These are ideas that Gail Lee Martin shared on the Our Echo website back in 2007. She hoped they would inspire people to write about their childhood days.
September Memories
I recently read about a restored World War II P-38 named Glacier Girl being featured at the Oshkosh Air Show in Wisconsin in July and this jogged my memory of using food stamps and gathering scrap metal during WWII. We did without a lot of things because they were rationed, such as car tires, gasoline, sugar even meat. What are your memories of things during WWII?
Scrap metal and rubber collected during WWII for the war effort.
I also remember when we moved to town and had to buy oleo. It looked like lard until you put this small yellow pill into the oleo and blended it all together. Still didn’t taste like butter. Have I jogged your memories yet?
What kind of magazines do you remember your parents & grandparents having around the house? Maybe Good Housekeeping, Red Book, Country Gentleman, or an Almanac. Did you ever order anything from the ads in the magazines or order from Sears and Roebuck or Montgomery Wards catalogs? Or other types of catalogs.
Then did we start having home parties like Tupperware, Avon, to sell things to our friends? Those were fun and they still are except so many women have jobs outside the home that you can find only a few that have the time come.
I see they have brought the Bobble Head dolls back. Every young person old enough to drive had some kind of those bobbleheads on the dashboard of their cars, mostly dogs and other animals. This was just before WWII.
I remember when Farm Auctions were a place to go to see your friends and find something you just couldn’t do without. Of course, they were no fun if it was your family that was selling out. Did you ever go to auctions with your Dad or Granddad?
Romantic ruffles are back again. My mother put ruffles on my dresses and blouses in the 1930s and again for my five girls in the late forties and early fifties. She even put them on her aprons.
Ginger Martin in a ruffled dress – 1950s. Probably made by her grandmother, Ruth McGhee.
School started in our area this past week and school days should jog your memories of how you dressed, or carried lunch or ate at school. My kids each had a different lunch box decorated with their choice of popular characters on the sides. Did you? Let’s see how many different school memories we can come up with.
Discovering Mom 