Thu, May 14, 1942: sang her solo

"Well Aunt Ina sang her solo Sunday and the miracle is we all seemed to survive afterwards. It wasn't so bad but it wasn't so good.”

-- Letter from my grandmother, Bloomington, Kans., to my father, Winfield, Kans., May 14, 1942.  Ina, my father's aunt, lived on a neighboring farm.  My father’s family attended the Bloomington Methodist Episcopal Church, where Aunt Ina sang her solo that Sunday.

Thu, May 7, 1942: a solo

“Dorothea is getting out of singing with Ina Sun, but Mrs. Haring said Ina asked if she (Mrs. H.) would accompany her (Ina) on a solo.  So don't suppose we can talk her out of it.”

-- Letter from my grandmother, Bloomington, Kans., to my father, Winfield, Kans., Thursday, May 7, 1942.  Ina, my father's aunt, lived on a neighboring farm.  My father's family attended the Bloomington Methodist Episcopal Church, a mile and a quarter from their house, where Ina was scheduled to sing her solo. 

Thu, May 7, 1942: Ration Book

“I am sending your Sugar War Ration Book which I suppose you are to give to Mrs. Sellars until school is out and we must be sure to get it to bring home then so be sure and take good care of it.

“To-morrow is the All School Picnic at Augusta and then the band is giving their Victory Program at night.  We are going in if nothing happens.  The admission is a 25¢ War stamp or more and you get to keep the stamps.  The band is divided into two groups to see who can sell the most stamps & bonds.  So Barbara asked Aunt Stella to buy stamps and Uncle Frank bought a $1000 bond so she almost fell over she was so tickled but this morning she found out that Dick Alley had seen Ed Varner and he (Ed) got a $1200 bond from Dick and of course Dick is on the other side from Barbara so don't know which side will win.”

-- Letter from my grandmother, Bloomington, Kans., to my father, Southwestern College, Winfield, Kans., Thursday, May 7, 1942.  Throughout his college years, my father lived at Mrs. Sellars’s boarding house.  Since she cooked his meals, he apparently gave his ration book to her.  His uncle Frank was wealthy from oil revenue.

            Civilians in the United States suffered nothing like the civilians in other combatant countries in World War II.  Yet they were called upon to make sacrifices, by buying war bonds and by restricting consumption.  And, of course, many made the enormous sacrifice of losing a loved one in combat.  Unlike the current Afghanistan War and Iraq War, all Americans were continually made aware through their daily lives that the country was at war.  The Office of Price Administration and Civilian Supply had been created in April 1941, before the war, and would be replaced by the more powerful Office of Price Administration (OPA) in August 1942.  After Pearl Harbor, the agency implemented a series of rationing programs on items such as gasoline, tires, canned food, meat, butter, sugar, coffee, and shoes.  Consumers had to master the use of complex ration books containing coupons with expiration dates, in order to buy their allotted share of restricted products.  Tires were the first products to be rationed, in January 1942, since Japan controlled Southeast Asian sources of rubber.  The government also put in gasoline rationing and a ban on pleasure driving, again to conserve tire rubber, in December 1942.  The OPA took coupons away from some drivers, found to be driving for pleasure, and not for an acceptable reason, such as work, health, religious services, buying necessities, or handling emergencies.  The difficult-to-police ban on pleasure driving was lifted in September 1943, although tire and gas rationing continued.
              Food rationing affected farmers, such as my grandparents, less than it did many others.  Their farm was self-sufficient in most food items, except sugar and tea.  Rationing likely affected their son away at college more.  Sugar was the first food item to be rationed, starting in April 1942.  It was scarce, in part, because German submarines made shipping from sugar plantations in Cuba and Central America difficult, and, in part, because the U.S. was shipping food to allies in Europe.  The sugar allowance was initially 8 ounces per person per week.  In March 1943, butter and meat rationing began.  Meat consumption (excluding chicken and fish) was limited to 4 ounces per person per day.  People in the military, however, received ample supplies of meat, over half a pound a day in the army, and about a pound a day in the navy.  Victory gardens became a popular way to compensate for food shortages.  By one account, they provided 40% of vegetable production during the war years.  Rationing restrictions began to ease by the summer of 1944, but did not fully end until 1946.  (Sources: "Rationing." World War II and the Postwar Years in America: A Historical and Cultural Encyclopedia. William H. Young and Nancy K. Young. Vol. 2. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010. 574-581. Web. 13 Apr. 2012; Harvey A. Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (University of California Press, 2003), p. 85; Susan B. Carter, et al., eds., Historical Statistics of the United States: Earliest Times to Present (Cambridge: Cambridge U Press, 2006)

Wed, Apr 29, 1942: Victory Concert

“The band is having a Victory Concert a week from Friday.  We (the band members) get out Friday afternoon to sell tickets.  To get a ticket one has to buy a War Savings Stamp (any kind, 10¢, 25¢, 50¢, etc.) or a bond.  The money is turned over to the United States.  The band gets nothing but experience.”

-- Letter from my aunt, age 14,  Bloomington, Kans., to my father, 17, Southwestern College, Winfield, Kans., Wednesday, April 29, 1942. 

            My aunt's activities that Friday were part of the second of eight war bond drives during World War II. This one lasted from April 12 to May 1, 1942, and raised $18 billion.  Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., wanted to sell bond not just to the wealthy and large institutions, but to average Americans, including schoolchildren like my aunt, in part to raise money, but more importantly to sell the war and to make Americans "war-minded."   Judging from the tone of her letter, my aunt may not have been entirely sold on the idea. 

The federal government spent only $8.9 billion in 1939 (this itself was a large increase over pre-New Deal spending); but the government laid out an average of $75 billion annually during World War II.  Higher taxes, bonds, and the printing of money paid these increased expenses.  The Treasury Department started the Series E bonds for average citizens, in the spring of 1941.  It targeted two other series, F and G, at insurance companies, and corporations.  The government termed all three bonds defense bonds until Pearl Harbor, at which point they became known as war bonds.  In all, Series E (the ones bought by the general public) accounted for $33.7 billion (about 17%) of the $186 billion of bonds sold during the war.

Bond drives drew heavily on popular culture to sell bonds and the war itself to the broad public.  Advertisers organized under the War Advertising Council (the forerunner of today’s Ad Council), professional athletes, the movie industry, songwriters and musicians, commercial illustrators, and individual celebrities, such as Lucille Ball, James Cagney, Fred Astaire, Humphrey Bogart, Bing Crosby, and Bob Hope, were all involved in the effort to get Americans to buy bonds.

Schoolchildren, like my aunt, were encouraged to participate by buying defense savings stamps, which came in 10¢, 25¢, 50¢, $1 and $5 denominations.  Once a child had $18.75 in stamps pasted into their book, they could trade that in for a bond worth $25 at maturity.  The Treasury Department's "Schools at War" program encouraged these purchases by providing schools with materials containing "stories, plays, songs, and recitations that linked the buying of savings bonds and stamps to the value of democracy, citizenship, and patriotism."

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), 138; John W. Jeffries, Wartime America: The World War II Home Front (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), 31-36; "War Bonds," in William H. Young and Nancy K. Young, eds., World War II and the Postwar Years in America: A Historical and Cultural Encyclopedia, (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010), 2:751-759.

Tue, Apr 14, 1942: got to read

"Sunday I got to read about 113 pages of 'Pride and Predjudice.' Don't know when I'll get to read the rest of it.  It is real interesting and quite a bit different from present day novels."

-- Letter from my grandmother, Bloomington, Kans., to my father, Southwestern College, Winfield, Kans., Tuesday, April 14, 1942.  My grandmother was a schoolteacher, homemaker and farmer (although I imagine she referred to herself as a farmer's wife).  She obviously had very little time for recreational reading.  Pride and Prejudice had been made into a movie in 1940 starring Greer Garson, Laurence Olivier, and Edward Ashley, with a screenplay by Aldous Huxley and Jane Murfin. (source: imdb.com)

Fri, Apr 10, 1942: little kittens

“Stanley has been sick and I had to bring our two new little kittens up to the house for him to see.  Stanley's kitten is yellow, black and white and he named it Fuzzy.  Mine is all white.  I can't think of a good name for it (and don't suggest McArthur).”

-- Postcard from my aunt, Barbara Brown, age 14, on the farm at Bloomington, Kans., to my father, 17, a freshman at Southwestern College, Winfield, Kans.  Their little brother Stanley was 8.

         General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964), was Supreme Commander, Southwest Pacific Area in World War II.  He and his forces had just fled the Philippines for Australia in March, and given his famous “I shall return” speech.

         Cats had important work to do on the farm, catching mice.  But, as this letter makes clear, they were also loved as pets.  As they do on many farms today, cats lived outside in the barn and got much of their food on their own.  My grandparents did, however, give them some of the milk from the cows.  I remember stories of (and perhaps saw) cats waiting around while my grandfather milked the cows, knowing he would occasionally squirt some milk in their direction so they could catch the stream in midair.

          Source: “Douglas MacArthur” on Wikipedia.org.

Sun, Mar 22, 1942: skating rink

"Ray announced at the skating rink that Augusta had won in the finals at the basketball tournament at Hays but it seems like the paper said this morning Fredonia won. So suppose the paper is right but it seems funny Ray stopped the skaters and made the announcement and everyone shouted their heads off.  So everyone will sure be disappointed if Fredonia won."

--Letter from my grandmother, Bloomington, Kans., to my father, Winfield, Kans., March 22, 1942.  I’m not sure who really won.  Now that 80% of American adults use the Internet (at least occasionally) and 35% of Americans adults have smart phones, it’s hard to imagine a scene like this one these days.  The Internet has allowed lots of misinformation to proliferate, just not erroneous sports scores. (Sources: “35 percent of Americans own smart phones, says Pew survey,”  Consumerreports.org; Pew Institute “Pew Internet & American Life Project Poll, Jan, 2012)

Sun, Mar 22, 1942: little chickens

"We got our little chickens a week ago last Tuesday and are not having very good luck with them.  Have lost 50 out of 459 and they are not quite two weeks old. They with the other work we have to do keeps us busy. We are milking ten cows now and it takes quite a lot of time.  I usually help some in the morning after I get Barbara off to school and always in the evening."

--Letter from my grandmother, Bloomington, Kans., to my father, Winfield, Kans., Sunday, March 22, 1942. 

             Chickens and cows were part of the diversified farm my grandparents operated, which allowed them to produce a great deal of the food they ate (except for a few items like sugar and tea), while also having many different products to sell for income.  In the 1940s, their farm had beef cattle, dairy cows, pigs, chickens, grains (including wheat, alfalfa, sorghum, and milo), and garden vegetables.  In the postwar years, like most American farmers, they began to specialize more and to buy most food at grocery stores.  By the 1970s, they were raising beef cattle and grains and had no pigs, dairy cows, or chickens.

            My father wrote the following about the farm’s cows in his memoir.  “As a young boy, I heard Leonard's voice very early in the morning telling me that it was time to get up to milk the cows.  I can hear that insistent voice yet in memory!  We had six to ten milk cows, which required nearly an hour of steady milking by the two of us.  The work was arduous, and hand muscles were strengthened only with practice.  The task was also confining, for milking was required morning and evening throughout the year.  We could not be away for a single day without making arrangements for substitutes.

“Still, the milk cows were indispensable to the farm economy.  Regular income kept us in necessities between the sale of annual crops, or farm animals.  At first it was the income from cream delivered to the Bloomington store, or the creamery in Augusta, in ten gallon cans every week or two.  Finally, in the late 1930s we began to sell milk daily, picked up by Cleo Randall who drove the milk truck.  The milk check of about thirty dollars a month kept us going, as Leonard often remarked.  The night milking was kept in a can in cold water, and the morning milking often finished just before the milk truck rolled in.  Sometimes it was still going through the strainer as Cleo stopped to pick it up.  Our sanitation measures were primitive, and milking in the barn without washing the cows would probably not be permitted today.  But no complaints ever reached us about the foaming white liquid which came from our herd of cows.

“These cows were a mixed lot, Holsteins, Jerseys, Guernseys, or some mixture thereof.  They bore names conferred by the whimsical Leonard:  ‘Aunt Violet,’ a petite jersey whose milk was almost yellow, and contained a high content of butterfat, was named for the elegant Aunt Violet Berger; ‘Maudey,’ part Guernsey, the ‘brindle cow,’ was purchased from the Clarks, and bore the name of Clark’s wife, Maude.  Another was named Aunt Ethel, for Aunt Ethel Berger,  but whether these ladies knew of their namesakes, I never learned.  The name of the large Holstein, I have forgotten, but she gave the most milk, and was very easy to milk, in contrast to the Jersey which required stout hand muscles, making instructions to milk rapidly difficult to follow.  Cows gave more milk if milked quickly.

“Leonard talked more while milking than at any other time, and from those conversations, I learned that he was a fan of Kansas politics.  ‘In 1928 Clyde Reed promised that, if he were elected governor, he would not appoint Henry J. Allen to the U. S. Senate, but he did it anyhow, and was beaten for reelection.’  Leonard was a man of few words, but, while milking, opened up about the things which interested him.  When he was not there, I sometimes sang the popular songs of the day, and my cousin Joyce Sooter was vastly amused when he came into the milk place, and heard me singing, ‘Flatfoot Floogie,’ in time to the streams of milk.

“On any given morning my job was to bring in the cows from wherever they had spent the night in the pasture.  After the animals were penned up in the barn lot, they were brought into the barn to be secured in the five or six stanchions in the milk area.  While their heads were clamped in place, they were fed oats, soy bean cakes, alfalfa hay, or even prairie hay in winter.  While the cows chewed on their cud, the milking began, and could be a dangerous enterprise as certain cows were infamous for kicking the milker.  These we restrained with hobbles, iron cuffs linked closely by a chain.  The work was always done from the right side.  Anyone who came in from the city, and tried it from the left side was dispatched with a rousing kick.

“Before the cows became fresh with milk, they produced calves, and these were kept, when weaned and small, in the pen east of the barn.  They had their own feeding place in the barn itself, next to the oats bin.  Their water came from the well, just south of the pen.  Watering the calves was my job, and ten to twelve buckets of water had to be pumped from the well each day, and carried across the lane to be poured into the half metal barrel used for watering.  To a little boy that was a tedious job.  The cows, by contrast, drank directly from Muddy Creek, whose opaque, gray water justified its name, from the half acre bought in 1881 from the quarter section to the north.”  (Source: Sidney DeVere Brown, Kansas Farmboy: A Memoir of Boyhood and Youth [2008], 97-99.)

Sun, Mar 22, 1942: Barbara’s birthday.

"Well to-day is Barbara's birthday and we all went to Katherine’s for dinner.  Flo, Everett and Lois were there and Mr. and Mrs. John Smith and Mrs. Alley.  So with Katherine's family there was quite a houseful.  We had a nice dinner.  Of course I baked Barbara a birthday cake so we took it along and had it for dinner too.  It was pink angelfood with blue and pink frosting."

--Letter from my grandmother, Bloomington, Kans., to my father, Winfield, Kans., Sunday, March 22, 1942.  My father’s sister, Barbara, turned 14 that day.  Katherine and Flo were my grandmother's sisters.

Sun, Mar 1, 1942: little chickens

“We are going to get our little chickens next week so suppose I'll be busier than ever.  Did you get your clothes, popcorn and mute O.K.?

“Hope you are well and write us again when you get time.

“Lots of Love

“Mother”

-- Letter from my grandmother, Bloomington, Kans., to my father, Southwestern College, Winfield, Kans., Sunday, March 1, 1942.  (Note that my grandmother washed my father’s clothes and mailed them to him, while he was in college.  Southwestern College was 30 miles from the farm.)

On my grandparents’ farm, chickens provided meat, eggs, and income.  One factor that encouraged chicken consumption and sales in World War II was that chicken, unlike pork, beef, veal, and lamb, was not rationed.  My grandparents purchased certified white Leghorn chicks from the Augusta Hatchery and sold eggs back to the hatchery at a premium, because of their pedigree.  As was typical in many households, women cared for the chickens on my grandparents’ farm.  It was my primarily my grandmother and my aunt who cared for the chicks and later collected the eggs, although my father fed them as well and had the job of cleaning out the chicken house on Saturdays.

While the Augusta Hatchery was a small operation by modern standards, my grandparents’ connection to it was part of a trend toward greater specialization in livestock production and a decline in the self-sufficiency of farms.  The local hatchery could monitor its breeding program more precisely to increase egg production in its birds.  In addition, Gene Schofield of the Augusta Hatchery, regularly visited my grandparents’ farm to supervise conditions in their brooding house and prescribe remedies for sick chickens.  This was a step away from more traditional farming, where chickens simply reproduced on the farm.
           Chicken raising and people’s relationship with chickens have changed radically in the seven decades since my grandmother got those chicks from the hatchery.  Lots of Americans, including myself, see problems with the transformation of poultry production in the postwar years: declining animal welfare, declining human health from increased meat consumption, loss of the efficiencies that come from combining animal and plant production, a basic loss of knowledge of where our food comes from. But my father never expressed any regret about these trends which meant he probably never had to clean out a chicken house or slaughter a chicken after he left the farm. Like most Americans, he welcomed these changes.

Before they were hidden away in factory farms, chickens were much more present in Americans’ daily lives.  Most country kids and many urban kids in 1940s knew from an early age the details of raising, caring for, and slaughtering chickens.  With chickens close at hand, people consumed more eggs.  Americans ate about 310 eggs per person per year in 1942 and only about 240 eggs in recent years.  Chicken meat, however, was more a by-product of egg production than a primary goal. It was a way to get rid of birds that did not produce eggs: roosters and older hens.  Before the factory farming revolution and marketing success of products like Chicken McNuggets, Americans ate about a fifth as much chicken meat as they do today: 15 pounds of poultry meat a year in 1942 vs. 73 pounds by 2007.   

Leghorns, such as those on my grandparents’ farm, descended from chickens first brought to United States from rural Tuscany in the mid-nineteenth century, their name deriving from an anglicisation of Livorno, a Tuscan port.  This breed has provided a great deal of the genetic stock of the standard factory-farmed caged laying hen of today.  Through breeding programs, and changes in feed, lighting, and housing, egg production has increased dramatically. (Factory-farmed laying hens generally do not receive antibiotics or hormones, unless they are sick.) These hens produce up to 270 eggs a year nowadays, while typical hens produced around 100 eggs a year in the 1940s.

 In the decades after World War II, egg and chicken meat production became highly specialized and vertically integrated.  Small-scale operations like that of my grandparents are now a tiny part of the industry.  The number of farms growing chickens went from about 1.6 million in 1950 to about 27,000 today.  The majority of these broiler operations work under contracts with one of the four large chicken processors – Tyson, Perdue, Pilgrim’s Pride and Sanderson – which sell them chicks and dictate their production methods.  Egg production is highly consolidated as well. The 180 or so egg-producing companies with flocks over 75,000 hens represent 95% of all layers.

  Sources: Sidney DeVere Brown, Kansas Farmboy: A Memoir of Boyhood and Youth, 1925-1952 (2009), 113-14; Marion Nestle, What to Eat [New York: North Point Press, 2007], 261; "Leghorn (chicken)" wikipedia article USDA, “Food Availability Data System”;USDA, "Farm Production, Farm Disposition and Income: Chickens and Eggs1939-1940";  Marsha Laux, "eggs profile" (Iowa State University); Ryan A. Meunier and Mickey A. Latour "Commercial EggProduction and Processing" (Purdue University); Pew Environmental Group.  "Big Chicken:Pollution and Industrial Poultry Production in America" (July 2011).