Children’s shoes

Gloria Heinkel Novak was born in 1926 to a German immigrant family. Her father was a bricklayer in the steel mills, and her mother’s family owned Kosak’s Bakery. These shoes were ones that Gloria wore as a child growing up on the East Side. After graduating from a local Catholic high school, Gloria was hired as a secretary for a physicist secretly working on the Manhattan Project’s atomic bomb in the basement under the football field at University of Chicago. She later worked in offices at Wisconsin Steel and Sherwin Williams paint company and wrote articles for the local Daily Calumet newspaper. She began volunteering at the Southeast Chicago Historical Museum in 1989 and later served as president of the organization.