The Herald-Express described the neighborhood where the killer abandoned the Bauerdorf car as “a Negro residential district.” (Oct. 13, 1944.)
Georgette Bauerdorf, an Unsolved Murder:
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31
These days, we have access to the 1940 census, so we can examine the ethnic makeup of the neighborhood more precisely. You’re looking for Enumeration District 60-821, Sheet 11A.
Here’s a handy tool for searching the 1940 census.
We find:
724 E. 25th: White family.
728 1/2 E. 25th: African American family. Notice that the family name is Mounday and that the woman who reported Bauerdorf’s car was Marian/Marion Mounday, according to the census.
730 1/2 E. 25th: African American family.
734 E. 25th: Chinese family.
744 E. 25th: White family.
744 1/2 E. 25th: White family.
750 E. 25th: White family.
758 E. 25th: Chinese family
In other words, it was a multiethnic neighborhood. Other pages in the Enumeration District show Japanese families, who would have been in internment camps during the war.
To be continued.
ladailymirror.com 
Good find. If minute details such as this are to be inaccurate, or simply reported with any type of bias, then all of the larger facts that were reported automatically become subject to reconsideration.
It seems like, due to a myriad of circumstances surrounding this case, ascertaining what actually occurred takes a lot more of digging through the facts than would initially appear to be necessary.
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There is no substitute for original research.
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Well, it’s not exactly original research, but I dug a little deeper into the issue of the missing gas rationing sticker. It turns out they were not all that easy to get; they were passed out by citizen boards similar to draft boards and there were criteria, like you had to have five good tires. The rule of no sticker, no gas was evidently pretty well enforced, especially by your fellow drivers — gas rationing was intensely disliked (I remember my father talking about that, even thought as a railroad policeman he had a very large allowance) and “gas cheats” were liable to be confronted.
So the issue of the missing sticker is a (probably irrelevant) little mystery within a mystery. Did the person who took the car lift it (and possibly a ration book from the glove compartment)? Did some passerby notice the abandoned car and take it? Did the cops remove it as part of the impound process? FWIW, as they say on the tubes of the interwebs 🙂
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Yes, you actually had to submit the serial numbers of your tires!
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Maybe, in the 1944 world of The Herald-Express, one or two black families made it a “negro neighborhood”, as in the fear-mongering of 1970’s school busing.
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This has proven out to be a fascinating and instructive post. Thanks!
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Thanks for reading!
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Back then, it was probably like the “one drop rule” (a drop of “black” blood makes you black, which still seems to be in effect in America): one “Negro” family made it a “Negro” neighborhood.
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