World War II in Pleasant Hill, as Told in Its Newspaper

To mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion of Europe during World War II, we’ll look at how a small Missouri railroad town took on the war. The story and its pictures come from the weekly Pleasant Hill Times and from letters it published from men and women serving at home and abroad. In the postwar years, a young Bill Cloud, often tagged along when his father, Tilghman Cloud, who took pictures for the family-owned newspaper.  

Now, after 42 years of teaching copy editing at the University of North Carolina and previous professional work at Newsday and The Miami Herald, Bill Cloud returns to his hometown in this presentation on the hardships, tragedies, and anxious townspeople who lived through the war and remember the years leading up to the start of the first peacetime draft in American history.