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In Manhattan, one-legged, whiskery, 62-year-old Charlie Miller would engage in a different sort of enterprise; he would try to shut the sound of carols from his mind. They reminded him too painfully of his happy boyhood in Germany. Charlie would spend Christmas where he spent every other day—in the grim, Lysol-haunted Municipal Lodging House. He would pass the morning reading tattered newspapers. At eleven, he would pick up his crutches (to which his spare shoes and a bundle of other belongings were lashed) and get a chicken fricassee dinner. Then, slowly, he would go back to the heap of limp newspapers.
But in the U.S. of 1946 the Charlie Millers would be comparatively few. On Christmas Day, William George Dampier, a 48-year-old Indianapolis milk delivery man, would watch a heart-warming scene: |iis five children, exclaiming happily over presents in the front room of his warm, frame house. Like millions of other U.S. families, the Dampiers would eat a vast and savory dinner, look forward to the long holiday before the New Year.