Horses and WWII Gasoline Rationing

[Pat Holscher]

My wife and I went to a new Yuppie hamburger place a couple of months ago. The waiter had a number of new piercings, some of which were infected. He wanted to sit next to me and be my buddy while he took our order. I was not amused. The food was adequate, but not worth the possibility of contamination by an infectious waiter.

We see Artillery Lieutenants in blues all the time! What's so unusual about that?

Eons ago when I was still a National Guardsman I recall a new recruit joining who had a really strange scar on his ear. This was long before you saw men wearing ear rings hear.

Anyhow, somebody asked him about it (it was impossible not to notice) and he related that he'd had an ear ring and somebody had grabbed it and yanked it off, through his ear lobe, in a bar fight.

I know that its a Neanderthal view, but I see no reason to give anyone artificial advantages in bar fights. You just never know.

[Todd]

My wife and I went to a new Yuppie hamburger place a couple of months ago. The waiter had a number of new piercings, some of which were infected. He wanted to sit next to me and be my buddy while he took our order. I was not amused. The food was adequate, but not worth the possibility of contamination by an infectious waiter.

We see Artillery Lieutenants in blues all the time! What's so unusual about that?

Eons ago when I was still a National Guardsman I recall a new recruit joining who had a really strange scar on his ear. This was long before you saw men wearing ear rings hear.

Anyhow, somebody asked him about it (it was impossible not to notice) and he related that he'd had an ear ring and somebody had grabbed it and yanked it off, through his ear lobe, in a bar fight.

I know that its a Neanderthal view, but I see no reason to give anyone artificial advantages in bar fights. You just never know.

A charitable reaction - assuming that he was telling the truth about an earring scar from a 'bar fight'....

Personally, I would go with something like 'wolverine attack!'

[Pat Holscher]

My wife and I went to a new Yuppie hamburger place a couple of months ago. The waiter had a number of new piercings, some of which were infected. He wanted to sit next to me and be my buddy while he took our order. I was not amused. The food was adequate, but not worth the possibility of contamination by an infectious waiter.

We see Artillery Lieutenants in blues all the time! What's so unusual about that?

Eons ago when I was still a National Guardsman I recall a new recruit joining who had a really strange scar on his ear. This was long before you saw men wearing ear rings hear.

Anyhow, somebody asked him about it (it was impossible not to notice) and he related that he'd had an ear ring and somebody had grabbed it and yanked it off, through his ear lobe, in a bar fight.

I know that its a Neanderthal view, but I see no reason to give anyone artificial advantages in bar fights. You just never know.

A charitable reaction - assuming that he was telling the truth about an earring scar from a 'bar fight'....

Personally, I would go with something like 'wolverine attack!'

He was prior service and right out of the Marine Corps which made his choice there all the more likely, at least at that time, to open a person up to bar fight wounds.

Maybe the era has passed where men worry about making themselves vulnerable in bar fights. .. but it still seems to be inviting injury.

[Couvi]

My wife and I went to a new Yuppie hamburger place a couple of months ago. The waiter had a number of new piercings, some of which were infected. He wanted to sit next to me and be my buddy while he took our order. I was not amused. The food was adequate, but not worth the possibility of contamination by an infectious waiter.

We see Artillery Lieutenants in blues all the time! What's so unusual about that?

Eons ago when I was still a National Guardsman I recall a new recruit joining who had a really strange scar on his ear. This was long before you saw men wearing ear rings hear.

Anyhow, somebody asked him about it (it was impossible not to notice) and he related that he'd had an ear ring and somebody had grabbed it and yanked it off, through his ear lobe, in a bar fight.

I know that its a Neanderthal view, but I see no reason to give anyone artificial advantages in bar fights. You just never know.

Sounds like he met Gunnery Sergeant Highway in Heartbreak Ridge.

[Pat Holscher]

Regarding horses, I've met a few old timers in East TN who say that when rationing took effect a LOT of people quickly went back to using saddle horses for routine tasks. This was still a very rural area and you could do that within limits.

I'd have to think that there were a fair number or rural areas in the country where this would also have been true. I almost wonder if this is one of those topics that there's little information, simply because people didn't think it was a big deal.

Even in cities, I wonder a bit. I know that ice delivery, milk delivery and snow removal was still horse powered in Montreal in the 1940s. Churchill wrote a memo after France fell inquiring if recently removed draft horses could return to city duties as well. I wonder if there was any notable horse reemployment in towns, or if that simply rarely occurred. Perhaps the associated difficulties of forage, etc, made it impractical at that point.

[wkambic]

When I was in Law School at Marquette in Milwaukee the Dean was discussing some taxation issues in class and got off onto a tangent about property taxes and German Socialists. The WI German Socialists were a bit odd in that they did not believe in deficit spending. They controlled the Milwaukee City and County government some periods of time in the 1940' and '50s and horse drawn snowplows were in use until about the end of the Korean War.

You're probably correct that large scale, commercial use of horse drawn equipment was probably not economical in urban areas due to the energy costs of the infrastructure of horsekeeping.

[Steve Haupt]

From the Imperial War Museum.
The way this pair is moving they have started a pretty good load.
The London Midland and Scotland Railway was an amalgamation of railroads and was one of the largest corporations in England before the Nationalization in the 1970s.

https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/32534

Cheers,
Steve Haupt

[Joseph Sullivan]

Having just re-read all the posts, I wonder if there aren't a couple of difference angles from which o view these questions: horses in work use; and women in the workforce. As to horses, from what I saw in a relict pocket of Indiana as a small boy in the 1960s, where horses did some tasks ( I remember running next to a horse-drawn sickle bar), and listening to my elders, I suspect that wartime mechanical progress, and the war-driven capacity to make motor vehicles cheaply in large numbers went hand in hand with the ability of people to pay for the machines. In fact there is an economic school of thought that holds that at least to a point, supply creates demand.

Anyhow,during the 1930s and 1940s, my grandmother drove to town for groceries and such in a pony trap because he husband used the one family car for work. remember when few families had more than one car?

My wife's grandfather farmed cotton and rice with 40- 50 mules which my father in law was very happy to change out for a tractor. A tractor. One tractor.

Pat is undoubtedly right about labor-saving home devices freeing up women's time and making them available for work. However, until the 1960s there was still a social barrier against it. I won't say stigma because working women weren't stigmatized, but I well recall women in my family commenting in sympathy about mothers who "had to work." However, if one reads first-wave feminist authors, especially Betty Friedan, one finds a very plausible argument that it was neither the experience of war-time factory work nor economic need that drove the larger numbers of women into the workforce; rather,it was the need to do something meaningful. Mothers of children DID have meaning, but children grow out of the mother's direct command and control in just a few years especially with chemically-enabled smaller families. With so much labor performed by machines, and clothing coming from the store very inexpensively, the absolute dependency of the family on the labor of it womenfolk faded, and with it the meaning in the lives of many intelligent, hardworking women.

[Pat Holscher]

However, if one reads first-wave feminist authors, especially Betty Friedan, one finds a very plausible argument that it was neither the experience of war-time factory work nor economic need that drove the larger numbers of women into the workforce; rather,it was the need to do something meaningful. Mothers of children DID have meaning, but children grow out of the mother's direct command and control in just a few years especially with chemically-enabled smaller families. With so much labor performed by machines, and clothing coming from the store very inexpensively, the absolute dependency of the family on the labor of it womenfolk faded, and with it the meaning in the lives of many intelligent, hardworking women.

There's a lot to that, and a lot to ponder. While I'm getting way off topic, I've sometimes noted that one of the great myths of modern work has been the concept of "meaning" in the context of "career" and the role that's played in the daily lives of women.

Now, before I get too far off track, work, and by that I mean work of any kind whatsoever, paid and unpaid, household or out of the house, traditional and non traditional, and even just f=m(a) has meaning. Indeed, while it'd be even more way off topic, lack of work achieves a psychological meaning of its own. While it may sound trite, there's dignity in working and there's a certain dignity to being one who works.

And for meaning in work, (as opposed to "meaningful careers") up until some point in the late 1970s I think a lot of men and women found meaning in their work, but in ways that looped back to their families as an integral part of that. Post 1970 or so that part got subverted, and with it the meaning was lost to a large degree.

Carrying on, at some point in the late 20th Century, and it seems to me some point after I graduated from high school, a concept of "finding fulfillment in a career" really got rolling and women have been the biggest victims of it. Men knew all along, I think, that at the end of the day most "careers" were just work, although there are certain exceptions for certain occupations and certain people who and which are really stamped with being called or being callings. It's been sort of a societal fraud, and it grew in part of out of that 70s feminism which suspected that men were hanging on to jobs because they were "fulfilled" in their work and women were being accordingly cheated. Nobody seemingly noticed that there was a pretty big workbench to bar top culture that lots of urban men engaged in darned near every day, and it wasn't because every day was just like playing in the World Series. It was because it wasn't.

Well, I'll take my amatuer sociologist hat back off.