What have you done living

[Smitty37]

Sometimes it is interesting to think back about "Life in earlier decades"

I was born in 1937 in a boarding house run by my mother for the "Mountain Ice Company". There was no central heat, no indoor plumbing and no electricity. I really don't remember anything about living is that house except that one of the many ice houses in my home town burned down and I remember seeing that huge fire - one of my brothers was holding me.

The USA got into WW II on December 7, 1941 and I turned 4 on December 18. I don't remember that but I remember my 2 older brothers leaving to go in the army and we didn't see them again until the war ended. My third older brother joined the Navy early in 1943 when he turned 17. I remember the flag with 3 blue stars hanging in the front window.

I recall, buying stamps every week at school and putting them in a book - when you got $18.75 worth you exchanged them for a War Bond.

I remember getting an onion bag and picking milkweed pods for the war effort.

I remember A, B, C windshield stickers to indicate how much gas per week you could have.

We saved every piece of scrap metal, including the foil from chewing gum wrappers and cigarette packs and all tin cans for the war effort.

Turning off all the lights early at night - air raid drills, searching every place you could for old rubber tires, inner tubes and anything else made of rubber to contribute to the war effort.

Almost everything in the Sears catalog was stamped "Not available for the duration" My family didn't have enough money for new toys but it didn't matter because nobody else could get them either. My big Christmas presents in those years were either homemade or second(or third) hand. I didn't even know that until years later.

The speed limit was 35 mph to save tires - to get an A stamp you had to show that you had turned in all but 5 tires.

Every rural family had a Victory Garden. My dad even planted one for my sister and I - it was about 10 feet long by 6 feet wide and we took care of it. We would spade the soil, dad would plant it and we would weed and cultivate it (dad pointed out which were weeds and which were vegies). Dad would do most of the harvesting.

Letters from the "front" were writting on paper so thin it was almost like tissue paper and came in envelopes just as thin. Words and sentences that revealed anything about where the writer was were blacked out.

Kate Smith on the radio taught the whole country to sing "God Bless America" When you heard the National Anthem or saw the flag passing by you stood up. If you didn't somebody would remind you...

Everyone was expected to sacrifice for the "boys overseas". Patriotic signs and posters were everywhere. "Don't you know there's a war on?" was the reply you got if you complained about shortages.

Everybody was at war and everybody made some contribution to the war effort. I remember the unrestrained joy at V-E Day and when V-J Day brought the war to a close. Everybody welcomed our troops home with parades, parties, special services.

Look at the difference in the way we do wars today - 10 years of war in Afganistan and Iraq and if we didn't have TV to watch, we wouldn't even know it was going on.

 

[PenMan1]

Thank you, Smitty, for reminding us of the huge price and huge sacrifices made by your generation to insure the freedom of my generation. As always, I will give my best efforts to be a good steward of our great land, and I will try my VERY BEST to leave this world a better place than when I arrived.

Sometimes this seems to be an impossible task, BUT as I learned from your generation, "it's not over until its over" and there IS NO FAILURE....until you quit trying.

Thanks again for reminding us of our obligations to future generations of Americans!

 

[PenMan1]

I think the thing that confounds me most is that today, we are Latin Americans, Oriental Americans, African Americans, Conservative Americans and Liberal Americans.

Back in gentler times, WE WERE ALL AMERICANS FIRST AND FOREMOST. It seems that a country that helped eliminate a sadistic murderer and restore world peace and order, could over come such a small thing as ethnic diversity and differences in religious and political philosophy.

Resoectfullu submitted.

 

[Longfellow]

I was born in 1932, so my experience was basically the same. We did have heat and indoor plumbing. Instead of brothers serving, it was cousins and uncles or me. We had a slaughter house in town, and we could buy horse meat there. Tasted pretty good, too. We had a Victory garden, that was my responsibility, and we would pick blackberries and blueberries growing in wooded areas. My mother made Jellies from most of them. A jelly sandwich was a treat after eating onion sandwiches for a while.We raised chickens and rabbits, for meat also. Lessons well learned growing up during those times.

 

[Smitty37]

I was born in 1932, so my experience was basically the same. We did have heat and indoor plumbing. Instead of brothers serving, it was cousins and uncles or me. We had a slaughter house in town, and we could buy horse meat there. Tasted pretty good, too. We had a Victory garden, that was my responsibility, and we would pick blackberries and blueberries growing in wooded areas. My mother made Jellies from most of them. A jelly sandwich was a treat after eating onion sandwiches for a while.We raised chickens and rabbits, for meat also. Lessons well learned growing up during those times.

Picking huckleberry's and black berries was a regular summertime occupation where I grew up - they were plentiful growing in the wild and made great jelly, jam, pies and my personal favorite was a huckleberry cake my mom made that was to die for.....

 

[TellicoTurning]

I was born in September before Pearl Harbor, so I don't remember the war at all. But, lived much like Smitty did when I was young.... my dad was a share cropper, and farmed for other people. He borrowed mules or broke mules for other people so he would have a team to plow the fields. We didn't have an automobile until he bought an old Model A in 1948... it was a 2 seater coupe that didn't have the rumble seat. We were a family of 5 by then and it took some pretty special seating arrangement for all of us to fit.... Dad drove, Mom sat in the passenger seat with my younger sister between them and straddling the shift leaver, my older sister sat on the front edge between Mom and the door and I rode laying across the back of the seat behind my parents.... we actually moved from east Texas out to West Texas in that coupe with all of us seated in that manner.

Since we were farmers, we always had a garden going... chickens out back and we usually had a cow and a couple of pigs for milk and bacon. We rarely ate the chickens, except on special occasions or Sunday dinner... often there would only be vegetables on the table.

I remember the first time I ever saw an electric light, when they strung electricity through the community of Freestone where we were living in about 1947... I was born at home in what was called a tar paper shack... literally a house covered in tar paper. Dad rode his horse into town to get the doctor and if his old car had been much slower getting to the house, I would have gotten there first. He had time to take off his coat, wash his hands and catch me.

When we moved to West Texas it was for another share cropper job, we moved into the owner's field hand house, which was an old army baracks that he had procured somewhere... it was a long three room building with the kitchen/living room in the middle, two bedrooms on either end, no heat, not indoor plumbing and no running water. After the first season, we changed farms and moved into a real house, again, no heat except a wood stove, running water in the kitchen only, we had a well out back with a windmill that filled a water tank, so we had cold water in the kitchen sink, but no indoor plumbing. Dad actually walled in around the bottom of the water tank and put up a shower head for us to be able to bath without having to bring a wash tub into the house.... I still like cold showers sometimes...

I think we lived there two seasons until the owner tried to bilk us out of our share of the cotton crop... we had a certain amount of acreage that we worked as our own cash crop and he sold our cotton as his, pocketed the money. After an altercation that I think he lost, we got our money and moved to town where Dad took a job with a roofing company.

We did go back to share cropping a few years later, but only for two seasons... by then Dad was a journeyman carpenter and worked most of his life in later years at carpentry.

I remember hearing some about the war effort in the years after the war, and I still have the ration books that were issued to the family for sugar, shoes and a few other things....

Dad went down to sign up for the war, but as a farmer and already having two kids, they sent him home and before the war was over we had a third child... I think he sometimes always regretted not being able to do his part... he never said, but think he thought about it some. He had two brothers that were single and did go. His older brother was a machinist at an aircraft factory in Dallas, so he didn't get to go either.

I remember seeing some of the letters from overseas... they were probably letters that my grandma saved from her two boys... also even in the years that followed, air mail letters were on the thin tissue paper....