The Baltimore Sun has called popular historian Gilbert Sandler—author of several books and countless columns and essays and the man behind WYPR-FM’s weekly “Baltimore Stories”—the city’s “great rememberer.” Yet Sandler doesn’t remember what Baltimore was like during World War II; that’s because, for most of the war, he was serving in the Pacific, aboard the USS Leonis. In an effort to fill this lacuna in his prodigious local memory, Sandler searched out people who were there to witness daily life in Baltimore at the time, and gathered their stories. The result is a charming collection of partially anecdotal history, Home Front Baltimore: An Album of Stories From World War II (Johns Hopkins University Press, hardcover).

The book is composed of stories and quotes from those old enough to remember that era, interspersed with contemporary clips from newspapers—primarily The Baltimore Sun, the Baltimore News-Post, and The Baltimore Afro American. Sandler also frequently compares what was afoot “over there” with what was happening at the same time on the home front, to sometimes humbling effect. (The week of May 4, 1942, the navies of Imperial Japan and the United States were “locked in a fierce sea battle.” That same week, Sandler tells us, Minnie the Elephant played the harmonica for a crowd at the Druid Hill Park Zoo.)

The book is not, Sandler freely acknowledges, an official history. The people he’s chosen to speak with—from a generation whose ranks are rapidly dwindling—are perhaps not representative of the entirety of Baltimore. But the book is an engrossing piece of local lore nonetheless, dense with the details of daily life that one does not often see in more official accounts: what people talked about, what they ate, how present the war was in their lives—then, as now, it varied—what they wore, what they longed for, what they did for fun. All of this is heavily supplemented with captivating photographs. (Those of our local Rosie the Riveters are among the best.)

Through much of the book, the city is barely recognizable. The shipyards and steel mills were working at such a pace during the war, for instance, that swing-shift workers petitioned for midnight entertainment. The Century Theater on Lexington Street acquiesced, screening its first predawn movie in April of 1942. Two thousand workers attended. Dancing was another popular entertainment. In 1941, the city’s Department of Recreation carefully selected 80 young women—representing a certain percentage of religious affiliations—and put them on a bus to Edgewood Arsenal for one of the first staged socials for visiting servicemen. Different times, indeed.

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