You might recall Ultimate Christmas Toys from your own past — a Barbie, or Lionel train set, a Cabbage Patch Doll, Rubik’s cube, or Lego set. Today’s Ultimate Toy tends to rely on advanced electronics, a gigabyte of memory, a video screen, and it probably doesn’t sell for less than $130. It’ll be unique, clever, engrossing. It’ll also be in tune with today’s tastes in amusement, because fashions in entertainment change just as they do for clothing.

In post-war America, the fashion in toys was education. The Christmas tree was crowded with games to stretch children’s minds. They were a hit with the parents. They flopped with kids — which didn’t surprise some toy experts. The staff at New York’s F.A.O. Schwartz toy store had a theory about what made a toy successful.

Toys, they say, are nothing more than an imitation of life. In a footnote they add that any plaything is worthless if it is not fun to use.

The store’s vice president said,

“If you have to force or coax a child to play with a toy, it’s a waste of money,” he says, “The popularity of educational toys was the result of high-powered salesmanship, backed up by fancy psychology, that tried to teach mothers what children should have instead of telling them what kids always have liked,” He sighs lugubriously. “That’s the trouble with the business. Adults buy the toys. If kids shopped for their own stuff, everybody would be a lot happier.” [“There’s No Other Store Like This,” Stanley Frank, Dec 14, 1946]

For years, the Ultimate Christmas Toy was a Monopoly set. Monopoly hit the market in 1935 and made a fortune for Parker Brothers Inc., and becoming the most successful board game in history. In the decades that followed, the Parker executives reviewed hundreds of new board-game ideas, hoping to find the next big money-maker. They received hundreds of proposals for new games, but few seemed promising.

In 1957, within two weeks of the launching of Sputnik I, the company got a hundred Sputnik games. Half the games sent in today concern space travel, and Parker is fed up with them—inventors love them but people don’t buy them.

“I have no idea why some subjects sell while others don’t,” says Edward P. Parker [grandnephew of the company’s founder]. “Every time we make up a theory, we’re proved wrong.”

Members of the board (no pun intended) at Parker Brothers found almost all new ideas were variations on old standards.

Like a comedian who has heard all the basic jokes, the Parker firm has seen countless variants of the six basic games: track games (Parcheesi), war games (chess), word games (Scrabble), card games (rummy), luck games (dice or roulette), and alignment games (Chinese checkers).

The company could probably survive if it made nothing but Monopoly, but Parker has some 150 games in stock and produces a half-dozen new ones each year. The firm makes over 10 million sets yearly. No one knows the total number of all games sold annually in the U.S., but a rough guess is 50 million. ["Pass Go And Retire," Roy Bongartz, April 11, 1964]

At the time of this article, 1964, the company was selling one million Monopoly games each year. Today, 275 million have been sold and Hasbro, who owns Parker Brothers, claims that over one billion people have played the game. And Monopoly is just a small part of the American toy industry, whose sales exceed $20 billion each year. No wonder toymakers spend their years, and fortunes, to create the next Ultimate Christmas Toy.

Yet one inventor struck it rich by accident — and help from his two-year-old son. Richard James was a nautical engineer who conducted performance testing on battleships. One of his tools was a torsion meter, which tested the horsepower delivered to ships’ propeller shafts. To get an accurate reading of torsion, free of the ship’s vibration, the meter was suspended by a spring. One day at work, James knocked one of these springs off his desk and noticed how it bounced and flipped. He showed it to his boy.

Slinky creator R. T. James and his son, Tommy, race Slinkies down a set of stairs.

James’ son, Tommy, liked one as a plaything. So did a neighbor boy who came down with measles. So did other children. The engineer had a vague feeling that he ought to do something with this device, but it was Tommy who showed him the possibilities. The boy put one on the steps of their home, pulled the top of the spring down to the next step, and to James’ surprise this talented hardware walked gravely down.

James immediately set out to design a toy in which this trick would be perfected. A piston-ring company manufactured a few for him in the fall of 1944, but toy dealers weren’t interested. Less than a month before Christmas a department store phoned to say James could use the end of one counter, but would have to serve as salesman. No little embarrassed, he and his wife turned clerks on November twenty-seventh and sold their entire supply—400—in ninety minutes.

In the last few weeks of the year, the toy made more money for them than James had earned all year in a good engineering job. By Christmas 22,000 had been sold, and by October of this year James was manufacturing 22,000 a week. He had sold 430,000, had his own business, his own little factory, and had quit marine engineering cold.

["Up Bounced a Business," Robert M. Yoder, Dec. 21, 1946]

While high-tech toys come and go, the Slinky remains popular, impervious to toy fashion. And while it might never again be an Ultimate Christmas Toy, it is something almost as good — a toy that can be enjoyed by more than one generation.

Building The Ultimate Toy: From Monopoly To Slinky The Saturday Evening Post

General Walter Bedell Smith, Ike’s chief of staff, described the situation in the first of a sic-installment series entitled, ”Eisenhower’s Six Great Decisions.” The whole outcome of the war might rest on his first great decision, which was “forced on the Supreme Commander not by the action of the enemy, but by the weather.”

This was the irrevocable order, issued shortly after 0400 hours on June 5, 1944, to launch the invasion of Normandy during a twenty-four-hour break in the worst June weather the always un- certain English Channel had churned up in twenty years. We were at Portsmouth, where an Advanced Command Post bad been set up overlooking the harbor. Everything the planners could do to insure the success of the gigantic undertaking bad been completed. The troops were in the armada’s 5000 ships, ready to converge on Normandy from every port in England. Weather could wreck the expedition, and already the assult had been postponed a day because of the Channel gale.

No commander bas ever faced a more formidable decision than General Eisenbower at that dawn meeting of his commanders in chief and meteorologists. With the wind blowing rain against the window, it was one man’s responsibility to weigh all the factors and decide—twenty-four hours before H Hour on the beaches—whether he would give the order to go.

The Supreme Commander made the rounds of assaulting divisions and noted with satisfaction that the troops seemed bard and eager. The soft English spring moved toward June in a succession of beautiful days and long twilights which deepened into perfect nights. If the weather held, the Supreme Commander’s decision would be a routine confirmation of June fifth as D day.

It was comforting to remember that General Eisenhower was not only a great commander but a lucky one. Everyone had said so since North Africa, when the calmest seas in the oldest inhabitant’s memory bore our first invasion shoreward. His reputation had been confirmed off Sicily, when a sudden storm lashed the invasion fleet on its crossing and then miraculously died in time for H hour.

But as May wore out, June dawned dark and stormy with a gale over the Channel. Up at Shipmate—code name of the Advanced Command Post on the bluff—we shivered in our tents and trailers. The meteorologists in their Nissen huts near Admiral Ramsay’s headquarters worked desperately, searching the fronts for clearer skies. They were not only trying to predict the weather, they were trying to make it. Commanders’ meetings at Southwick House were charged with worry. The sober fact was that the worst June storm in twenty years was whipping the Channel.

By 1000 hours on June third, it was evident that the weather was worsening, not improving. The meterologists confirmed it. Periodically that day we listened to their forecasts, but they could promise no immediate change. There could be no invasion on June fifth—the ideal day. At a special commanders’ meeting at 0200 on June fourth. General Eisenhower accepted the certainty of delay. After discussing the matter gravely with his commanders, he issued orders to postpone the operation for at least twenty-four hours.

The timetable required slower elements of the fleet to be in motion well before the major force was launched. Some were already under way. Because radio silence was imperative for the security of our plans, destroyers were dispatched to round them up. That afternoon the Supreme Commander sent me down to the harbor to see the men who came back to Portsmouth. It was heartbreaking to watch their faces. The eagerness had gone out of them, now that the edge of their expectation was dulled. I have never seen more unhappy soldiers.

There was no promise of a break in the weather that evening. With all their alchemy, the weather wizards could not lift the blanket of cloud that hung over our heads and our spirits. We drove back through the blackout after the ten o’clock meeting June fourth with dull realization that if we could not go on June sixth, we should almost certainly have to postpone our assault for another two weeks, the earliest date when the tide would again be right. Although June seventh would still have met our conditions if the weather cleared, some of the ships which had come down from northern ports would have insufficient fuel to carry through the assault phase if it were postponed…

It was still drizzling outside the trailer when I got up to attend the meeting set for 0400 on the morning of June fifth… All the commanders were there when General Eisenhower arrived, trim in his tailored battle jacket, his face tense with the gravity of the decision which lay before him. Field Marshal Montgomery wore his inevitable baggy corduroy trousers and sweat shirt. Admiral Ramsay and his Chief of Staff were Immaculate in navy blue and gold.

The meteorologists were brought in at once. There was the ghost of a smile on the tired face of the tall Scot. “I think we have found a gleam of hope for you, sir,” he said to General Eisenhower, and we all listened expectantly.

“The mass of weather fronts coming in from the Atlantic is moving faster than we anticipated,” the chief meteorolgist continued. “We predict there will be rather fair conditions beginning late on June fifth and lasting until the next morning, June sixth, with a drop in wind velocity and some break in the clouds. Ceiling—about three thousand.”

But toward evening of June sixth, his charts showed, there would be a recurrence of bad weather, with high winds and rough seas. It was impossible for the experts to predict how much longer the bad weather would last. They were giving us about twenty-four hours of reasonable weather. That was all.

General Eisenhower inquired how many hours he could count on for the attack and just when bad weather would resume. The morning will be fair,” the Scot said. “Good weather may last through the afternoon.”

All the questions had been asked, and then there was silence. No one broke it, and I suppose all the men were thinking, as I was, that postponement now meant two week’s delay. It meant an almost insoluble problem of what to do with the thousands of troops in the ships. I remembered their dejected faces. It was impossible to keep them closed in for two weeks, yet to let them out of the beach areas would almost certainly convey information to the Germans about our attack. There was the problem of the press correspondents, too— almost 100 scattered through the invasion force. The very fact that they filed no dispatches for two weeks would arouse suspicion. Finally, there would be the reaction of our Russian Ally, whose great eastern offensive was to be co-cordinated with our assault.

The silence lasted for five full minutes while General Eisenhower sat on a sofa before the bookcase which filled the end of the room. I never realized before, the loneliness and isolation of a commander at a time when such a momentous decision has to be taken, with full knowledge that failure or success rests on his judgment alone. He sat there quietly, not getting up to pace with quick strides, as he often does. He was tense, weighing every consideration of weather as he had been briefed to do during the dry runs since April, and weighing with them those other imponderables.

Finally he looked up, and the tension was gone from his face. He said briskly, ‘Well, we’ll go!”

Eisenhower didn’t make the decision lightly. He was never blinded by the self-assurance and hubris that has spelled the ruin of many military commanders. As proof, we have this public statement, which an aide later found in Eisenhower’s pocket, written in case the invasion was turned back.

‘Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.’

The Great Decision: Eisenhower Makes The Call The Saturday Evening Post

In “Hillbilly Boom,”[PDF download] Zolotow reports on the efforts of Art Satherley, who scouted country music for Columbia Records. In March of 1942, Satherley was auditioning potential recording artists in a Dallas hotel when he met Albert Poindexter.

On that historic morning in March, Satherley, a scholarly and dignified man who speaks with a British accent and looks somewhat like an Oxford professor of Greek history, placed his pince-nez on his nose and patiently listened as Poindexter and his companions dreamily strummed and thrummed and twanged their way through the thirty-five lays of despair. Finally, Satherley selected twelve to be recorded. The best of the twelve, thought Satherley, was a lilting love song called Rosalita. Another of the twelve was a ballad having to do with a husband who is having a wild time in a night club in the company of a blonde when his wife catches him in flagrante delicto, she forthwith drawing a revolver, shooting out the lights and beating him gently about the face. Although he was not particularly impressed by this saga of marital infidelity, Satherley recorded it because he liked its steady, insistent rhythm. He was otherwise unimpressed, however, because he says that in hillbilly circles it is very common to hear songs about men and women who are unfaithful to each other, and who are always shooting it out with guns.

“To be honest about it,” Satherley recently confided, “I never dreamed it would be the hit it turned out. We only released it because we needed a contrast to put on the other side of Rosalita.”

Released in March, 1943, Rosalita was promptly forgotten. Instead, millions of Americans began to walk around advising pistol-packin’ mama to lay that pistol down. By June it became one of the biggest selling records in the history of American recording and by December, 1943, it had sold 1,600,000 copies, and the manufacturer had orders on hand for 500,000 more which he could not fill because of the wartime shortages of labor and shellac…

The Hit Parade for a long time refused to recognize the existence of “Pistol-Packin’ Mama” because the opening line went “Drinkin’ beer in a cabaret,” and the radio networks are not permitted to publicize people who look upon the malt when it is amber. This is a ruling of the Federal Communications Commission. The publishers of Pistol-Packin’ Mama haled the Hit Parade into court, and finally the lyric was altered to read “Singin’ songs in a cabaret,” and Pistol-Packin’ Mama became No. 1 on the Hit Parade…

Satherley has a gloating air of triumph as he recites these and other statistics which prove that hillbilly music has come into its own. After “Pistol-Packin’ Mama,” among the biggest recordings of the past twelvemonth have been “There’s a Star-Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere,” by Elton Britt and his band, and “No Letter Today,” by Ted Daffan and his Texans, both of which have gone over the million mark. Six large radio stations now have gigantic programs devoted solely to hillbilly music, and WLS broadcasts five solid hours of the National Barn Dance every Saturday, In Nashville, Tennessee, the Grand Ole Op’ry [sic] is aired over WSM for four hours. NBC broadcasts portions of these two programs on a national hookup, and has a third sorghum show entitled The Hook ‘n’ Ladder Follies.

Almost as remarkable are the grosses amassed by hillbilly units which play one-night stands all over the country in county auditoriums, schools, barns and theaters. Obscure performers playing in hamlets like Reeds Ferry, New Hampshire, will draw $5600 in a single night. On the road, hillbilly troupes will consistently outdraw legitimate Broadway plays, symphony concerts, sophisticated comedians and beautiful dancing girls. When a unit, say, like Roy Acuff and his Smoky Mountain Boys is scheduled to hit a town like Albany, Georgia, farmers will pour into Albany from a 200-mile radius, and night after night Acuff will play to audiences of 4000 in places where Betty Grable or Tommy Dorsey or Bob Hope would only succeed in drawing boll weevils…

A hillbilly unit waiting backstage before a performance. On the road, troupes of this kind have consistently attracted larger audiences than many a big-time Broadway production.

It is no mystery to Satherley, who, for some twenty-five years, has been crusading for hillbilly music among his cynical Broadway friends, Satherley dislikes the term “hillbilly,” and he keeps talking about ” folk music,” “country rustic” or “mountain music.” He says that the explanation of the hillbilly phenomenon is quite simple. He explains that most Americans either live on farms today or came from farms, and that the strains of a hoedown fiddle or a cowboy plaint are their own native folk music and the one they will always respond to, no matter how far they have gone from the farm. He also believes that the congregation of groups of young men in Army camps has much to do with the boom in hillbilly music.

Because much of the hillbilly talent is employed in farming or ranching, Satherley must seek out his talent in the bayous, the canebrakes, the cotton plantations, the tobacco regions…

Although all hillbilly music sounds monotonously alike to the urban eardrum, it includes many types of music.

The qualities Satherley says must always be present in fine hillbilly music are simplicity of language, an emotional depth in the music, sincerity in the rendition, and an indigenous genuineness of dialect and twang, “I would never think of hiring a Mississippi boy to play in a Texas band,” he says, “Any Texan would know right off it was wrong.”

But, above all, sincerity, even if it is awkward unpolished sincerity, is the criterion used to judge the performer. “A true folk singer who is not synthetic can be recognized because he doesn’t ‘do’ a song; he cries it out with his heart and soul,” Satherley says.

After sincerity, Satherley strives to project the meaning of the lyrics. “The person who listens to mountain music wants to hear a story,” Satherley explains. “My singers must get the picture of the words. I’ve got to instill into them a picture of what they are singing about. If they’re singing about a dead person, I impress on them that their best friend is lying dead and ‘you’ll never see him again.’ I tell them, ‘Sing It in the extreme.’ In folk music, we don’t care about trick ways of phrasing or hot licks; we concentrate on the emotions. The country people — these so-called hillbillies — are tremendously sensitive people, with deep emotions. Whereas the sophisticated city person likes these humbug boy-girl love songs, with everything pretty-pretty, the mountaineer is a realist. His songs deal with loneliness, misery, death, murder.”

Read “Hillbilly Boom,”[PDF download].

The Post Discovers Country Music… in 1944 The Saturday Evening Post

Nationally, however, it seems to balance up this way: in war industry, women have been pulling their weight, and still are, though the last few months of 1943 saw a dismaying tendency among job-holding women to quit.

Women do all right in the armed forces when enlisted, but too few bother. In civilian-volunteer work, the situation is healthy only in special lines. In the home they could do better; in general co-operation they are unimaginative. The sum is not impressive. It is easy to see why many women going all-out in topside war-activity jobs admit disgust with their own sex, sometimes heatedly.

The author reported that the WACs (Women’s Army Corps) was having trouble meeting recruitment numbers. Hospitals were short of nurses’ aides. Moreover, women were spending a lot of the money they were earning and not saving precious household wastes.

The favorite general diagnosis for the failure of women to enlist is that fathers’ and boy friends’ disapproval is the catch. In view of how little masculine disapproval affected women’s urge to vote and wear colored nail polish, the theory seems inadequate.

Rosie the Riveter’s detractors like to harp on the fact that, in spite of fair-to-wonderful pay, absenteeism and turnover run higher among women than among men in war jobs.

Fair-to-wonderful was $31 a week doing the same job that paid a man $56 a week. Beyond the unfairness of the pay inequity, there’s also the household budget reality: a women who replaced a man lived on 45% less money.

"When G.I. Joe comes home from the wars, and naturally wants his old job back, will she have to come down from her perch?"

Admirers point to the fleets of planes over Berlin and Micronesia, made in plants where 40 per cent of the pay roll are women, many of whom never had an industrial job before.

The significant point seems to be that, where employers realize that women are not just “little men,” but different creatures, Rosie does very well. In some War-Department plants, handling high proportions of women cleverly, their absenteeism and turnover are better  than men’s.

The Moore Dry Dock Company, of Oakland, California, an important shipyard turning to women as manpower dwindled, once had a women’s turnover of 20 per cent every three months… Nowadays. Moore’s newly recruited women go on the job after a full course… to break them in on what men know automatically… It works. The first three months reduced turnover of women so processed to 7.9 per cent.

Rosie’s other troubles may come from the obvious fact that, to quote a sage expert, “Women don’t have wives”—nobody at home to clean the house, get breakfast, pack a hearty lunch and have a hot supper waiting. With a home and often youngsters to look after before, or after, her eight-hours at the plant plus transportation time, Rosie has a job and a half. No wonder so many women quit war jobs in a few weeks from discouragement or, after four to six months, from exhaustion.

The steady rise in the birth rate in the last few years is one thoroughly valid reason, of course, why many young women are not in war work. The nation now has more than 1,500,000 babies and children under four whom it would not have had if the birth rate had stayed at 1937 levels. Taking care of them under wartime shortages of help and safety pins is often a full-time job for a new mother, and always the best possible national service.

Almost 3,000,000 babies born since 1940 were “first births,” meaning inexperienced mothers. The total woman-hours involved in taking care of the 10,300,000 American babies known to have been born in the last four years is no negligible factor in the national situation.

Still, many women accepted these challenges. They took on totally new jobs and continued to hold the old one as homemaker. However they contributed to the war effort, women must have taken a dim view of the armchair experts who questioned their patriotism. They could criticize women’s motives and performance because they were volunteered, not ordered. Men escaped such criticism thanks to the wonderful incentive of the Selective Service Board. Even so, many men found ways to dodge the draft, and the criticism.

An eminent American legislator, asked to wrestle with that problem for purposes of this article, finally muttered something about “Why just talk about women? Too many Americans of both sexes are still trying to sit out the war.”

Read “Are Women Doing Their Share in the War?” [PDF download].

War, Work, and Women, Part II The Saturday Evening Post

Domestic America had also changed. The returning GI might have sensed a difference in women’s attitudes, but nothing like a call for equal rights. Women, for the most part, quietly put down the rivet gun and resumed traditional roles as homemakers. They were generally glad the men had returned and looked forward to the domestic life the Depression denied them.

But the war years had given women a closer look at attitudes that shaped their lives and destinies. They thought about it, long and hard. And while they continued the model of femininity their mothers had instilled in them, they raised their daughters with different expectations.

Three articles from 1944 give an historic view of attitudes that shaped women’s post-war thinking. The first, “Paper Dolls” [May 20, 1944 - PDF download], reported on women journalists who had proven they could do the jobs left vacant by men in service.

Women have invaded such hitherto inviolate masculine precincts on newspapers as finance, politics, sports, and the police beat. Paper dolls are reading copy, working on the rewrite desk, taking pictures. They are covering riots, crimes of purple passion, train wrecks, fires and suicides without swooning.

Much to the astonishment of the misogynists who work alongside them, the paper always appears on time, it is reasonably free of errors and there has not yet been a deluge of libel suits or indignant readers canceling their subscriptions.

The authors, who were [ahem] both men, grudgingly conceded:

It pains die-hard newshounds to admit it, but the newspapers would have been in an awful jam in the last two years if women had not been ready, willing and sometimes [sic] able to step into vacancies on staffs depleted by the draft.

While ignoring the condescension in their article’s title, the authors wrote about the outspoken, unapologetic contempt that newspaper editors felt toward women.

"Typical copy desk today. That skirted reporter at the left chats sociably between puffs while two female copyreaders struggle with dispatches and a copy girl does her best."

All things considered, the recommendations in favor of newspaperwomen outweigh the objections against them, but the ancient prejudice still holds firm. Managing and city editors are suffering the dames under protest; chivalry impels them to throw the ladies a few words of good cheer and encouragement, but candor compels most editors to admit they will take a dumb man of erratic social habits over a smart gal every time.

According to the city editor of a major paper, “No matter how able they are, all are given to chattering among themselves and with personable male staff men,” Bodin broods. “They are coy and warm by turns; they clutter and clatter endlessly. Every afternoon, just after the home-edition dead line, the local room presents the sight and sound of a meeting of neurotic clubwomen. The atmosphere demoralizes the men. I have to restrain myself violently from installing a samovar and serving tea and ladyfingers at three o’clock.”

The girls write well enough, they have a deft touch on descriptive stories, human-interest yarns and interviews—provided they don’t gush over the interview. Yet it is rare to see a woman write the lead story on a news break of major importance. Most editors believe women have a constitutional inability to gather up all the loose ends of a complicated story and weave them into a compact, well-rounded piece.

Fortunately, the authors were aware of some basic truths of the situation:

A few words in defense of the girls should be offered at this time. All the faults found with them can be applied to inexperienced men: editors are prone to forget that the majority of their paper dolls were secretaries, file clerks, telephone operators, receptionists or copy a girls a short time ago.

They have been thrown into jobs demanding special technique and know-how without the basic training given men reporters in normal times. Veterans had to serve a long apprenticeship of dreary leg-work, and they were promoted slowly as their knowledge of the craft expanded. The girls have been plunged into the whirlpool of news without the breaking-in process that teaches them how to keep their heads above water. Newspaperwomen further are laboring under strains men do not have to contend with.

Many are married and some have young children; there are households to maintain and, if husbands are in the service, there is a constant pressure for money.

Read “Paper Dolls” [PDF download]

Next: You Just Can’t Get Decent War Workers These Days

War, Work, and Women The Saturday Evening Post

We can count the money spent and the number of Americans wounded and dead, but the effect on society is harder to calculate. Business declines. Resources grow scarce. Opportunity shrinks. The money for non-essential industries dries up. And people just learn to get by with less. They lower their expectations. Sometimes, they never raise them again.

Americans endured such things in 1944, knowing how little they sacrificed compared to the GIs in combat. So it is rare to find an article that talks openly about the cost of living in wartime. The author of “Ouch! That White Collar Pinches” [PDF download] gives a glimpse into family life in wartime, as it was lived, not recalled through clouds of nostalgia. Owenita Sanderlin accepts that wartime austerity is inevitable. But she is dismayed that her husband’s education and profession are so poorly rewarded.

In our garage, next to a 1935 model without any rubber, is a row of wooden chairs.

We have tried glue and nails and everything else, but nothing will hold them together any more. George sits, and they split. Not that George is so hefty. He may be more than six feet tall, but he weighs only a hundred and fifty pounds. It’s just that the chairs didn’t cost very much, in the first place, and they have served their term. So now we sit around our maple table on an odd assortment of seats — George on a solid piano stool; Frea, our five-year-old princess, and I on the wobbly, last two of the chairs; Mary, fat, funny and three, on a tall kitchen stool; and David, the baby, in the remains of the high chair.

We eat the minimum essentials with just enough silverware to go around, washing the spoons between dinner and dessert — when there is any dessert. Of course, if we have company — which I have been avoiding lately — I get out my wedding-present silver: six spoons, four knives and four forks, six salad forks and a sugar spoon. We have been borrowing the chairs, ever since the time a college president folded up in one of those little maple numbers of ours. I suppose when the last two chairs are gone, we shall eat buffet style.

Surely, you are thinking, it isn’t so bad as all that. You can still buy chairs. Well, maybe you can. We can’t, because we haven’t any money.

Senator Thomas of Utah, a member of the Senate committee which recently investigated the status of white-collar workers… says there are 20,000,000 of us, living on salaries that were low before the cost of living rose 25 per cent or more. He says we are “mighty good Americans” and just as essential as factory workers. We keep the schools open, for one thing. Well, it is comforting to know that somebody appreciates us.

This makes George feel that he is of some consequence—a good teacher, with all the training a man can get, plus experience. His salary is $2000 . . .

The average income in America that year was only slightly higher: $2,400. But, as you’ll see, that $400 would make a big difference in Mrs. Sanderlin’s 1944 budget.

The Sanderlins, one of the thousands of white-collar families squeezed by rising prices. Their budget will not permit such "luxuries" as dining-room chairs.

We live in a small university town in Northern Maine—a town where living is cheap. Milk is only thirteen and a half cents a quart, but, on the other hand, the long winter burns up a great deal of fuel. Then, too, we have three children, but some people have even more. Although we get along, the thing that stumps me is this: How about the people who don’t live in a town like ours?

To get down to details, suppose that your budget, like ours, allowed your family less than $2.50 per person per week for food ($600 per year). Or twenty dollars a year per person for clothes.

Is your rent less than forty dollars? We are buying our house, and the payments are only $38.47 a month, including taxes and insurance. We spend $128 a year for water, electricity and a party phone.

Do you carry much insurance? We can afford only one policy on my husband’s life, which would pay me and the three children $1000. [Health] insurance premiums, in our budget, come to forty-one dollars a year. Perhaps you don’t have large fuel bills. Ours was $135 last winter, for the furnace and hot water in the morning.

How much do you contribute to the Red Cross, the War Chest, your church? And do you like to say no? We can give only thirty-two dollars a year. If we had more money, that is where most of it would go, because we know how many millions of people are far worse off than we are.

Did you ever put up with a toothache because you couldn’t afford the dentist? Or wonder what you would do if your baby were really sick enough so that you had to call the doctor? I have. All I can manage under the item Medical Care is twelve dollars a year for each of us, and it will hardly be enough, even if we are as healthy as usual. Last year, it all went for a baby.

Another difficulty of ours is that my father was a doctor, and so it would never occur to me not to pay a doctor’s bill. Ask any doctor [which patients] are the surest pay. Not the rich, not the poor, but men in white collars.

You may very well have to pay more taxes than we do. Only $3.80 a month is withheld from our check, some which will be returned, and we are glad to pay some Federal taxes; we wouldn’t feel very American if we didn’t. Then we have an extra eleven dollars in local taxes.

Do you spend much in going places-either by bus, train or automobile? We have no items at all in our budget for Transportation. We put our car away and sold the tires. George walks to college, and you should see David’s chubby face entirely surrounded by groceries piled in the baby carriage. We wheel over to the village once a week and stock up.

I suppose you contribute 10 per cent in War Bonds? We feel like heels because we can’t. We have no money to save. We have no savings because the salary was always low, and the first few years of marriage are the hardest. Furniture, babies—you know. But I do put down seventy-five dollars a year for bonds. And we keep them.

How much money do you blow in annually for birthday presents, wedding gifts, cards, Christmas, little toys for the children? We never have been able to give anyone a decent present, although we have received many beautiful things ourselves. We are limited to sixty dollars a year for gifts.

How often do you go to the movies or stop at the drugstore for a soda? Are you taking any kind of vacation this year? These things appear in our budget under the heading of Recreation, and I allow one dollar a month. This has to include the fifty cents it costs for a girl to take care of the children. Cigarettes? Luckily, we don’t smoke.

Do you ever pause beside a newsstand? I’d rather have a magazine than a new hat, but I never buy one. We take one magazine to keep us posted, and listen to the news on the radio or read the paper in the college library. And of course we can borrow from our good neighbors. But if we ever do get rich, George is going to buy – soft music, please – a book.

These miscellaneous items — which must include medicine, postage, stationery, lollipops and such- like — are supposed to come to no more than $6.30 a month in our budget.

Now, if you will add up all the expenses listed above, you should get $1956.84. Deducting this from George’s salary leaves $43.16 to cover the unforeseen. You’re right. It never does.

But we are not in debt— yet. We haven’t lost our home—yet. Right now, George is out in the garden assassinating potato bugs, which helps explain how we live on our small food allowance. And he is looking up at the sky to straighten out the crick in his back, certain the sky over our small white house is bluer than anywhere in the world. He thinks he has pretty nice children too. I agree. Of course, it was rather unreasonable of us to have so many. And, obviously, we can’t have any more.

But we feel that we are getting along fine. We compare ourselves with the privates in the foxholes and the pilots in the sky and the many war workers who are not lining their pockets with gold. Even compared with the war profiteers, we are lucky. The biggest item in our budget costs nothing at all. It’s happiness.

But I wonder about the rest of the 20,000,000 white-collar workers — most of them without gardens — with higher city rents, with transportation expenses, with more insurance, larger families, lower salaries, poorer health and old debts. And what do they do for fun, when they can’t play tennis for free and plant flowers and vegetables in their own back yards? It must be dreadful to stay in a sweltering city all summer long, without a spare cent for weekend vacations, year after year of this war. How they must worry about the future. And I can guess which question worries them most, because it’s my worst nightmare, too: What if prices go up even higher?

Read “Ouch! That White Collar Pinches”, by Owenita Sanderlin, July 22, 1944 [PDF download]

Family Life in Wartime The Saturday Evening Post

But Americans were also living and working in quiet towns and peaceable cities, never hearing an air-raid siren, spotting an enemy bomber in the sky, or even seeing an enemy soldier. And, unless they had the bad luck to be born to Japanese parents on the west coast, they never saw a military operation.

Yet their lives were hardly tranquil. They lived in gnawing uncertainty about the war’s progress, the fate of a loved one in combat, and even the possibility that America could still lose the war. They also lived with food shortages, gas rationing, and the impossibility of buying automobile tires or even a new pair of shoes. For many, the 1940s looked a lot like the grim 1930s.

The future, though, was another matter. It easily accommodated any wish for a better life. The thought of peace and prosperity must have been dizzying, particularly for the young men, who would only have vague memories of life before the Depression and war.

Now, with all the new technology generated by the war effort, life was going to be better than ever. Anything was possible.

This spirit of post-war predicting is captured in a Post article from August of that year: “The Coming Boom in Vacations.” According to its authors, America wouldn’t just beat its swords into plowshares, but into fishing rods and camping trailers.

If having fun ever needed any justification, it has that justification overwhelmingly now… Our great responsibility for the future is to create peacetime work in a volume at least comparable with what we have been doing for war.

An important item helping to keep our economy in blooming good health can be the activities engendered in keeping ourselves individually healthy, mentally and physically, by getting a larger share of the out-of-doors.

A considerable part of what we mean when we say “the American standard of living” involves our power to rove and play.

And a considerable part of the new recreation industry the author anticipated would involve camping and hunting. He quoted the head of nation’s Fish and Wildlife Service:

“Right after World War I, there was a thirty-per-cent increase in the number of hunting and fishing licenses in the United States. Much of that increase was due to the fact that a lot of city boys had newly learned to live out-of-doors during their military service and had likewise learned to use firearms skillfully.  This time almost every able-bodied young man has been drawn into military service. When these men are restored to civil life, their wives and children will certainly share to a considerable extent in their newly won proprietorship of the American woods and fields and streams.”

Ironically, American industry would enable its citizens to get back to nature. The end of gas rationing, the resumption of auto manufacturing, and the growth of passenger air service would give families new access to America’s 13 million acres of National Parks.

The automobile did much to further both the use and the preservation of the parks. Among the guardians of the Yellowstone, 1922 stands as a kind of frontier year. One per cent of the visitors arrived in automobiles then. But thereafter the change was sensational. In the five years between 1922 and 1927, thanks to automobiles, more visitors came to the park than had come in the previous half century.

By saving travel time en route, vacationers are going to gain time to play. Whether you work in Hollywood or Brooklyn, if your vacation begins on a Friday night, on Saturday you can begin spending your vacation period at your goal, whether it be the slopes of Mt. McKinley, the Great Smoky Mountains, Lake Placid… etc.

The author also expected that military equipment would soon appear on the shelves of sporting-goods stores.

Will this G.I. hammock, watertight and insectproof, become standard vacation gear?

A major part of war production has been concerned with the making of new things to enable Americans to live out of doors in health and reasonable comfort.

Probably the most popular single appliance, if the soldiers were asked to vote on it, would be a companionable little stove intended to be a kind of supplement to any motor vehicle, jeep, truck, reconnaissance car, tank or your car. Its fuel is the same gasoline. When taken out of its neatly fitting cylindrical container, that container becomes a stew pan. When the folded top of the stove is opened, it looks and functions just like the burner on your gas stove. Since one of these stoves, complete, weighs only a pound, you could easily and habitually carry in your car one stove for each passenger.

There will be a companion piece to that stove. It is a six-pound item… in which a soldier can have a night’s rest in a jungle, no matter though the ground beneath him be ankle-deep mud. No tent is necessary; this is a tent. The tent part is simply a cloth roof, which is a part of a hammock with a zippered envelope of mosquito netting. As used by the military in the jungles, this little fabric home is simply tied between any two trees conveniently spaced. The soldier inside sleeps as dry as if in a cocoon.

The rubber boat, because it is not merely a portable but a packaged boat, represents, potentially, a geometrical expansion of fishing and hunting opportunities. This package, in combination with airplane, automobile or jeep, means that any trip can become, at will, an expedition.

Some of these products, with modification, became staples for modern campers. Others, like the following, never got farther than being a war-time fantasy:

Recently the sales manager of a New York sporting-goods store received a letter which confirmed exciting conjectures about out-of-doors life after the war. This letter was probably the first civilian order for an amphibious tank. It is wanted by a Maryland duck hunter, and he is ready to pay $2000 for it.

The order was accompanied by a cutting from a newspaper, a picture of the amphibious vehicle being used by the United States marines wherever they are making landings on hostile beaches.

And the amphibious tank is, of course, but one more item in a catalogue of relatively new and wonderful inventions being produced in America because of the war, all of which lead the entrepreneurs of outdoor sports to believe a boom in their business waits only for peace and demobilization.

Next: Raising a Family on a War-Time Budget

Life in the Shadow of a Distant War The Saturday Evening Post

But in war time, when your family, your relatives, or your friends are risking death every day in distant lands, you can’t rely on platitudes. In these two editorials, the Post writers tried to keep the big picture in focus, while acknowledge the intense worry and suffering of family members.

Addressing War in Wartime: Post Editorials from the 1940s The Saturday Evening Post