Emergency Contact Please

Every Monday morning at the SOVA West food bank where I volunteer, there is a short staff meeting at 9:15AM to brief the volunteers on the latest things they need to know, such as what food items are in stock or not in stock, what job fairs or free medical clinics are coming up, etc.

On recent Mondays, Dennis, our pantry manager, has been asking the volunteers who do intake with the clients (of which I am one), to try to get an emergency name and phone number for each client, so that should there be a need in the future, we would know whom to contact.

Later that morning I overheard this conversation:

Intake Volunteer:
"We would like to have an emergency name and phone number for you in case it was needed.  Can you give me a number?"

Client:
"Oh yes.  Call 911."

"Conservation" during WWII

My friend Joan, a fellow volunteer at the SOVA food pantry, recently sent me a humorous piece about the "green thing", which now means being environmentally conscious, and what Americans did long ago (when Joan and I were kids), with our trash and other environmentally sensitive issues.

This got me to thinking about things we did during WWII.  Our objective was not to save the environment.  Rather it was to win the war,  But it did have some environmental side effects.  I was almost 6 when that war began, and I was 9-1/2 when it ended.

Here are the things that I can remember:

• We planted Victory Gardens.  There was a large plot of undeveloped land up the block from our house.  (After the war, a developer built 3 or 4 homes there.)  Many in the neighborhood staked out areas in it and planted gardens.  I think my mother and I worked a small area.
• We collected newspapers.  Myself and several friends went door-to-door in the neighborhood and collected used newspapers.  We tied them up in bundles about 8 or 9 inches high.  Our next-door neighbors, the Robinsons, donated their garage to this effort, and we came close to filling it up with newspaper bundles stacked very high.  Eventually, some men came and hauled the papers away somewhere; I'm sure that helped the war effort.
• We collected the tin foil that was then used to wrap chewing gum and balled it up into balls about the size of a baseball.
• We collected rubber bands and wound them upon each other making balls of rubber bands, also about the size of a baseball.
• Finally we filled stamp books with saving stamps that we bought at school.  I think the stamps cost one or two cents each.  When the book was full, we took it to school and exchanged it for a savings bond.  I suspect that these savings stamp books were the forerunners to the S&H Green stamp books that were to come after the war.

Finally, there was rationing.  This did not impact me much, but was a concern for my mother.  This included allotments for meat, butter, eggs, sugar and gasoline.  Perhaps we should have just kept the limits, especially on the meat and gasoline!!