Kewaunee County Recycling: Wool Clips, Binder Twine, Lipstick and Toothpaste Tubes

Buy Local. Re-purpose. Reuse. Recycle. Individual recycling containers go out to the curb along with the garbage cans, and HGTV offers programs using inventive and creative ways to use what some would throw away. Recycling and buying local is anything but a new idea. As for buying locally, before the advances in transportation during the last 40 years, local was the most logical and sometimes the only way to go.

Throughout history, people made do with what was around them. The World War l effort brought such recycling to another dimension while efforts during World War ll are beyond what many would believe today, 70 years after its end.

World War ll came as the world was tunneling itself out of its worst economic depression ever. That followed World War l. As  U.S. residents were finding jobs and digging themselves out of want, the new war brought new restrictions and regulations. There was rationing, and ration books allowed just how much gasoline, meat, sugar, shoes and more could be purchased if it was  available.

Algoma Record Herald, Luxemburg News and Kewaunee Enterprise editorials continually urged county residents to do their part and their duty. Seventy years later, such urgings would fall on deaf ears. Sugar was the first commodity severely rationed. Coffee came from Brazil and that meant preyed-upon shipments by German U-boats. Among the other rationed items were cheese, butter, oil, shortening, dried fruit, canned milk, appliances and more. Rationing helped supply the troops, however such rationing actually helped retailers experiencing shortages. Sometimes the shortages were due to rumors and panics, such as the run on flashlights and batteries immediately following the attack at Pearl Harbor.

The draft picked up even before the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 1, 1941. Production had also picked up, in part due to Lend Lease. Then Pearl Harbor changed the lives of most.

Three months after Pearl Harbor, the War Production Board issued an order curtailing the telephone industry from using “scarce and critical materials.” That meant lead, copper, iron and steel, zinc and more. Algoma’s Phil Dart, manager for Wisconsin Telephone Co. stressed that telephone conservation – which was really curtailing expansion - was most important to the war effort. A few weeks after that, new residential construction was forbidden. Maintenance and repair costing more than $500 was banned. Though agriculture was important, agricultural related construction costing more than $1,000 was also prohibited. Any public or privately financed construction with a price tag of over $5,000 was not approved. It didn’t matter if it was for highways, utilities or institutional buildings. New electrical lines were strung only if it was proven that they were necessary to the war effort. A federal agency was the authority.

By March 1942, selling canned dog food was against regulations thus prompting manufacturers to begin making dehydrated products. It might be hard to believe today but the purchase of a new tube of tooth paste was denied unless the previously used metal tube was turned in. Many combined baking soda and salt to make their own toothpaste. It saved money and by-passed the tubes.

New regulations seemed to come daily. Families hardly had time to deal with being told their new house was on hold or that the dream of having a telephone wasn’t coming before they had to start thinking about something so seemingly insignificant as scrap paper. “Scrap for Victory” began in the schools. Boys in rural schools collected scrap paper while helping farmers collect and pile scrap metal for pickup and sale. Rural school students made surveys of waste materials around the county so the information was readily available when needed. It was a time when the clothing division of the War Production Board set up a wool clip collection. And what was that? Fashionable men and boys wore cuffs on their trousers at the time and the “clips” became available when cuffs were prohibited. The Red Cross collected the clips cut from pants at stores throughout the country.

Binder twine isn’t something most guard preciously, but 1942 farmers certainly did when twine was controlled. It was only available for growing, harvesting or handling farm products, and for sewing grain bags shut. A year later, in 1943, farmers were allowed to purchase as many burlap bags for potatoes as they did in 1941.

The War Board’s survey as late as spring 1944 revealed that only 2 in 4 knew how important waste paper collections were, and that only 1 home in 4 saved the waste paper. In a day when few had file cabinets, documents, letters and so on were stored in attics. Town officers stored the old records in their attics. Where else could they put them? The immense paper drives of World War ll cleaned out the attics, ridding families and townships of their history. Schools began being the pick-up points for the 1940s paper drives and Boy Scouts continued the efforts. The county’s newspapers were affected when the War Production Board cut newspaper consumption by 10%. At the same time Algoma Record Herald told readership that the paper “had gone to war” and would be available by prepaid subscription only. It guaranteed that the paper would not use one more sheet of newsprint than absolutely necessary.

A month after Pearl Harbor Wisconsin industry was said to be converting quickly and efficiently from peace-time to war-time manufacturing while hiring additional employees. Unemployment was decreasing while the cost of unemployment was also going down. Algoma Plywood was building airplane wings and noses in addition to boat hulls, including the hull that evacuated General Douglas Mac Arthur from the Philippines. Kewaunee’s new shipyard turned out boats at an astonishing speed. One of the ships eventually became the U.S.S. Pueblo, well-known as the ship captured by North Korea in January 1968.

Family welfare agencies of the time were directed to do all they could to keep families together. Fighting men had to be freed from family worries and those who were working had to be most efficient. Agencies were to focus on character building in their work with children, thus preparing them for their part in the war effort. Those working with the aged and handicapped were to lead the way in rehabilitating as many as possible for useful war production.

Materials' collections and restrictions brought innovation. With silk supplies being cut off and the silk there was going into parachute manufacture, silk stockings were in extremely short supply. One parachute required the same amount of silk as 2,300 stockings. The stockings of the 1940s had seams in the back and creative women used eyebrow pencils to draw seams on their bare legs. Cotton socks were in short supply and it was known some continued a Depression era ruse and dipped their feet in white paint rather than admit they didn’t have them. Under coveralls or pants, who knew? Then nylon was invented and used for parachutes. It went into women’s stockings which became known as “nylons.”

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared war following the Day of Infamy, the army had more horses than tanks. The U.S. Army ranked 18^th in the world, just behind Romania. There was a long way to go but it happened at breakneck speed. Mothers and grandmothers saved tin cans and took them to the pick-up centers. They made kids’ snowsuits and coats from old, worn men’s suits and topcoats. Usable men’s shirts were used to make dresses and shirts for smaller tykes. They saved meat bones to be used in soap making. Fat from meat was saved as a key ingredient of glycerine. It took a pound of fat to make 1/3 pound of gunpowder. Thirty lipstick tubes produced 2 cartridges, but it took 30,000 razor blades to make from fifty 30-calibre machine guns.

World War ll affected each family and most had a family member or close friend who paid the ultimate price. Technological innovations went far beyond nylon. Seventy years later many drive Jeeps and use high octane gas. Epoxy is used in construction and beyond. So is Styrofoam. Synthetic cortisone is a pharmaceutical, and Teflon is so widely used that it is found in humans and in growing things all over the earth. The electron microscope is a boon to the scientific world and where would we be without a bowl full of M & Ms? Or penicillin?

It was a time when Buy Local, Re-purpose, Reuse, Recycle went beyond caring for the environment. A few years after the war, if there was anything citizenry did not feel like doing, it was buying local, re-purposing, reusing and recycling. Nearly 40 years of scrimping and saving brought pent-up demands and for awhile  buying local and recycling faded away. Today it is "in" to buy locally and just about every city mandates recycling containers at each residence. The more things change, the more they remain the same. It's just the reasons that are different.

Sources: Algoma Record Herald, Kewaunee Enterprise, Luxemburg News, blogger's family history files

Kewaunee County & the 40 Hour Work Week

Unimaginable unemployment, cuts in hours and pay, and increasingly worsening working conditions for those who did have jobs, were only a part of what became the Great Depression. Today we read about other countries that have less than a 40 hour work week and wish. Few remember the time in our history when government was advocating a shorter work week. One of 30 hours. It happened during the 1930s and in the depths of the Great Depression. The issue of hours affected Kewaunee County as it did the rest of the country.

History tells us that around 1800, men, women and children in the manufacturing workforce put in 14 hour work days. The country was seeing an industrial revolution. Martin Van Buren was president in 1840 when he issued an executive order limiting the manufacturing work day to 10 hours. At the end of World War l in 1919, an 8-9 hour day was advocated and hours were maximized at 48 a week. It happened because of an international labor group. No sooner was it accomplished than the country was in the Depression. President Herbert Hoover proposed limiting the work week to 30 hours. It passed the Senate but didn’t fly in the House. Then Franklin Roosevelt, elected in 1932 on a platform that differed little from 1924 and 1928, enacted more social legislation than most can wrap their heads around today. By the early to mid-1930s, lack of jobs, foreclosures, soup lines and even starvation brought the issue of work hours and that began to get confusing.

The April 15, 1933 issue of Newsweek - one of the first issues in the magazine’s history - headlined a startling article about the U.S. work week being cut to 5 days and 30 hours. There were severe penalties for overtime work, prompting Kewaunee County merchants to quickly announce new hours. The bill was passed as a means to increase employment during the Depression, the worst economic catastrophe known to the U.S.

News articles indicate Kewaunee County employers were worried about compliance with federal regulations. Government’s idea was that more people with jobs meant increased buying power thus helping the country get out of the Depression. At the same time, the state was trying to win federal funds for public works, work that would also help prime business. Where would money come from to hire more people? Kewaunee County folk did not think it was as simple as it sounded.

Six months before the Newsweek article, author Joe Mitchell Chappel was urging protective tariffs as a way of guarding the American worker from the sweat and peasant labor of other lands. Chappel talked of a shorter work week and a work day, saying it was sound.

By late January 1934 federally funded CWA (Civil Works Administration) workers in rural areas and cities with populations less than 2,500 learned that because of dwindling funds, they would be limited to 15 hours a week of work until the end of the CWA period in February. It was felt that living costs were higher in larger areas so those workers would get 24 hours of work a week. Wikipedia tells us that spending about 200 million a month and temporarily employing about 4 million construction workers, CWA functioned during the winter of 1933-34, ending on March 1, 1934. The Record Herald pointed out that 197 Kewaunee County men had been part of the program but the county’s number was being cut to 166. In late March 1934 the paper said a mid-March pay roll was $1,305.20 for 112 men in the county quota. To put that in another perspective, the men received about $11.65 for 60 hours of work, or roughly 18 cents an hour. At the time 25 cents bought a man’s admission to a dance. Ladies paid 10 cents, a used tire could be bought for one dollar, an adult haircut at Timble’s was 40 cents, 4# of navy beans went for 19 cents, a dozen oranges sold for 25 cents and hamburger was 10 cent a pound. Eighteen cents won’t even buy a quarter hour at a parking meter today.

A November Record Herald editorial couldn’t see how limiting labor could go forward without a worsening of the economy. It said if limiting hours to 30 would put more men to work, would limiting hours to 20 or even 5 create more work? The paper couldn’t figure out how families other than the “idle rich” could get what they needed with reduced work and increased idleness. The limited hours would not affect agriculture, though it was pointed out that in Kewaunee County farmers worked 6 hours before dinner and another 6 after, however farmers knew they put in far more. The editorial said that any store open 8 or 9 hours a day placed a physical toll on employees. It also opined that it was really factories that proponents wanted to limit, and yet that wouldn’t work either because production costs would increase prices to a point of unaffordablity.

Farmers were against the advocated 30 hour work week and higher wages for non-farm labor. In October 1937, farmers felt it meant higher costs for them. They felt non-farmers working fewer hours wouldn’t be able to buy their products. It was pointed out that higher standards of living would come with lower production costs and higher wages. It was further said higher production costs and higher wages would bring down the standard of living because food and clothing were basic necessities.

About 6 months later there were other issues. Farm cooperatives also had to face labor issues and if farm products had to be produced in 40, or even 50, hours a week, a lot of farmers were going to find it impossible to exist at “present levels” or at levels in excess. That would put city dwellers in a more difficult economic position.

Hours continued to be a hot topic. A December 1938 Record Herald article  pointed out that in 1849, American industrial workers began work at sunrise, got 40 minutes for breakfast and lunch and then went on to work till 7 PM. In 1938 the average work week was less than 40 hours. Then there was the blame game. Merchants weren’t getting rich on sales in the days of high taxes and wage and hour restrictions.

President Franklin Roosevelt and Labor Secretary Frances Perkins initially endorsed the idea of shorter hours and work week, but buckling under opposition from the National Association of Manufacturers, FDR dropped his support for the bill, which in turn was defeated. It wasn’t long before Roosevelt advocated the job-creating New Deal spending and a forty-hour work week limit, passed into law on October 24, 1938 as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Again, it wasn’t long before there was another change.  World War ll production saw those in defense manufacturing positions working at least 45 hours a week.

Women’s hours seemed to be a separate issue and beat the 1938 40-hour week. In May 1937 the House passed a bill on to the Senate setting hours at 8 hours per day and no more than 44 hours a week, however in an emergency a 9 hour day and 50 hour week would be accepted. By August news articles discussed machines bringing shorter hours and shorter work weeks thus offering more leisure time.  A Record Herald editorial questioned why leisure was necessary because there were those that had nothing but leisure. It went on to say that it took a better man to stand up under all that leisure and make something of himself, more than it did for one who was always on the go.

The paper went on to opine that economic forces were bewildering. Swings too far either way always caused hardship to somebody. Seventy-five years ago the paper said, “Too bad there isn’t some way of determining the happy medium.”  The 40 hour work week has long been a staple in the U.S. Countless articles on its history can be found simply by Googling. One of the most interesting articles appeared in a Jayson DeMers article in Forbes on May 15, 2015. DeMers feels the 40 hour work week is dead for a number of reasons. As Abraham Lincoln said, "We cannot escape history."

Sources: Algoma Record Herald, Jayson DeMers in Forbes 5/15/2015 online; Google; National Park Service guide at Lindenwalk, Kinderhook, NY; Newsweek 4/15/1933; Wikipedia.

A Ground Hog's Place in Algoma's History

According to CNN, Punxsutawney Phil didn’t see his shadow. If Phil is right, we’ll have an early spring.  Shubenacadie Sam in Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia agrees with Phil, but Dunkirk Dave in Dunkirk, New York saw the sun, and that means more winter. Then there is Jimmy the Groundhog here in Wisconsin who agrees wholeheartedly with Phil and Sam. If they are right, it means the oak leaves will be the size of a mouse’s ear much earlier than Wisconsin farmers generally plant their corn.

Wikipedia tells us the Ground Hog Day was adopted in the U.S. in 1887. Wikipedia also tells us, "The celebration began as a Pennsylvania German custom in southwestern and central Pennsylvania in the 18th and 19th centuries. It has its origins in ancient weather lore where a badger or sacred bear is the prognosticator, as opposed to a groundhog." February 2 is also Candlemas Day, a day celebrating the presentation of Jesus, the light of the world. Candlemas comes midway between the first day of winter and the first day of spring. So does Ground Hog's Day. Googling both, a number of sites point out that both bear similarities to the Pagan festival of Imbolec - the seasonal turning point of the Celtic calendar which is celebrated on February 2 and also involves weather prognostication - and to St. Swithum's Day on July 15. St. Swithum is regarded as the saint to whom one prays in the event of droughts.    

1924 Record Herald

A search of old Ahnapee/Algoma newspapers reveals a ground hog’s prediction was something everybody had fun with. Farmers generally don’t  generally like things, but the ground hog sightings helped beat the winter doldrums and brought thoughts of the seed catalogues that would soon start arriving. During World War l and the Great Depression, highlighting the day meant frivolity in austere times. Then came the 1993 film Ground Hog Day which really “kicked it up a notch.” Star Bill Murray called it some of the best work he ever did. Festivals and celebrations begin in the early morning, and early morning TV shows are there to let viewers in on just what they need to know to go forward. Most often it is that viewers need to hunker down for another six weeks.

One hundred years ago Ahnapee Record told readership that the ground hog was to emerge from his hole and size up weather on Candlemas Day. If he didn’t see his shadow, he’d emerge for good and thus break winter’s backbone. Since the ground hogs eat clover, cabbage, young beans and more, the paper opined that if the ground hog didn’t see his shadow and stayed out, he’d starve. What happened in 1915 when it was reported that the ground hog was at large? His favorite foods weren’t there. Over the years the paper advised area populace to watch their resident ground hogs. It always seemed as if the local 4-legged creatures had the edge on smarts.

In 1914 the paper reported that on Candlemas Day Immaculate Conception Church would bless the candles used in church and in homes. The second part of the article said it was also the day on which the “proverbial” ground hog would make an appearance. A year later Ground Hogs’ Day set the stage for some fierce competition in Algoma. Bowling. The Glue Eaters – white collar personal at Algoma Panel - were taking on the Printers at the Majestic Bowling Alley. The Glue Eaters were afraid the Printers – the Printers’ Devils from “Ink Alley”  (Algoma Record) - would emulate the ground hogs and return to their holes. The Glue Eaters were afraid there was a chance the Printers would rally and carry their black ground hog-like colors into the deciding three games. But, at least Ground Hogs’ Day was sure to establish Algoma’s worst bowlers!

In 1935 people had more winter than they needed and thought it was time to foil the ground hog. Swiping his alarm clock was one idea. Or, passing a law requiring ground hogs to wear sun glasses. Maybe he needed a trapdoor blocking his burrow. Depression era ground hogs seemed to be taking on human characteristics, but it was a time to enjoy some merriment even if it was ridiculous.

By 1950, Ground Hogs’ Day was sunshine following a January that the paper said was monotonous, but monotonous it was not. It was much like this one. January 1950 saw all kinds of weather, including a day when Algoma’s temperature hit a balmy 50 degrees. Another day saw a minus 13 degrees. There was rain, freezing drizzle and ice. There were high winds and there was thunder. January 1950 certainly wasn’t boring and offered plenty of conversation. January 1950 went out with sub-zero temperatures prompting the paper to say and who beside a ground hog would want to stick their neck out?

Just as all of Kewaunee County, Algoma is packed with history though ground hogs aren’t usually considered a part of that history, but did you hear the one about Montpelier’s ground hog………..

Sources: Ahnapee Record, Algoma Record, Algoma Record Herald, Google, Wikipedia. Clip Art in Windows.