In 2020, while we were all in pandemic lockdown, one morning my father-in-law, Herbert Turman, called my wife on her phone, and launched into a rant on lockdown protests that were occurring at the time. My wife Toni always talked to him in speaker mode, so I got to be privy to the rant. I’m sure everyone remembers the “I Need a Haircut” sign or signs. There was one with a Roman Catholic priest with a few of his parishioners protesting that they couldn’t attend mass. My father-in-law did not approve of the protests and called them a few choice words such as “stupid” or “weak.” He then started talking about WWII, and how they couldn’t get things, and how they couldn’t go anywhere because of gasoline rationing. He continued on, saying that his father worked, and his mother picked up a job in a factory. They earned more money than they had ever made in their life, but there was nothing to spend it on. He summed it up by saying, “And we did it for four years!” Everyone knows about WWII rationing, but how did it affect my parents and Toni’s parents?
I have vivid memories of the Arab oil embargo of 1973. I was living with my parents in Jefferson County, Florida at the time, and it didn’t affect us that much. My dad, who always had a weakness for small, imported cars, drove either a Datsun 510 (made by Nissan) or a Dodge Colt (made by Mitsubishi) along with the family trash and firewood hauler, a Datsun pick-up truck.
To save fuel, President Nixon asked everyone to voluntarily drive 50 miles per hour. Even though my dad didn’t care for Nixon, and didn’t vote for him, he was one of the few people to drive 50. He had to attend a conference at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida so one afternoon after work he stopped off at the Army/Navy surplus store on Tennessee Street in Tallahassee and bought two five-gallon jerry cans. He filled them with gasoline, loaded them into the back of his Datsun truck, and drove the 218 miles to DeLand at 50 MPH. I know this because he took my brother and I with him. All three of us rode in the cab of a subcompact pick-up truck with the luggage and gasoline tossed into the rear bed. Good times.
The United States in 1942 was much better able to handle the shock of gasoline shortages than the United States in 1973. There were fewer automobiles on the road, and many families didn’t own a car at all. In 1940 there were 0.83 cars for every household in the U.S. By comparison, in 1973 that number had risen to 1.2 cars per household, and today that number is probably around 2.0 cars for every household. Many families in 1942 didn’t own a car. Public transportation was more extensive than it is now as well as rail lines.
When the United States started rationing gasoline in May of 1942, the basic ration was 16 gallons a month. To make matters worse, bicycle rationing started later that summer.
Frank and Rosa Turman owned their home just outside of South Beloit, Illinois, and they also owned some land; enough land to plant a garden and raise livestock. Frank Turman, Jr. wrote down his reminisces a few years before he died in 2013, and one of those stories involved a horse and a car. It probably occurred prior to the war, maybe sometime between 1938 and 1940.
Frank wrote that one of his chores was to water their horse. They owned a horse, I guess. One morning his father walked to work “as he did sometimes.” Frank Turman, Sr. worked in the foundry of the Fairbanks-Morse Company in Beloit, Wisconsin. The distance he walked was around three miles. He walked to work, did manual labor all day, and then walked home. Frank, Jr.’s job was to take a tub of water out to the pasture for the horse. His father’s car was just sitting there so Frank got the idea to use the car to take the water out to the horse. Frank had never driven a car before, but had watched his father do it, had driven a tractor before, and was confident he could do it. There was just one hitch. The car’s battery was dead. Either that was the reason his father walked to work, or the car had been sitting unused for so long the battery died. Undeterred, Frank and his friend Ruchie took the battery out of the car, walked “downtown,” purchased a new battery, walked back with it, and installed it in the car. The car started right up.
He took the tub, a newer one his father had paid $3 for, filled it with water, and tied it to the front bumper. He then started driving, but when he shifted into second gear, he lost control of the vehicle and ran over some mailboxes. This must have caused the tub to be knocked off the front bumper because he ran over the tub and bent the bumper of the car.
When his father got home from work, and found out about the damage to the car and tub, his mother started crying and begged him not to kill Frank,Jr. He didn’t. Instead, not long afterwards, he got Frank a farm driver license.
He also wrote about when it came time to butcher one of their cows or hogs, his uncle, Mansfield Bass, would travel down from Vernon County, Wisconsin with his “twin tomahawks,” and Uncle Mansfield and his father would butcher the animal themselves, and utilize the entire animal. Rosa Turman reportedly made good calf brains and eggs.
When wartime rationing started in 1942 the Turman family, like many rural and semi-rural families, were largely self-sufficient when it came to food. Even though meat was rationed, they still enjoyed chicken, beef or pork, and vegetables grown in their garden.
Frank Turman, Sr. did have 12 mouths to feed which was reduced to 10 when his stepsons Ross and Lyle enlisted in the army. Gas rationing didn’t affect them that much. Frank Turman was clearly in the habit of walking to work so he saved on gas and tires, which were rationed as well.
My dad once told me a story about him and my mother’s honeymoon. They were married in 1944 in Sarasota, Florida, and spent their honeymoon in St. Petersburg, Florida, about 50 miles away. While they were driving, my dad worried about his car’s tires blowing out the while way.
One thing the Turman family did not have was a proper bathroom. My father-in-law frequently mentioned that he had to use an outhouse while growing up. A lot of families used an outhouse. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 45% of households nationally did not have a tub or shower with hot and cold water or a toilet. As my father-in-law said, his parents were both working and earning more money than they had ever had but had nothing to spend it on. At some point, they put a proper bathroom in the house with some of that money. The Census Bureau reports that by 1950, 35.5% of households did not have a tub or shower or toilet, and by 1960 that number had dropped to 16.8%. Good times at the Kohler Company.
My father-in-law frequently complained of not having shoes in his childhood. Shoes were expensive, but shoes were rationed during the war, and in a family the size of the Turmans, it not surprising that he spent his summers barefoot.
Clothing was not rationed per se, but the War Production Board limited the amount of fabric that could go into clothing, so fashions became simpler. Those limitations ended in 1945.
Meat and cheese rationing didn’t start until 1943, and poultry and milk were never rationed. Beginning in May of 1942, each person was issued a ration book with stamps, and different cuts of meat were assigned different stamp values depending on demand and supply. The value of the meat was constantly changing.
This was all overseen by the Office of Price Administration or the OPA. The office was created in August of 1941 to prevent price gouging in times of shortage, and inflationary concerns. Former president Richard M. Nixon worked for the OPA for a short time but quit to join the Navy. He ripped a page out of the OPA playbook when he imposed wage and price controls in 1970 to control inflation. High fructose corn syrup came into common use during his administration as well in an effort to keep food prices down. A 2012 Los Angeles Times opinion column was titled, “Blame Nixon for the Obesity Epidemic.”
Congress had to reauthorize the OPA every year, and in 1946, after considerable agitation by the National Association of Manufacturers, or NAM, a bill was passed limiting the scope of the agency. This bill was vetoed by President Harry Truman, who wanted the agency to have more power, and with the OPA gone, food prices rose 14%, igniting a public outcry to the point where it was brought back with the same limited scope that Truman originally opposed. By 1947, the OPA was gone for good, and 1947 was the year sugar rationing came to an end. That didn’t mean that shortages came to an end once the confetti from V-E and V-J Day celebrations was swept up.
In a letter postmarked May 13, 1946, my mother wrote to her mother from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where my parents were living at the time, “These ads the NAM is putting out about ‘want more meat? Then write your congressman to kill OPA’ make me very, very mad, and I even got sufficiently militant to withdraw my trade from the store that displayed them. Since they were the only store in town that ever got meat, it hurt me much, much more than it did them, but I get the fun of feeling a crusader, anyway.”
My father-in-law was right. Compared to what they endured during WWII; pandemic lockdown was nothing. Personally, I did just fine during lockdown despite the annoyance of not always being able to buy my preferred brand at the grocery store.
The advantage that my Frank and Rosa Turman had over people now – and to an extent, the advantage my parents had over people now – is that they knew how to make do without. They knew how to make things, how to repair things. They knew how to make a meal out of what they had on hand. According to the legend, wasn’t it WWII that birthed that all time American classic meatloaf? With edible sawdust?
As my mother wrote her father in 1945, “Gramma {my great-grandmother Clara Sharp} and I are aping Mrs. Miller now in her solution to the meat shortage. We’re going to raise chickens, 30 apiece. Mrs. Miller is quite an experienced canner, so some I’ll put up for the winter; if it’s good enough.”
Among the many sources I used were Wikipedia, the U.S. Census Bureau, and copies of letters and memoirs I’ve collected over the years, as well as my memory.
Thanks for reading. This one is a day late. Toni didn’t like what I originally was going to write about so she suggested this.