In this season of one year, we're focusing on 1942, telling stories about the home front

during the most tumultuous year in U.S. history.

The best way to understand what it was like in America 80 years ago is to talk to someone

who actually lived through 1942.

So we sent our producer Sophie Summergrad to interview a very special guest.

Baba, can you tell me your name and how you're related to me?

My name is Bill Dritt Summergrad, and you are my granddaughter, Sophie.

My grandmother, Milly, is 98 years old.

I call her Baba.

Her family immigrated to the U.S. from Ukraine in the early 1920s, a few years before she was born,

and they settled in New York City.

Baba grew up in a relatively new and sort of unique housing development in the Bronx.

Somebody had built something called the Coops, the workers cooperative colony.

It was three separate buildings, all connected to each other.

Beautiful buildings, with beautiful grounds.

The Coops were thought of as a kind of progressive utopia.

They had everything you could imagine, right at your doorstep.

We had a library.

We had a daycare center, food shopping, right in the building.

There was a grocery store and a butcher and a fruit market.

There was also a lot of activity.

There was a chorus that people could sing in.

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