Subscribe and get unlimited access to our online magazine archive. I’m 94, so I remember lots of Christmases. The Christmas of 1944 was the one in which the merry was strained through a kind of holiday sieve. My father had suffered a heart attack the previous month. He had survived but was still bedridden, and doctors thought he might never work again. So I’d dropped out of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and, the following Monday, headed for the Chicago Daily News Building in hopes of getting a job as a copygirl. I did. And I found myself, a former journalism major, in the heart — the city room of the