West Haven Archives - New England Historical Society

The Kid in Upper 4 had a profound impact on travelers inconvenienced by the crowded, unreliable trains that carried passengers during World War II.

He was an 18-year-old soldier and, unlike civilian passengers, he had a place to sleep — in Upper Berth 4. He was on his way to a ship that would take him to a faraway battlefield.

Everyone talked about him, including radio stars. He was made into a song and a movie short. People pinned his story to thousands of bulletin boards, read it from pulpits, published it in prisons and told it in leading magazines and newspapers.

The Kid in Upper 4 wasn’t a real person. He came from the imagination of a 29-year-old copywriter named Nelson Metcalf.

Train Troubles

During World War II, railroads had to move enormous amounts of troops and war materiel, while transporting their normal load of passengers and freight. They were often late, always crowded and without amenities as dining cars and Pullman cars went to other uses.

Union Station in Chicago during World War II. Photo by Jack Delano, Office of War Information

“Railroaders were working on man-killing schedules — and still their offices were besieged by angry passengers,” wrote Metcalf.

Lillian Novak was a teenager living in West Haven, Conn., when Pearl Harbor was attacked.

Boys lined up to enlist, and the train stations were crowded with families sending them off. and the family always went with the member of their family who was going in the service and that railroad station was wall to wall people, people crying, people saying good bye to their…you know, it was a very sad time and that’s when you realized…

The Horrors of Train Travel

Roberta Ellison was attending Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vt., during the war. Trips to visit her family in Connecticut were discouraged. During the few times she got permission to go home, she remembered, the trains,

…were always packed with servicemen. We girls would sit on our suitcases in the aisles. The guys had the seats and they also had the luggage racks, and many of them slept in the luggage racks. And sometimes you’d have a tired serviceman slumped over on your shoulder. We would all talk and move around. The guys were very courteous. They were often too tired to do a lot of visiting.

For a young mother with a baby, train travel was a harrowing ordeal. Marie Boucher took her infant daughter on a five-day train trip from New Haven to San Diego to be with her serviceman husband.

The trains were so full of servicemen, servicemen and families like us, going back … We didn’t have any sleeping arrangements, we slept in the same seats that we sat in all day and would get up every once in a while when the train would pull into the station so we could stretch our legs a little bit and get some fresh air. Food was not very plentiful…. Babies would be crying all night and children would be running up and down the aisles.

The Kid in Upper 4

Complaints poured into the headquarters of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. So the railroad asked its Boston advertising agency to explain why things were so bad.

Metcalf first tried an ad that described the amount of war freight the trains were moving. It was called “Right of Way for Fighting Might.”

People still complained.

Then Metcalf wrote an ad called “Thunder along the Lines,” which told the story of the hell the railroads were going through. Three weeks after the ad ran, the typographer who set the ad took the train to Boston. He met Metcalf soon after he arrived, and praised the “Thunder” ad — then complained about the train service.

Metcalf vowed to write an ad that would make everybody who read it feel ashamed to complain about the trains.

The Ad

He came up with the following classic:

It is 3:42 a.m. on a troop train.
Men wrapped in blankets are breathing heavily.
Two in every lower berth. One in every upper.
This is no ordinary trip. It may be their last in the U.S.A. till the end of the war. Tomorrow they will be on the high seas.
One is wide awake … listening … staring into the blackness.
It is the kid in Upper 4.

Tonight, he knows, he is leaving behind a lot of little things – and big ones.
The taste of hamburgers and pop … the feel of driving a roadster over a six-lane highway … a dog named Shucks, or Spot, or Barnacle Bill.
The pretty girl who writes so often … that gray-haired man, so proud and awkward at the station … the mother who knit the socks he’ll wear soon.
Tonight he’s thinking them over.
There’s a lump in his throat. And maybe – a tear fills his eye.
It doesn’t matter, Kid. Nobody will see … it’s too dark.
A couple of thousand miles away, where he’s going, they don’t know him very well.
But people all over the world are waiting, praying for him to come.
And he will come, this kid in Upper 4.
With new hope, peace and freedom for a tired, bleeding world.

Next time you are on the train, remember the kid in Upper 4.
If you have to stand enroute – it is so he may have a seat.
If there is no berth for you – it is so that he may sleep.

Honored Guest

And finally, Metcalf concluded:

If you have to wait for a seat in the diner – it is so he … and thousands like him … may have a meal they won’t forget in the days to come.
For to treat him as our most honored guest is the least we can do to pay a mighty debt of gratitude.

It’s been called “the most famous single advertisement of the war and one of the most effective of all time.” It’s been included in a list of the 100 best advertisements of all time – and one of 20 “that shook the world.”

Nelson C. Metcalf, Jr., had plenty of job offers to choose from, but he waited until after the war. He walked into McCann-Erickson cold and asked for a job, saying he wanted more variety and a better chance to learn.

This story was updated in 2022.

Images: Color images from the film Lifeline of the Nation.

Jennie Cramer and her mother Christina had an awful fight on Thursday, August 4, 1881. Jennie and her friend Blanche Douglass had been dating two of the Malleys – members of one of New Haven’s wealthiest families – and they hadn’t come home the night before.

Cover of the book about the murder of Jennie Cramer, The Beautiful Victim of Elm City

If she didn’t stop her scandalous behavior, Christina threatened, Jennie, 21, would have to find her own place to live. Jennie insisted she did nothing wrong, that she only spent the night at the hotel where Blanche was staying because Blanche was ill and she could find no one to accompany her home.

In truth, the two girls had stayed at the Malley mansion. Jennie thought it would sound better to say they had stayed in Blanche’s rooms. But Jennie probably did believe the rest of it – that Blanche was sick. The best evidence suggests that Jennie never knew exactly what was going on with the Malleys and Blanche.

Walter Malley

Walter Malley’s father, Edward, owned Malley & Co., a very successful dry goods store. The department stores it spawned would remain in business through 1982. Walter was a shy boy, musical and artistic but unambitious. He attended college but never graduated, and lived at his family’s mansion.

His cousin Jimmy was more outgoing and a harder worker than Walter. The two had met Blanche (one of several names she used) at a brothel in New York, and she was “dating” Walter.

Jimmy, meanwhile, was attracted to Jennie Cramer. Jennie’s father, a cigar maker, was far less wealthy than the Malleys. Jennie herself is generally described as beautiful, but not extraordinarily smart.

Illustration of the discovery of Jennie Cramer from The Beautiful Victim of Elm City

Nevertheless, Jennie was very protective of her reputation. She hoped her beauty would allow her to marry well. While she was open to Jimmy’s attention, she did not intend to sleep with him.

With this in mind, Blanche, Walter and Jimmy cooked up a scheme. The three would try to find a way to have Jimmy and Jennie spend the night together. Jennie never knew of the scheme, and in all likelihood never knew that Blanche was a prostitute.

Savin Rock

On Wednesday night, they put their plan into action. Walter’s father Edward was away at Saratoga. The mansion was vacant. The four spent some time drinking and eating and singing, and then Blanche began to protest that she was feeling ill. Blanche would later say she heard Jimmy and Jennie fighting in the next room that Wednesday night, as Jennie fought off his advances – apparently successfully.

After telling Jennie’s mother the altered version of the story, Blanche said she went to her dressmaker. She saw Jennie on a horse-pulled trolley headed to Savin Rock in West Haven, home of an amusement park. It was the last she ever saw of Jennie – or so she said.

Postcard of The Colonnade at Savin Rock.

Witnesses would later come forward and say they saw Jennie Cramer with two men and a woman who looked like Blanche and the Malleys at Savin Rock on Friday. With Jennie missing, her father began making the rounds looking for her.

He questioned Jimmy Malley, who said Jennie had spoken of going to New York, perhaps with Blanche. Walter made a show of taking a train toward the city, but turning back when he received a telegram at Stamford informing him Blanche was in New Haven.

No one knew where Jennie was. Until Saturday morning, when a fisherman at Savin Rock found a body – Jennie Cramer – in the surf. He pulled her to shore and ran for the police.

The first assumption was that she had drowned. But a cursory exam showed she had no water in her lungs. The next assumption was that she had killed herself because of the fight with her mother, but that, too, would soon seem far-fetched.

Arsenic and Lies

Over the next several weeks, some of the truth about Jennie Cramer began emerging. An autopsy revealed she had been raped. Further analysis found arsenic in her system. Some theorized that perhaps she had taken it herself, which some girls did to improve their complexion.

No, there was too much arsenic in her body to have been the residual effect of small doses of arsenic. Rather, she had taken a large dose and it killed her. Suicide made little sense, unless it was in despair over being attacked.

The more stones the police turned over, the worse things looked. When they discovered Blanche had told a slew of lies about herself in the initial inquiries, they arrested her and the Malleys. A grand jury declared Jimmy was the killer and that Walter and Blanche were his accomplices. They would have to stand trial.

The Edw. Malley Co. logo

While the case was proceeding, however, the Malleys did not stand idly by. Edward hired a team of lawyers and detectives. Rumors spread that he was paying off witnesses to change their stories – to become less sure they had witnessed the Malley boys with Jennie on the Thursday and Friday in question.

Blanche’s performance, even with legal coaching, was shaky. One of the Malley family, she would later say, asked how much money she would require to run away and get on the next steamer to Europe. Either confident of victory, or fearing she was being set up, Blanche refused.

The Trial

In the spring 1882, the trial kicked off. The press covered the salacious story extensively. New Haven at the time was a mini-melting pot of immigrants, with an entrepreneurial and clannish nature.

A small book was published about the case, and the Malleys tried to buy up every copy to shore up their image. There was little doubt among the public that the wealthy Jimmy Malley was guilty, but the jury found otherwise.

There was ample evidence that the Malleys and Blanche had lied repeatedly, but the judge instructing the jury told them there was only one question before them. Had the threesome poisoned Jennie Cramer with arsenic? On that point the jury found inadequate evidence to convict.

The shocking death of Jennie Cramer wreaked havoc on her family. Her father killed himself before the trial. Her mother, who became mentally unstable after the trial, followed suit and committed suicide in 1891.

Blanche Douglass would make headlines in the years after the trial a couple of times. Once she was accused of trying to blackmail the Malleys with incriminating letters Walter had written to her. She would later create a scandal by announcing that she and Walter had married, a story he immediately denied.

This story about Jennie Cramer was updated in 2023.

Image of Malley logo: By Self-made scan of vintage box., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24225778. Savin Rock PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10134715.

West Haven

The Kid in Upper 4 Changes Hearts and Minds During World War II