Tues, Jul 21, 1942: lassoing

"Stanley spends most of his spare time lassoing a little calf.  He helps with the work some but you'd know he doesn't hurt himself."

-- Letter from my grandmother, Bloomington, Kans., to my father, Salina, Kans., Tuesday, July 21, 1942.  Stanley was my father’s 9-year-old brother.

Tues, Jul 21, 1942: school of army cooks

“Wayne writes that he has been attending school of army cooks and thinks it probable that he will change camps soon but believes he will remain in the U.S. for some time.” 
 -- Letter from my grandmother, Bloomington, Kans., to my father, Salina, Kans., Tuesday, July 21, 1942.  My dad’s cousin, Wayne, was 27.

Tues, Jul 21, 1942: to the army

“Did you know Eleanor Anne was operated on for appendicitis in June and was home just about a week before Mildred's operation?  She is getting along O.K.  I read one of her letters at Aunt Edith's to-day.  She said Byron was just deferred until July 1st but has heard nothing in regard to his going to the army.  Harold has changed jobs.  He is a fireman at a defense plant of some kind near Decatur.  Richard is still in Wisconsin, Carroll was transferred to Decatur and Ira still works at his job of delivering milk to nearby towns.  Betty is in school at Bloomington Ill. Don't know what she plans to do.”

-- Letter from my grandmother, Bloomington, Kans., to my father, Salina, Kans., Tuesday, July 21, 1942. 

This letter, written six months after the U.S. entered World War II, provides a rundown on my fathers’ many cousins living near Decatur, Illinois.  All the men mentioned were in their twenties and of draft age.  As this letter shows, the majority of men of military age were not in combat.  Germany had invaded Poland in September of 1939 and France in May 1940.  In response to these events, the United States began to consider military conscription.  Roosevelt finally endorsed such a proposal in August 1940, in the midst of his second re-election campaign.  Ultimately, his Republican opponent, Wendell Willkie, came out for a draft as well.  Roosevelt signed a selective service bill into law on September 16, 1940 – the country’s first-ever peacetime draft.  The September 1940 Selective Service Act required all men ages 21 to 35 to register for twelve months of military service.  By the fall of 1941, the military had gone from 250,000 men to 1.5 million.  With the declaration of war against Japan in December 1941, the term of service was extended through the duration of the conflict.  In November 1942, the draft pool was increased to all men ages 18 to 45.   A variety of professions including ministers, farmers, miners, commercial sailors, railroad workers, and milk deliverers were exempt from conscription.  In all, sixteen million Americans served in the military during World War II.  However, only one third of the men between the ages of seventeen and thirty-five ever joined the military. And, a fourth of those military men (including my father) never left the United States.  (Source: "Selective Training and Service Act of 1940" in William H. Young and Nancy K. Young, World War II and the Postwar Years in America: A Historical and Cultural Encyclopedia, Vol. 2. [Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010] pp. 617-621; John W. Jeffries, Wartime America: The World War II Home Front [Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996], 171.)

Tues, Jul 21, 1942: new suit

“We went to Wichita to-day took over a cow and two calves and I persuaded Daddy to buy himself a new suit.  It is surely good-looking sort of a grayish blue.  Am returning the one we ordered from Ward's.”

-- Letter from my grandmother, Bloomington, Kans., to my father, Salina, Kans., Tuesday, July 21, 1942.  My grandparents had to drive about 33 miles to Wichita (pop. 114,996 in 1940) to sell livestock at the stockyards.   Montgomery Ward's company presented a useful option for rural people far from any stores by allowing consumers to have products from their catalog delivered by mail.  The company operated its catalog business from 1872-2001, and operated brick-and-mortar stores part of that time.  (After bankruptcy and liquidation in 2001, it sold its name and brand which are still used by a separate company, Direct Marketing Services Inc.)
       My father wrote the following about visiting the stockyards in his memoir: “In my childhood taking cattle to the stockyards in Wichita for sale was a pleasant break from the farm routine.  Leonard usually took me with him on days that seemed right according to the farm report of Bruce Behymer.  Behymer delivered his radio program in a nasal twang, which many tried unsuccessfully to imitate, from his office at the stockyards over Station KFH, keeping us up to date on prices.  One or two animals we loaded into our own trailer to be pulled behind the car, but, if a half a dozen were slated for sale we hired a neighbor’s truck, sometimes Charlie “Slim” Myers’s new 1936 Chevrolet.  We pushed the uncooperative, bawling cattle, up a loading chute one by one into the bed of the truck.  They were justifiably alarmed at the change in their routine.  Once the truck was underway, we followed by car.
      “At the stockyards we made our way through the bustling crowd in to the offices of Rieff-King Commission Company, where Jeff King greeted Leonard warmly as an old friend, and sometimes walked with us on the catwalk above the pens.  There we found the cattle that we had unloaded for sale.  Jeff, dressed in a stylish ten-gallon hat and boots essential in the muck of the pens, descended among the bellowing, circling cattle, brandishing his whip at recalcitrant animals.  When Dad returned to the office for the check, Jeff was cordial, and talked about all kinds of things.  We believed that he had gotten the best possible price from Jeff, and we learned about all kinds of confidential business arrangements.  Rieff and King had an agreement that in the event of the death of either, their widows would share in the business profits.  Then Jeff handed me small pencil which could be put back into the tubing with the Rieff-King name on a red background.  A valuable memento it was to a small boy, and Leonard was doubtless glad to have the check to keep us going.  He could sell his steers as money was needed.”

          (Sources: Sidney DeVere Brown, Kansas Farmboy: A Memoir of Boyhood and Youth [2008], 112-13; Montgomery Ward in Wikipedia)

Tue, Jul 21, 1942: quiet and lonesome

“Woodrow came after Carol & Philip Sun. evening.  It seems rather quiet and lonesome since they left. Up until he came both the children said they were going to stay here but after he came they decided to go home.”

-- Letter from my grandmother, Bloomington, Kans., to my father, Salina, Kans., Tuesday, July 21, 1942.  Woodrow was my grandmother’s brother.  His young children (ages 2½ and 4) had been staying with my grandparents, while he and his wife were separated.

Wed, Jul 15, 1942: chiggers

"Ada & Mary Ruth were over this afternoon to see Philip & Carol.  Philip was pretty cross to-day; he has chiggers all over him."

-- Letter from my grandmother, Bloomington, Kans., to my father, Salina, Kans., July 15, 1942.   Philip and Carol, ages 4 and 2½  were my grandparents’ nephew and niece, staying with them while their parents were separated.  Ada Lenz lived on a neighboring farm; and Mary Ruth McNeil was the wife of the Methodist preacher in Bloomington.  Chiggers are the larval stage of trombiculid mites. Their bites are familiar to anyone who's walked through tall grass in the part of the country where I grew up.  (Sources: “Chiggers” at PubMed Health; “Trombiculidae” at Wikipedia.)

Wed, Jul 15, 1942: haul water

"Uncle Orrin is going to thresh to-morrow.  Barbara is going to haul water for him."

--Letter from my grandmother, Bloomington, Kans., to my father, Salina, Kans., July 15, 1942.

Farmers shared labor by forming threshing crews that went from farm to farm to thresh wheat (i.e., pitching the stalks of wheat into a machine that separated the grain from the rest of the plant).  My aunt Barbara was fourteen years and taking on the role often assigned to children when threshing parties came through: hauling water.  My Dad wrote the following about threshing when he was younger. “Threshing wheat was an annual task which I remember vividly for the first time in the torrid summer of 1936.  Bill Hill owned the community's threshing machine, and George Tribble the steam engine which towed the thresher between farms at about two miles an hour.  Farmers traded labor with one another, and the threshing crew of two dozen men had a welcome morning off if the move were distant.  Ordinarily farm life was isolated and solitary.  Threshing wheat was a very exciting event because it brought a multitude of neighbors and workers to our place for a day or two.... For making the rounds every half hour on my horse Old Tony, I made fifty cents, and had a few dollars of my own at the end of the season.”  Farmers began acquiring combines in the 1940s, which combined harvesting and threshing.  This new technology eliminated the shared labor of threshing crews.

(source: Sidney DeVere Brown, Kansas Farmboy: A Memoir of Boyhood and Youth [2008])

Wed, Jul 15, 1942: married

“Forgot to tell you Glennagene (Berger) was married in May.  Her husband is in the army so she is staying at her folks.”

--Letter from my grandmother, Bloomington, Kans., to my father, Salina, Kans., Wednesday, July 15, 1942.

Glennagene’s wedding took place during a surge in marriages that happened as the U.S. went to war.  We can imagine many reasons for this upsurge: economic optimism as government spending on the war effort practically eliminated unemployment and a desire to enjoy the present given an uncertain future.  One other reason may have been to avoid conscription or combat.  Americans expected, rightly to some extent, that draft boards would be less likely to draft married men than single men.  Marriage rates shot up (by 50% in one survey) when Germany invaded France and talk of conscription began in the spring of 1940.  They shot up again after Pearl Harbor.  Similarly births spiked nine months after Germany invaded France and again nine months after Pearl Harbor.  Although most of these marriages lasted, the haste to marry also led to a doubling in the divorce rate from 1940 to 1946.  (Berger was my grandmother’s maiden name; however, I am not sure who Glennagene was.) 

           (Sources: William L. O’Neill, A Democracy at War: America’s Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II [New York: The Free Press, 1993], 86;  John W. Jeffries, Wartime America: The World War II Home Front [Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996], 87-88).

Wed, Jul 15, 1942: get into everything

“Woodrow and one of his brother-in-laws came out Sun. eve.  He said Maryjane has decided to come back so they are coming after the children next Sunday.  It is lots of work taking care of them because they get into everything they come to.”
--Letter from my grandmother, Bloomington, Kans., to my father, Salina, Kans., July 15, 1942. Woodrow was my grandmother’s brother.  His young children, Philip, age 4, and Carol, 2½ , had been staying with my grandparents while Woodrow and his wife, Maryjane, were separated.