Civilians make concessions to the war

RITZVILLE – Joanna McCrady, who shared the story of her cousin Adolph Gram’s invaluable service to General Dwight D. Eisenhower at the end of World War II, recalled details of civilian life during the war.

She grew up on a farm near Sprague before moving to Ritzville in October of 1945. She said she got to visit her cousin Adolph, who grew up on a wheat farm in Ralston, but “during the war, you didn’t go visiting very much because of gas rationing.”

She said people received certain amounts of gas rations, depending on where they lived and what they did.

“Farmers had ‘A’ and ‘B’ stamps, because they needed more gas,” McCrady recalled. “’A’ stamps didn’t get much gas, and ‘C’ was almost unlimited.”

That sparked a memory about her father driving a neighbor, as a favor.

“It was a wonderful thing when you got gum. When we lived in Sprague, there was a Catholic priest who spoke German. He didn’t drive, but dad (who wasn’t a Catholic, but spoke German also) would take him downtown, and the priest would give us a package of gum for the kids. We loved it — especially Black Jack,” McCrady said. “Kids nowadays go to a store and they expect to get everything.”

McCrady said the family received ration books, but living on a farm they had their own meat, so they didn’t need the meat stamps.

“Mom would trade them for sugar and other things,” McCrady said. “We had canned goods stamps, too, but we didn’t use those, either, because we canned our own stuff.”

McCrady said if you wanted to get a tube of toothpaste, you had to bring in the old tube.

“It was aluminum, so maybe they recycled it,” McCrady said. “People brought in cooking utensils to the metal drive, and I remember my mom said she didn’t have that many pots and pans to give any away. You pretty much gathered up anything you could, to donate.”

McCrady recalled the stamp drives when she was a grade school student in Sprague.

“We had stamp drives in school, and kids would bring a dime and you would get a war effort stamp and put it in a stamp book,” McCrady said. “One of the jobs, if you were good, was you got to take the money down to the bank. I got to do that two or three times, and I was so proud of myself.”

McCrady said the students planted Victory Gardens at school in the springtime.

“I wondered, years later, if someone in town took care of them. In the spring, you planted the vegetables, and I never thought about it at that time, but I hope someone took care of them, because we put in work,” McCrady said. “My dad planted like they did in Germany, you had a house garden of things you used everyday and the field garden had things that took longer to grow, like corn, and that you didn’t use everyday.”

McCrady said most people canned everything, because there were no freezers at the time.

“The freezers didn’t come in until the last year or so we lived in Sprague. They weren’t home freezers, but they were in town,” McCrady said. “The Mercantile building in Ritzville had the freezers, and you rented a freezer locker and you had your meat in there. We hadn’t lived in Ritzville very long when my mom bought our own freezer, and I was so glad, because when I went to the freezer locker in town, I was sure the door was going to lock on me. It never did, but I would make my little brother stand outside the door and watch it. But he never did; he always came inside because he was so curious to see everything.”

“I remember when the freezers came and someone told my mom to freeze fruit and it was so delicious,” McCrady said. “From then on, she froze peaches.”

McCrady said before they had a freezer, they canned or cured and smoked their meats.

Her mother, Emma Kessler, was a German immigrant who came to the United States from Russia.

McCrady said her father served in World War I with the German Army before emigrating to South Dakota to work on a farm with his uncles.

“He had to crawl out a second story window in a snowstorm one night because the snow was so high,” McCrady said. “That’s when he said he’d had enough, and came to live with his sister, on a farm out of Sprague.”