No. 105 July, 2009
Harold Ratzburg was born at the start of the Great Depression and raised on a Dairy Farm in Wisconsin. He served four years in the US Air Force in the 50's and was stationed in Germany, where he met his wife Anneliese, who helped get him through College to become a Civil Engineer. After a time as a Highway Engineer and College Instructor, he wound up as a City Engineer of a small town in New Jersey. Twenty four years later he retired to become an old geezer telling old stories on his new fangled computer.
A Farm Boy Remembers World War II
By Harold Ratzburg
The Jap attack on the US of A at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, occurred when I was twelve years old, and slowly our life on the farm changed. The years before had my Dad struggling to recover from the Great Depression, but when the war started, the country stared to pull out of it and farm products and labor became important to the war effort.
It also affected us kids. Instead of playing cowboys and Indians, we begin playing war games and shooting Krauts and Japs instead of those pesky redskins.
It seemed like EVERYBODY got into a patriotic mood and the whole country worked together, not like today with all the political groups pulling in different directions. The War Effort was tops for everybody.
Scrap drives had every one saving something. I remember finding an old broken plow point on a stone pile up on our hill one time, and I lugged that sucker clear across forty acres so that I could turn it in to a scrap metal drive in town. People were asked to save tin foil and toothpaste tubes. The tin foil would be collected together making a ball, until the ball got big enough to make it worthwhile to take to the collecting point.
Rubber was a big deal, because the Japs had captured the Dutch East Indies where almost all of the rubber that the USA used came from. New rubber products were not available, including tires, so scrap rubber was collected for the war effort. I remember giving up an old hot water bottle to the drive because a brick heated in the kitchen stove oven and wrapped in cloth would serve the same purpose so as to keep this kids feet warm in bed, in the unheated upstairs of the old farm house in the cold Wisconsin winters. (It could be that the old rubber bottle had started to leak, but it does sound more patriotic and/or heroic to say we gave it up for the War Effort.)
One of the other drives, (I believe it was organized through good old Marion High School,)was to collect milk weed pods. For city folks, I will explain that the milk weed was a weed (of course) that grew wild (of course) and when you broke a stem, the sap inside oozed out and looked like milk. As the weed matured, it developed pods that contained fluffy stemmed seeds that eventually would break out and float away in the wind. The War Department told us that the fluffy stuff inside the pods would be used to make life preservers for the sailors of the US Navy, so us kids gave it our all, and roamed the hills and cow pastures with a gunny sack to collect for the boys in service. I always kinda wondered how in the heck these things could be made to float a sailor, but then, who was I to question the War Department.
Tin can collecting drives was also important. Any old tin can was to be cleaned out and then crushed so as to take up less space. When we got enough to make it worthwhile, we would take them to town and sell or trade them in to Max Dapin, who ran a scrap yard and a grocery store in town.
Wartime rationing was a very real thing. You couldn't just walk into a store and buy as much sugar or butter or meat as you wanted, nor could you fill up your car with gasoline whenever you liked. All these things were rationed which meant you were only allowed to buy a small amount (even if you could afford more). Meat, silk, shoes, nylon and just about everything else was rationed. The Sears Roebuck and Co. catalog of 1943 contained a list of all rationed farm equipment. Even chicken wire fencing was rationed.
Fortunately, In 1940, before the war and rationing started, Dad got a new Ford-Ferguson rubber tired tractor, ($740.00) complete with a hydraulically operated, three point hitch, combination quack digger and cultivator. (($114.60) and pully ($29.00). Before that, Dad had run the farm with a team of horses and an old and slow but powerful, 1926 Fordson tractor with cleated drive wheels which was not allowed on the asphalt road because the cleats tore up the road surface. Clintonville Used Car Sales, where Dad bought the tractor, gave him $100.00 as trade in for the old Fordson. (How do I remember all that stuff in such detail, you might ask?????? It's because Brother Lyle still has the original receipt from the sale and he told me.)
Anyway, getting back to the Wartime, gasoline was also strictly rationed. By the end of 1942, half of the US automobiles were issued an "A" sticker which allowed a whole 4 gallons of gas per week. That ain't a heck of a lot, and for nearly a year, A-stickered cars were not to be driven for pleasure at all. Now, how is that for sacrificing for the war effort? Imagine if people were called on to do that today !!!!!!!!!
Farmers were better off, because they received an "R" sticker for non-highway vehicles, such as farm tractors and how could anyone know how many gallons were necessary to do the farm work? My Dad had an iron drum holding maybe, 100 gallons, mounted about six feet high in the woodshed. A local gasoline dealer delivered gasoline to that tank, and it was fed by gravity flow to the tractor when he needed it. If a little got into the family Model A Ford somehow, nobody would really know about it. But you know, I don't think that happened very often, cause things were so tight on the farm, that there was not much of an excuse to go into town or anywhere else for pleasure. Dropping in at the neighbors or nearby relatives after milking for a visit and maybe to play a few hands of sheepshead compromised a great deal of the recreation that a farmer could afford, time wise and money wise. TV of course, was not an option.
Actual vacations, where a dairy farm family would take a trip for a coupla days were very difficult, because where could you find someone reliable who would milk those damn cows twice a day. When Dad would take the family away over night on occasion, he worried about what was going on back home all the time. Those damned cows needed that TLC every day, morning and night. What if a hired man got drunk in town the night before, and didn't wake up in the morning to do the milking???? We sometimes had hired men like that on the old homestead, so Dad did not like to go far from home..
The national speed limit was 35 miles per hour, not really to conserve gasoline, but to conserve the rubber tires, Remember, the Japs had control of most of the rubber trees in the world in Dutch East Indies, and artificial rubber had not yet been invented or produced, and it took a lot of leaky old hot water bottles to make a new tire.
Along about 1943, in spite of shortages of everything, my folks acquired a real honest to goodness electric refrigerator. There was a black market for things in short supply, and I really don't know if Dad got the refrigerator legally or not, but we went from the old icebox, powered by ice cut out of and hauled from Kinney Lake the winter before, to an electric box with a light that went on automatically when you opened the door. It was a real modern miracle to this kid. As I remember, it took two months, or more, before Dad could get someone to install an electric receptacle into which to plug the fridge. I remember that every day when I came home from school, I would open the door to see if the light went on, cause I had a brand new baby sister named Patsy, that needed cooling for her bottle. Finally of course, it did, and the old ice box went to the dump down by the swamp.
Post war, Post script: After the war ended of course, things got better and new cars became available.
I remember that Tony Malueg, Jim Malueg's Dad, got one of the first new Ford cars that came into Marion. Jim Malueg and I were chumming around together at the time and double dating with our girlfriends.
Back then, it was advised that new cars be "broken in" for the first 1000 miles at no more that 35 MPH. Jim was a very cautious guy, and believe me, that new car never went over 35 MPH while he was driving. Do you know how long it seems to take to get anywhere at only 35 MPH? FOREVER, is the word to describe it. But Jim held it there by Gawd, AT 35.
Contrast that with a note in my high school year book a year or two later from Lee Keller with whom I also chummed around. Lee wrote "We've had some good old times together ain't we, but I still am going to try to make Clintonville in 3 1/2 minutes.
Oh well-----different friends, different times----but all of them good!!!!!!
