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