World War II Memorabelia

As I have told everyone before, this blog is a collaboration of efforts from my Uncle Lee and myself. He has the memories and the photos and I just transfer them to this blog for anyone interested enough to read.

In an older post, I published photos of my Grandmother's Asst. Sector Air Warden Card. Here is another bit of memorabilia from that era. Grandpa Seligman was too young to serve in WWI and too old to serve in WWII. But I know he and Grandma both did their part on the home front to help our soldiers and country in WWII. I treasure these photos as they are a part of America history preserved in the Seligman family so that on one will forget.

The photos are of my Uncle Lee's ration book for May of 1942. Lee was only 4 years old at the time, but all citizens must have had their own books - no matter the age.

Below is what Lee has to say about rationing during this time.

"I remember a little about rationing ... mostly, that we never seemed to not be able to get most things ... Mother had a friend who had a butcher stand in the old Center City Market on 7th St [I think] ... there was only one of these [Eastern Market] left when I left DC and it burned down a couple of years ago [supposedly, they were/are going to rebuild it and it is definitely one of the places I intend to go when I'm back there], but there used to be one in each section of the city & one in Georgetown. They were amazing ... kind of like the farmer's markets of Paris and London ... enclosed buildings that were like open areas with a roof, sawdust on the floor with stands inside for every kind of food ... vegetables, fruit, meats of all kinds, cheeses [when I was at Customs Hq. in charge of food and vegetable/animal products imports, one of my main sources of info/research was the cheese purveyors there], and baked goods outside ... only place I know of to this day where I could go and buy a 10# bag of chicken livers! But, as usual, I digress ... the only thing I can remember we could not get was butter ... they had something called oleo that came in a two # plastic bag with a red dot that you had to push to brreak and then squeeze throughout the mass of this stuff to color it so it looked like butter, but still tasted horrible. I can remember that, when real butter became available when the War was over, Mother was so happy that for a month she "buttered" both sides of her morning toast. I can remember "Uncle" Al managed to get us a phone for the kitchen and wire it in which was unheard of .[by the way our phone number in 1941 was GEorgia-3280 !! and we were the only Seligman's in the DC phone book]."

I had always heard about rationing at that time, but it never seemed that real to me until I saw these scans of the documents. I find it amazing the Lee remembers the phone number after all these years!