By Staff
I bet a lot of people my age can surely remember those pesky war ration books we had to contend with from the U.S. Office of Price Administration during World War II.
The first book was issued in May 1942, along with a mandatory 35-mph speed limit.
Can't you just see going 35 on I-94?
Book number two came out in January 1943. Books three and four were October 1943.
After using a stamp from your book, which had to be done in the presence of the storekeeper or an employee, and if the whole stamp wasn't needed, you would then be given tokens for the remainder of the stamp's value.
Red tokens were for meat and blue tokens were for canned goods.
May of 1942 started gas rationing, which used different kinds of stamp books for the different categories of driving.
You had a sticker in your windshield to tell your type.
At this time was probably when car pooling originated.
I can also remember sugar, tires and shoes were rationed.
My mother used to have a big coffee can sitting on the stove to save cooking fat and meat drippings, etc., to take to the butcher.
We also used to cut off both ends of our tin cans and flatten them to be saved for the scrap drive.
Some butcher shops offered two red tokens per pound of used fat turned in.
When you first got your ration book you had to declare how much sugar you had on hand.
Before giving you your ration book they would remove some of the stamps from your book to make up for the sugar you declared.
Of course, the black market had to come with rationing and a Gallup Poll found one out of four occasionally used the black market.
One story was of a man who hoarded 300 pounds of sugar in his attic, had a leak in his roof and then ended up with 300 pounds of "rock sugar," which he had to break up with a sledge hammer.
If I remember right, my mother had to go to the old Oak Street School to apply for our ration books.
Also, my friend Joy Murphy showed me some ration books she still has. I have a couple red tokens in my pack rat treasures.