You may find this website helpful. I've used it countless times myself. It has a collection of digitized newspapers from across the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Most of them are from well before the 1940s, but you'll find some later examples if you dig around. Here, for instance, is the Wilmington Morning Star, a daily newspaper from North Carolina. The archive appears to have scans of every issue from 1940 through 1947, which covers most of the time period you are interested in.