Yes, yes. We got—they were called V-mails. We would get like “Dear,” and we’d have our names on the top of them and then, “How are you?” and then blacked out. We might get four or five sentences and then the whole thing would be… I think they had large centers set up around the both sides of the United States that censored nothing but the mail coming through, thinking that somebody was gonna say something, as though anybody worried about telling where they were gonna be. They would censor them all and they would just cross them off; black them out. So all you would get was like, “Dear So and So, I’m fine. I love you,” and then that was about it. But you looked forward to that. I mean you really looked forward to it. Dad didn’t have anything that was censored on his side, going over. They didn’t worry about us. They were afraid that they might put out some little thing that would get out over here that would give the enemy some inclination of where a certain division was or something like that. We would wait for weeks; maybe we wouldn’t get anything. Then all of the sudden we’d have eight, ten, fifteen, twenty letters in the mailbox. It would be like, you know, how happy we were, but there wasn’t much on them because everything would be censored and blacked out.
What was the rationing like, that you remember?
JM: You would get books at the first of every month and they would be like little coupons in them or little stickers. They’d have like one point on them, five points, ten points, fifteen points, and then your canned goods were all rationed. Gasoline was rationed. You got two pairs of shoes a year. That was it. A lot of your meat was rationed, so you had, and you got so many—I don’t remember how many points, but you got so many points a month. So you would have to figure your meals around your points, or you ate things that weren’t rationed—like bread wasn’t rationed. So you could have bread and butter—or bread, not butter. But you could have bread. Like maybe a can of peaches would be worth thirty-five points. Well, you better be careful because maybe that month you were only allowed two or three hundred points. So it was a little different. That was the only thing you had to try to figure out. Chicken wasn’t rationed, but meat was. Tires; you couldn’t get tires. Gasoline was rationed and so we didn’t use the car unless it was absolutely necessary. My mom did save up oh, about every four months we would take a trip out to what they called Point Defiance—it had been a military base, and it was a zoo now. We would get enough gas to go out there and take a little picnic and we could go through the zoo. That was our big outing, and then come back home. But other than that, the car just sat because we didn’t have enough, gas for it. My school was about a mile-and-a-half, maybe two miles from where I lived. They didn’t want anybody taking bus transportation unless they absolutely needed to because they wanted those for the workers. So the kids all walked back and forth to school unless it was a really bad day, and then they let you ride the bus. That was a lot of fun.
JM: We had air raid practice all the time in school. It was very scary because they would make you, when it would go off—and you never knew when this was going to happen, they would just have a citywide thing and the air raid sirens would go off. You would get under your desk and curl up in like a little fetal position, with your hands over your head, and you would just stay there until you were told to come out. I can remember one time walking home with my old girlfriend and she looked at me… we’d bought an ice cream cone, which was very, you didn’t get that very often. We’d saved up our money for it and she said to me, “What would you do if you heard an air raid siren right now?” And I said, “I’d probably throw this ice cream and run like the devil for home.” I didn’t say, “devil,” but I [unclear.] She said, “I think I’d be so frightened, I’d just stand here frozen.” Well, you know, a second later the siren went off and we both did the reverse: I stood there holding the cone, and she threw hers and started running. But it was a horrible feeling, ‘cause you just didn’t know. We had blackouts, of course, every night. We had to have the heavy windows covered and no lights going on outside at all. You didn’t go out at night, at all. You stayed in because everything was pitch black. We did have—they had, air raid drills all the time, so you got, you never were sure if it was one or it wasn’t one, so you reacted. In our apartment house, in the basement area, they had what they call their “air raid room.” When we’d hear ‘em at night, we all go down there and they had little bunk beds and food and supplies and stuff, where we could stay in case anything happened. So you might stay down there all night and then they would release you in the morning and you could some back upstairs. It was just a drill, but still at that time, you didn’t know.
RM: Did you participate in recycling or help recycle stuff?
JM: They didn’t really do a lot of that that I remember. We saved…
RM: Scrap drives?
JM: We saved like cooking fat and stuff like that and tin cans. We would have to save tin cans. We would crush them and put them outside. I don’t remember saving paper or anything like that, but I know tin cans, we did, and we recycled the fat from cooking if we had anything. I don’t know what they used that for, but anyway, we put the cans out and they picked those ups. Basically, you know, really, if it hadn’t been for my brother and dad being in the service, it wouldn’t have—I wouldn’t have, really realized what was going on too much, except for the air raid drills.