Last time you were talking about food rationing.
Right. But there was rationing out on the road too.
Like what?
Gasoline. That was the biggest hit. Each car displayed a sticker, and we got rationing stamps to match. The most common was the A stamp.
We had to put the sticker on the windshield of the car. Look at the corner of this windshield. See the sticker?
Families that didn’t need their cars for business had the A sticker. That was us and probably most families. My Dad took a bus and a train to get to work. We saved gas that way. The car was for shopping and other uses around town.
Then there was rubber. The government needed a lot of that for the war effort, so rubber tires were hard to come by. So automobile tires were rationed, and retreads were popular.
Retreads?
Yeah. As long as the sidewalls were in decent shape, we could have new treads fused to what was left of a tread.
And we could buy tires made of a synthetic material too. Not as good as rubber, but we got by.
Didn’t know that.
Oh, yeah. I guess it worked out okay. But the government would always be asking us — and we would ask ourselves — “If This Trip Necessary?”
And another shortage was of shoe leather, so shoes were rationed too. Needed a lot for combat boots. So, if the uppers were still in good shape but the soles were shot, we could have new soles attached to the bottoms.
We pretty much have a throwaway economy these days, but shoe repair was big business back then. And, because you might have only one pair of dress shoes, many of the shops had chairs where we could wait while our shoes were repaired.
“While You Wait” was a big thing during the war.