U.S. At War: That’s All There Is

Only a fulltime hoarder, with unlimited bankroll, could keep up with the flood tide of shortages; no hoarder had the future really cased without a full stock of hair curlers and wigs, Easter lilies and lawn mowers, girdles and cod-liver oil, sugar and quinine, gin and tea, rubber diapers and bronze caskets.

As steadily as a butcher’s slicing machine, the War Production Board trimmed new layers of fat off the U.S. standard of living. Out for the duration went all the kitchen gadgets which modern housewives had substituted for grandma’s elbow grease: electric toasters, waffle irons, mixers, dishwashers. Out went the nursery’s tin soldiers and electric trains.

Flies would be a major menace: swatters could not be made of metal, nor of rubber either. Tire-rationed motorists who had begun to think of buying bicycles woke up one morning to find that bicycles were rationed too.

Every time WPB said, That’s all there is; there isn’t any more, a new spasm of hoarding was touched off. But more & more citizens began to take pride in getting along with what they had. Some of their ideas were funny; some were good common sense:

> Shorter shirt tails—one inch would save 4,000,000 yards of cotton a year—were urged by the National Association of Shirt and Pajama Manufacturers.

> When WPB ordered toothpaste and shaving-cream buyers to turn in an old tube when they bought a new one, a Manhattan bride was horrified. She and her husband had used their parents’ tooth paste; they had no tube to turn in. A drug clerk saved her honeymoon, sold her tooth powder in a can.

> Washington’s tax collector announced that all brass dog-license plates would have to be turned in this year before new ones—of fiber—were issued.

> In curtailing thumb tacks, paper clips and pins, WPB urged businessmen to substitute tiny staples for clips on papers to be filed. Businessmen were one jump ahead; clerks and stenographers had long been salvaging pins and clips from discarded papers.

> Toymakers were ready, with substitutes, for their WPB order cutting off metals and plastics. Believe-it-or-not example: a wooden tricycle.

> In Los Angeles and San Francisco, Yellow & Checker Cab Co. advertisements begged patrons to stay out of taxis except in emergency.