University of Virginia Library

Foods, Shoes, and Cigarettes

While the local motorist was nursing his car through the difficulties
of war, the local housewife was having troubles of her own. As early
as September, 1939, she found sugar temporarily scarce, when her
neighbors with memories of 1918 started carrying hundred-pound
bags away from grocery stores. Flour also was gathered up by the
hoarders, and both of these commodities temporarily jumped in
price.[25] In a few days everything was back to normal, and the brief
panic was almost forgotten. By 1941, however, the economic pressures
of the defense program were slowly forcing the cost of living
upward. In September the index of consumer prices stood at 8.1
per cent above the 1935–1939 level.[26] More real than percentages
to the housewife were the calculations she had to make to stay within
the family budget for food. In the two years since the Nazi planes
had first roared over Warsaw, butter and eggs on the local market
had jumped ten cents a pound, and meat had crept up a few cents.
Baking was more expensive, because shortening, flour, and sugar were
all higher. Even the week-end specials in September, 1941, seemed
costly: ham, 28 cents a pound; chuck roast, 21 cents; frying chickens,
dressed, 28 cents; sirloin steak, 40 cents. Butter was advertised
at 40 cents a pound, eggs were offered at 41 cents a dozen, and a tall
can of evaporated milk was available at 8 cents.[27]

As her pencil planned the purchases which could be squeezed out
of the market money, the housewife would have been startled to learn
that she would soon be sighing wistfully for the return of 1941's low
prices and ample quantities, which seemed to vanish in the smoke of
Pearl Harbor. By the spring of 1942 she discovered that Hitler's
U-boats were keeping bananas out of Charlottesville. More serious
was the Nazi subs' interference with shipments of sugar, which
brought back the buying panic of 1939. Storekeepers restrained the
would-be hoarders by selling sugar only in small amounts until the
O. P. A. could get its rationing program in operation.

Sugar rationing finally arrived in the first week of May, 1942.
School teachers and other volunteer assistants gave up their afternoons
and evenings from May 4 to May 7 to register the entire population.
In Charlottesville registration cards were signed for 22,060 persons,
including an unexpectedly large number of University students. To
all but the 970 who admitted having more than six pounds of sugar
a flimsy little folder called War Ration Book No. 1 was issued.[28]
Along the bottom edge were two rows of coupons to be used in buying

sugar and any other commodities which might be rationed. The
basic allotment for each person was half a pound of sugar a week.
In most cases this quantity, which varied only slightly throughout
the war, proved to be sufficient. The chief effect of the sugar restriction
was to reduce the number of cakes and pies baked weekly in
Charlottesville and Albemarle County ovens, a result which, local
Pollyannas readily confessed, proved beneficial to waistlines. Because
bootleggers were unable to get sugar to make liquor and because many
of the hot-blooded youngsters were in military service, the Albemarle
County jail was empty on May 24, 1942, for the first time in the
memory of Sheriff J. Mason Smith, who had served the county as
law enforcement officer for forty years. Normally the jail housed
twenty or thirty prisoners.[29]

Having taken its toll of banana and sugar shipments, German submarine
warfare soon added another food casualty. By September,
1942, coffee was being doled out carefully at local stores. To spread
the supply evenly, the O. P. A. announced that coffee would be
placed on the ration list beginning November 28.[30] Coupons in War
Ration Book No. 1 were made valid for the purchase of coffee at the
rate of one pound every five weeks. Statisticians calculated that this
would give each person one cup a day, a miserly ration in the opinion
of all coffee lovers. Long-despised coffee substitutes promptly disappeared
from grocery shelves.

About the same time another type of beverage went under sales
control when the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Board restricted
liquor purchases to a quart a day as a preliminary to formal rationing,
which went into effect in January, 1943. With the manufacture
of beverage alcohol suspended for the duration of the war, meager
stocks were called upon to supply an increased demand. In June
The Daily Progress reported in an editorial that for three days “the
thirsty citizen of Charlottesville with spendable coupons supposedly
good for one pint might as well have been on a desert island as far as
his ability to buy legal whiskey was concerned. There just wasn't
any in pints—or in quarts either, for that matter—and only a very
limited selection in 26-ounce bottles, which are definitely a gyp size
under our rationing set-up.” By November the editor conceded, “If
Virginians get very little liquor, at least what they do get is of known
quality and is made available to them at a fair price, whereas if we
may believe the reports carried in the public press of other parts honest
whiskey has all but disappeared from the markets in many American
cities and prices, despite supposed O. P. A. ceilings, have soared
to fantastic heights.”[31]

These shortages of 1942, however, were only a preliminary warning
of what was to come. The local housewife had already been
reminded of the impending shortage of canned goods every time she
flattened a tin can for salvage drives. At the same time the national

appetite was growing faster than expanding agricultural production.
Young men in uniform required far more food than they had consumed
while wearing civilian clothes, and more people than ever were
able to afford beefsteaks and butter instead of hamburgers and oleomargarine.
During 1942 the nation had been living off its accumulated
fat of prewar years, but by 1943 it was necessary to take up a
notch in the belt.

Two new and comprehensive programs were announced in December,
1942. One covered processed foods, including practically all
canned, dried, and frozen fruits, vegetables, soups, and juices. The
other included all meats, except poultry and fresh fish, and all fats
but olive oil. The news of these programs was accepted in good spirit,
The Daily Progress reported. One merchant, who asked customers
not to buy more than half a dozen cans at a time, pointed out, “When
we explain things to them, most of them don't buy that much. This
rationing is going to be hard on delivery stores and will cause more
work for us as well as for the housewife, but it is the only fair way
to divide what food we have.”[32]

Once again more than 42,000 city and county residents registered
in the school rooms from February 22 to 26, 1943, for War Ration
Book No. 2. In order to get this book each family had to fill in a
declaration stating how many pounds of coffee and cans of food were
on hand at the time rationing began, and Books 1 and 2 were then
“tailored” accordingly by removing coupons for excess coffee or cans.
One Albemarle County family of three declared 2,167 cans, another
family of two, 975. Four out of five, however, stated that they had
no excess supplies.[33] Sometimes neighbors looked on these declarations
with suspicion, which was occasionally justified. One woman,
who declared only four pounds of coffee and ten cans of food, was
found by the O. P. A. to have had forty-eight pounds of coffee and
510 cans of food in her possession.[34] During registration an old man
came into the ration board's office to ask how he could buy sugar
and coffee. “The storekeeper keeps telling me to get a book,” he said,
“but there's no sense me getting a book; I can't read.”[35] A ration
clerk explained that to enjoy the kind of book he needed required no
literary attainment.

War Ration Book No. 2 introduced a new problem for the local
housewife. Designed for the point system, an innovation in rationing,
it contained four pages each of red and blue stamps. twenty-four
to a page. Horizontal rows were lettered. “A,” “B.” “C,” etc., while
the vertical columns were numbered “8,” “5,” “2,” “1,” indicating
the point value of each stamp. To enlighten Charlottesville housewives
concerning the use of the new ration book a meeting was scheduled
at Lane High School. but when the use of the auditorium was
denied to the speaker the meeting was cancelled and housewives were
left to solve their problems as best they could. In a letter to the editor

of The Daily Progress Henry McComb Bush explained why the meeting
had not been held. The speaker, although sanctioned by the O.
P. A., was an employee of the Southeastern Chain Store Council. Certain
local independent merchants refused to cooperate, expressing the
fear that the speaker was trying to put something over on them. The
use of the auditorium was denied on the technicality that it could not
be used by the representative of any commercial organization. After
expressing his admiration for the able and impartial way in which
the same speaker on another occasion explained in detail the use of
War Ration Book No. 2, Bush concluded by remarking, “This is a
startling example of lack of cooperation on the part of some of our
local merchants. At a time like this, lack of cooperation should not
be allowed to interfere with public benefits.”[36]

Blue stamps, designed for processed foods, came into use on March
1. They were made valid at the rate of three columns, or forty-eight
points, a month. With this quota in March, 1943, the housewife
could have purchased one can of peaches (twenty-one points), one
can of peas (thirteen points), one can of corn (eight points), and one
can of soup (six points). In terms of meals, she could have served
canned vegetables at about eight meals a month and canned fruit at
approximately six. She therefore had to eke out the family diet
with fresh fruit and vegetables, of which, fortunately, there was seldom
a shortage. On the other hand, when out of season these were
usually two or four times as expensive as canned food, and the
prompt action of the O. P. A. in freezing prices merely kept them
from going higher. A permanent change in eating habits resulted
from the fact that points were usually lower on frozen food than on
canned, while the frosted products were cheaper than fresh ones in
winter. Thus the people of Charlottesville and Albemarle County
learned to make frozen foods a part of their daily diet instead of the
occasional luxury which these had been in 1939.

Throughout February, 1943, the abattoir department of the
Elliott Ice Company was closed down for the first time since it opened
in 1912. Millard C. Elliott, president of the company, explained
that slaughtering had been suspended because though O. P. A. had
set up price ceilings on dressed carcasses, there were no price ceilings
on livestock. “As a consequence,” he concluded, “we cannot buy
livestock at present prices, since we would lose money on every animal
slaughtered.” The plant reopened March 1, but to operate at
only about one-fourth of its capacity.[37]

However, procuring meats and fats caused little trouble for the
local housewife before they went under rationing on March 29, 1943.
There was a brief scare on March 10, when someone reported hearing
over the radio that sales of butter would be frozen. The result was
a stampede which nearly emptied the Charlottesville stores of butter
that day. The flurry died down promptly and had been largely forgotten

by the time the sale of butter actually was frozen on March
22, in order to allow stocks to accumulate during the week preceding
rationing. Meat likewise remained plentiful, although the choice of
cuts was limited. Not until Saturday, March 27, the very last day
of unrestricted purchases, when housewives were packing their refrigerators
with meat, was any shortage noticed.[38] The initial ration
allotment required some reduction in the normal quantities of meat
eaten, permitting to each person approximatly a quarter-pound of
butter and two pounds of meat a week. Although changing point
values later lowered this quota, a family's consumption of rationed
beef, pork, and lamb could always be supplemented by ration-free
poultry and fish.

Adjustment to the new point system proved easy. In a few days
housewives had learned to count up purchases in points as well as in
cents. Butchers soon observed that shoppers were more concerned over
the number of red stamps which they would have to surrender for
any cut of meat than over the number of greenbacks required. The
O. P. A. also learned to change its point-prices like a shrewd merchandiser;
a slow-mover like dried prunes quickly dropped from
twenty blue points to none, while a fast-seller like butter jumped
from eight red points to sixteen in the first few months. In spite
of this increase, the demand for butter continued to outrun the supply,
as milk output was diverted to other dairy products. For the
same reason, canned milk went on the ration list in June, 1943. On
the other hand, the first sign of a turn for the better came when coffee
went off the list of rationed foods in July.

The summer of 1943 also brought a modification in the canning
sugar program. During 1942 allotments of sugar to families for canning
fruit had been made at the rate of a pound for every four quarts
put up in previous years, with no maximum limit to the amount of
sugar to which one could thus become entitled. With commercially
canned fruit rationed, however, many new families were expected to
join the ranks of the canners-at-home in 1943, and the government
wished to encourage this movement. Past practices in preserving
fruits were therefore ignored, and families were now granted for use
in canning up to twenty-five pounds of sugar per person. Two stamps
were validated for five pounds of sugar each. Those who needed more
applied to the ration board for their allotments, listing the quantities
of fruits and jellies they wished to preserve. This greatly simplified
the procedure and eliminated many of the complications and
delays which had been experienced in 1942. During 1944 the county
ration board issued coupons good for 364,116 pounds of canning
sugar, and the city board issued coupons for 281,460 pounds. The
county board reported approximately 20,000 applications for sugar
during the three year period 1942 to 1944, inclusive.

One other development of the summer of 1943 was the expiration

of the first shoe stamp. Shoes had been put under rationing in
a surprise move on February 7, with Stamp No. 18 in the sugar book
being made good for one pair until June 15. As that date approached,
many housewives discovered unused shoe stamps in the family's books,
and to keep them from “going to waste” they dashed into town to
buy shoes, overwhelming stores and clerks. One weary manager advertised
the next day: “We wish to express sincere appreciation to
you, our customers, for your patience during the recent 'Grand Rush'
for shoes. ... Our store will be closed Wednesday and Thursday to
give our employees a much-needed rest and to check our stock. J. N.
Waddell Shoe Co.”[39]

This was the only local excitement over shoe rationing, although
it continued until October 30, 1945. The individual allotment of
two to three pairs a year was more than adequate for the men, but it
failed to make concession to feminine fashions. As a result, Father
often had to surrender one of his stamps to buy Daughter a pair of
party slippers. This type of informal reapportionment within the
family served to smooth out any serious inconvenience. Apparently
more city than country residents had occupations which were hard
on their shoes, for the Charlottesville board issued 525 special shoe
stamps in the one year 1944, which was in sharp contrast to the
Albemarle County board's experience of issuing only 787 special shoe
stamps in three years.

Meanwhile, the point system was using up ration books rapidly.
By the middle of September, 1943, all the red stamps in War Ration
Book No. 2 were gone, and similar brown stamps in Book No. 3 had
taken their place. This book, distributed by mail during the summer
also contained stamps bearing pictures of guns, tanks, planes, and
ships. A few of the airplane stamps were validated for shoes, but the
rest were never used. In October Book No. 4 was handed out to
40,549 residents of the city and the county.[40] This contained pages
of green, blue, and red stamps, similar to those in Book No. 2, except
that they were only half as wide, besides two pages of stamps marked
“Spare,” “Sugar,” and “Coffee.” The “Coffee” coupons, O. P. A.
explained, had been prepared while the beverage was still on the
ration list.[41]

Another simplification came when the red and blue ration tokens
went into circulation on February 27, 1944.[42] These fiber disks provided
change, and made mental arithmetic involved in counting point
prices much easier. The value of the stamps was changed to ten points
each, with each token being worth one point.

During the second week of March, 1944, a survey was made of
Charlottesville retail food stores to determine the extent to which
O. P. A. regulations were being observed. The twenty-three volunteer
inspectors, who worked under the Charlottesville War Price and
Rationing Board's price panel, of which the Reverend H. A. Donovan

was chairman, visited fifty-five stores. In only sixteen did they find
full compliance with all regulations; however, there was general agreement
among O. P. A. personnel that willful instances of ceiling price
violations were decidedly in the minority. The thirty-nine stores
violating regulations were about equally divided between those which
failed to post ceiling price lists and those which by carelessness or
misunderstanding made charges above ceiling prices. Most overcharges
were for canned goods. In Albemarle County a like survey
showed that most of the 110 stores were complying. Twenty-seven
violations of meat and canned vegetable price ceilings were noted,
and a number of stores did not have a proper ceiling price list posted.[43]
During the first three years of rationing about twenty price checks
were made in both the city and county stores. There were a few cases
in which merchants were fined and patrons collected triple damages
because of overcharges, but the great majority of merchants tried to
keep both the letter and the spirit of the regulations.

The appearance of the ration tokens seems to have marked a general
improvement in the food situation. Point values were cut in
March and again in April. Canning sugar was available almost for
the asking. In September, as Allied armies rolled back the shattered
Nazi forces in France, most meat cuts and all canned vegetables,
except tomatoes, were removed from rationing. By mid-December,
however, when the supposedly beaten Germans suddenly struck back
in the Ardennes Forest, the belt had to be retightened. On Christmas
morning the housewife, who had experienced great difficulty in finding
a turkey for the holiday, learned that most of the food stamps
she had been saving had been cancelled.[44] A week later, on New Year's
Eve, further demands were made on her reduced stock of points by
the return of most foods to the ration list. On January 19, 1945,
lard, shortening, oils, and citrus fruit juice were put back under rationing.

It was, however, an unrationed commodity for which people
shopped most diligently during the winter of 1944–1945. By November
cigarettes were difficult to find and throughout the following
months the supply fell behind the demand to such an extent that
dealers' shelves were customarily bare. A shipment of any brand
was sold out almost as soon as it was opened. Smokers would shop
from store to store for hours and then stand in line interminably for
the privilege of buying a package of any brand. When he literally
did not know where his next smoke was coming from, the average
citizen felt like lynching the lady who boasted that she had a hoard
of seven cartons of a favorite brand cigarette. Indeed a man who
appeared in a downtown drug store casually carrying a quantity of
leaf tobacco under his arm had the nicotine addicts remarking, “Lucky
fellow, he's fixed for smokes.”[45] Sooner or later nearly everyone
tried rolling his own with varying degrees of success. One lady shopping

in a Richmond department store discovered a machine selling
for a quarter which did an excellent job of cigarette making. She
invested three dollars and on her return to Charlottesville quickly
disposed of the extra machines to her grateful friends. Gradually
supply caught up with the demand for cigarettes so that by the end
of 1945 a smoker was again able to pass his pack around in a crowd.

The canning sugar program announced in February, 1945, was
much stricter than that for 1944, and ration board allotments were
reduced thirty per cent below the previous year. Even V-E Day
on May 8 brought no relaxation in the O. P. A.'s grim outlook.

On June 1, 1945, the Elliott Ice Company, which was again having
trouble with O. P. A. regulations, announced that unless the
objectionable provisions were rescinded, it would close its abattoir
department on Saturday the ninth. The company objected especially
to R. M. P. R. Order 169, which required custom slaughterers to
“remit” to dealers who owned the cattle and calves which were
dressed an amount sufficient to make the total cost of the carcasses
to the dealer come under the O. P. A. ceiling prices for dressed meat.
The regulation, which was designed to prevent dealers from paying
excessively high prices for livestock, made the slaughterer a policeman
whether he wished to be one or not and penalized him heavily
if he slaughtered animals bought by dealers at the prevailing high
prices. The announcement of the impending closing of the only
slaughterhouse in the area caused considerable consternation as the
University of Virginia Hospital, the Blue Ridge Sanatorium, and
ten retail butcher shops were dependent upon the Elliott abattoir
for their meat. One merchant sent a telegram to O. P. A. Administrator
Chester Bowles saying. “We have cattle at Elliott's abattoir
waiting to be slaughtered purchased fully under MPR 574. Elliott
advises OPA restrictions don't permit him to slaughter them. We
have our quotas established by your office for June. What good is
a quota if you block us at the slaughterhouse? Can't you instruct
Elliott to slaughter these cattle? We have been slaughtering at
Elliott's abattoir for 34 years.”

The O. P. A. district director, J. Fulmer Bright of Richmond,
defended the regulation, saying that it should not force any established
abattoir to discontinue business, or anyone else for that matter
except the dealer who patronized the black market by purchasing
cattle at a price above the ceiling, or the dealer who paid excessively
high prices within the ceiling.

On the eighth a meeting of the Albemarle Farm Bureau discussed the
possible effect of the closing upon the farmers of the county. Several
representatives from the district O. P. A. office in Richmond who
were present stated that a revision of the regulations eliminating the
objectionable provision was expected. They pointed out that O. P. A.

had never ordered the Elliott Ice Company to close its slaughterhouse
and so could not, as some people suggested, instruct them to keep
it open.

Monday, June 11, the abattoir remained in operation, but no cattle
or calves were accepted from dealers for slaughter. Taking advantage
of a provision exempting persons and institutions which had
animals killed for their own consumption from the operation of the
“kick back” provision, the Elliott Ice Company continued to slaughter
cattle and calves for both the University Hospital and the Blue Ridge
Sanatorium. Hogs and lambs were slaughtered for all comers, but as
merchants' quotas for pork were limited to fifty per cent of their
sales for the same period the year before, only lamb was available in
normal amounts at the local meat markets.

Soon the controversial regulation was rescinded, and the abattoir
resumed slaughter of cattle and calves for all customers on June 21.
There was but little improvement in the local meat supply, however,
until after July 1 as most dealers had already used up practically all
of their quotas for the period. In July meat dealers were allowed
to handle fifty per cent of the amount of pork handled in July, 1944,
seventy-six per cent of beef and veal, and 110 per cent of lamb. Most
local dealers were able to find meat to fill these quotas.[46]

Preliminary negotiations preceding Japanese surrender were followed
immediately by the end of processed food rationing on August
15, and the meat-fat program was dropped on November 24. This
did not mean the return of plenty insofar as meat and butter were
concerned. The continuation of price control kept production down,
and supplies got scarce.

With the return of peace Coordinator of Civilian Defense Seth
Burnley wrote each member of the Charlottesville War Price and
Rationing Board thanking him for his loyal service. “When I
asked each and every one of you to serve this community,” he said,
“no one refused although you knew full well that you would be
criticized, and the work would require a lot of your valuable time
and energy and at times I know it took all of your patriotic zeal and
fortitude to continue. ... May our peaceful days now bring you
much happiness with the knowledge that you have finished a job
'WELL DONE'.”[47]

When the O. P. A. controls expired temporarily on June 30,
1946, meat returned in abundance but at high prices. The restoration
of price ceilings on September 10 brought Charlottesville the
worst meat shortage it had experienced. For a month butcher shops
were bare until the price control was finally lifted on October 15,
leaving sugar rationing the only important survivor of wartime food
controls. When that, too, was ended in June, 1947, the Charlottesville
housewife could do her week-end shopping with nothing to

remind her of the war—except the new prices, which were sometimes
double those of 1939. One Charlottesville shopper, who had
been forced to discontinue buying butter, the price of which had
climbed out of sight, compared the cost of things which went into
the market basket in June, 1946, before the end of O. P. A., with
the cost of the same items in October, 1947. The results were
startling and discouraging.[48]

                           

	June, 1946	October, 1947
Pork chops, 1 lb.	$0.37	$0.65
Eggs, 1 doz.	.47	.80
Sausage, 1 lb.	.35	.49
Coffee, 1 lb.	.24	.41
Bread, 1 loaf	.12	.14
Potatoes, 10 lbs.	.31	.41
Tomatoes, 1 lb.	.15	.13
Cabbage, 3 lbs.	.08	.15
Soap, 1 large cake	.10	.18
Flour, 10 lbs.	.54	1.05
Peas, 1 can	.13	.16
Milk, 1 can	.10	.12
	$2.96	$4.69