This morning we had a short storm pass through, with lightning and thunder (a rarity here in SoCal) and I turned off my computer, just to be on the safe side. Left with nothing to do, I decided to hunt through one of my craft drawers to see if, by any chance, I had the right sized knitting needle for one of my infamous projects. This necesitated removing a large box in which those needles, crochet hooks and embroidery needles are kept.
In taking the box completely out of the drawer, I discovered these old War Ration Coupon books from the WWII, made out in my name. Many years ago my mother had made a display of them for me, and I took it apart so I could put them in an album. I never did, and in the intervening years I wondered what happened to them.
Well, here they are.
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Inside the first one it says I am 4'1" tall, weigh 52 pounds, have brown hair and brown eyes and am 6 years old. The date is May 7, 1942. Apparently my size isn't important for the next year's card, as all it says is that I am 7 years old. And then in War Ration Book Three, I am noted as 8 years old and still at 52 pounds.
When I saw that, I thought to myself: No wonder my mother and father were worried about my health if I truly went from May of 1942 to May of 1944 without gaining any weight. But since "growing up" and having babies I've had to fight fat, so obviously there was not a big problem with my being a skinny child.
We kids were not really all that aware of what "war" meant. We knew about rationing, we knew certain things, like shoes and tires and butter, were hard to get. We knew our uncles were overseas fighting but our dad wasn't, so our home life wasn't so disrupted. We knew we had to pour any grease from cooking meat into an empty coffee can and our mother took it to the grocery store to turn it in. We bought saving stamps each week at school and pasted them into a book which, when completed, we turned in for a War Bond. We collected scrap metal, we had a victory garden and blackout curtains, and we knew what all the searchlights around Long Beach harbor were for. Interestingly, both Jerry and I still call them "searchlights" instead of "spotlights" or whatever their real name is now!
In the schools we practiced what to do for air raids (go into the halls and line up outside our classrooms. Later in the atomic area we learned to drop to the floor under our desks). But out on the playground we called each other "Allies" or "Axis", depending on which class got out a little early and ran to get the rings first. They were always the Allies and the slower class the Axis. We knew to insult each other by calling the other Tojo or Mussolini. Kids 6 and 7 and 8 didn't really know what all these terms mean, but we had picked up the names from our folks and knew who the bad guys were.
As "The Greatest Generation" and as we who experienced it peripherally as little kids die off, all this will be forgotten, unless one can dig into a social history of that time. When I saw these books this morning, time telescoped and I remembered being little and watching how my family operated with the wartime constraints on us. It was as if 70 years ago was just yesterday, my mother standing at the stove, an apron over her house dress, tipping the skillet over the coffee can and grease running down into the container. Yes, lots of memories.
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So back to reality: Of course I did not find in the box the size knitting needle I needed. Guess it's back to Michael's today to buy one!
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