Chapter 5

During WWII (The Big One), many things in America were rationed so that military needs could be given first priority and the remainder shared equitably among the citizenry. Who knows how equitable the sharing turned out to be, but few complained. Our country and our allies were being threatened, so almost any sacrifice was accepted without complaint.

It is difficult to compare those days with modern times.

Gasoline, rubber tires, butter, silk, sugar and a host of other commodities were strictly rationed. Each family was given a book of ration stamps which could be sold, given away or traded. In the backwoods, the bootleggers resorted to the use of Karo syrup as a sugar substitute. When hunting in the woods, the discovery of a pile of empty Karo syrup buckets was a good sign of needing to be somewhere else. Being too snoopy around a still could be a death sentence.

Although the country people were largely religious in nearly all their social activities and no one would admit to drinking alcohol in any form, bootlegging was accepted as an honorable profession. From time to time, a family would show up at church minus the father, with the short explanation that he had been “sent up”, or sentenced to a prison term. No apparent shame was attached to this predicament, regardless of the official position of the church on the subject. It is likely that the necessity of making a living by whatever available means was regarded more highly than the sin of demon Rum.

Another aspect of the war was that there was a 30 MPH nationwide speed limit. This was instituted as a means of stretching the gasoline supplies. For the most part, automobile production was halted, with the factories being repurposed for the production of military vehicles. Jeeps were produced by the Willys Motor Company at their factory in Willow Run. Wags referred to the Jeep and its origin as “Willit Run?” It is odd to realize that Jeeps are still being produced, although they bear little in common with the original.

Many of the country people cycled through the factories of Michigan, Illinois and Indiana. Whole families might move to Mishawawka or Detroit and work for months or years before assimilating enough wealth to move back to God’s country. This flow of workers had significant impacts on our culture. In some ways, it was comparable to the social impacts of WWI, the “War to end all wars”.

A popular song at that time was, “How You Gonna Keep’em down on the Farm After They’ve Seem Paree?”. It was a serious question. Knowledge is hard to put back into the bottle. Just as Balkan teenagers today wear the same clothes as those worn in Sherman Oaks, thanks to the miracle of YouTube, events which expose people to other cultures is bound to dilute whatever strict maxims have been used to keep those people in line.

Television did not come to the south until the 60s. Sure, there were a handful of stations in the late 50s, but not enough to cause a family to allocate the equivalent of a month’s income for a 12-inch black and white picture that was pretty snowy unless you lived near Atlanta. After the arrival of television and the widespread dissemination of a standard dialect and cultural attitude, things began changing quickly.

JC’s father got a job at the Reynold’s aluminum plant and was taught drafting, which he became quite good at. His job was to go into any part of the facility to make drawings of broken or damaged machine components so that replacements could be made on-site.

He brought home some amazing technological marvels. The family had already been exposed to the wonders of plastic, through the celluloid billfold that JC’s uncle had brought with him when they came to visit. Neglecting the fact that it had to be warm to bend without breaking, it was still an amazing example of what was to them, modern technology.

To see something that could be molded out of cellulose from cotton or wood was almost magic in their eyes. They had no idea that it had been around for years and that they had just never seen it. Some billiard balls still use it.

JC’s dad brought home a wonderful writing pen. He said it was called a “ball point” pen. The most amazing thing was that it did not have to be refilled all the time like a fountain pen. Most of the time, it did not wind up spilling ink all over your new white shirt, either. Most homework was done in pencil, but serious paperwork required the use of very messy and clumsy fountain pens. Most people were happy to see them go.

When JC took a typing class in high school, (mainly to mingle with the girls who were in the majority), he learned the immense difficulty of making carbon paper copies. There were only four boys in the class and they somehow wound up sitting front row, center. It could have had something to do with the fact that the typing teacher had been the Homecoming Queen at the University of Florida the previous Fall. It did not hurt that she wore dresses that featured plunging necklines, either.

To make one or more copies, the manual typewriters were loaded with sheets of carbon paper between the master and the copy pages. Typing mistakes had to be corrected by rolling the paper up so that a shield could be placed under the text to be erased, and repeated for each layer, being very careful to prevent smudging the carbon paper onto the copies or on the typist. After correction, the shield was removed and the paper was rolled back to the original location (hopefully) and typing could be resumed.

Failure to return to the exact original position resulted in another round of corrections. When multiple copies were being made, care became much more important than speed, while typing.

The manual typewriters required a lot of force on each key. JC found that it was necessary to practice a lot to be able to strike all keys with sufficient force, especially those struck with the little fingers.

To this day, JC is known to wear out keyboards very quickly. Low cost keyboards with adhesive labels will lose the e-r-t-i-o-s-h-n and m letters within a few weeks. His coworkers are also quick to mention the noise he makes when typing, although they might be referring to the farts and sniffles, rather than the fierce pounding the keyboard receives.

There were no telephones in the country, although they were common in the towns. Air conditioning was unknown, so natural methods of heating and cooling were exploited. A good shade tree can eliminate the need for tons of air conditioning, as well as adding aesthetic appeal. Modern environmentalists seem to prefer taxation to trees, as a method of reducing dependence on fossil fuels. The fact that trees love to eat CO2 seems to have also escaped their attention.