the Interior to Annually Designate at Least One City in The United States as An ‘American World War II Heritage City,’ and for other purposes” (October 30, 2018) 

". . .PURPOSE OF THE BILL 

The purpose of H.R. 6118 is to direct the Secretary of the Interior to annually designate at least one city in the United States as an "American World War II Heritage City." 

                  BACKGROUND AND NEED FOR LEGISLATION 

    On December 7, 1941, military forces of the Empire of Japan attacked the U.S. Naval Fleet and ground bases at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. On December 8, 1941, one day after what President Roosevelt referred to as, "a date which will live in infamy," the United States declared war against the Empire of Japan. Three days later, on December 11, 1941, Japan's ally, Germany, declared war on the United States. Sixteen million Americans, mostly young working-age men, served in the military during World War II, out of an overall United States population of 113 million. 

While an unprecedented number of Americans served in World War II, the country drastically increased its war production on the home front, serving not only the needs of the armed forces of the United States but her allies as well--in what President Franklin Roosevelt called "The Arsenal of Democracy." The combination of millions serving in the military, during a period of necessary and drastic increases in production, led to significant social changes on the American home front. 

The World War II period resulted in the largest number of people migrating within the United States in the history of the country. Individuals and families relocated to industrial centers for good paying jobs out of a sense of patriotic duty. Many industrial centers became "boomtowns," growing at phenomenal rates. One example, the City of Richmond, California, grew from a population of under 24,000 to over 100,000 during the war. . . ."