Episode 43 - A Home Front Reader

When it comes to learning about World War II, there are enough books to keep reading for an entire lifetime! Sometimes, it's hard to know where to start. In this episode, Sarah showcases some of the books she's read as a master's degree student and talks about their important contributions to this field of history. She tries out a delicious summer-time salad and reads the account of one man who remembers his teenaged years on the home front during WWII.

To see images, recipes and research conducted for this episode go to victorykitchenpodcast.substack.com. To learn more about Sarah and this podcast go to thevictorykitchenpodcast.com.

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If you love reading about World War II, no doubt you've already got a running list of recommendations growing through your mind right now on a plethora of topics. There are all kinds of World War II genres from fiction to memoirs to scholarly works. But what nonfiction books can we turn to to gain deeper knowledge about World War II on the American home front and around the world? Obviously, we can't cover them all in one episode or even an entire season, so I'm going to narrow it down a lot. In this episode, we're going to take a look at a selection of books I've read for school and my podcast that you might want to add to your reading list. So let's get started. Welcome to the Victory Kitchen, the podcast all about American food rationing during World War II. I'm your host, Sarah Creviston Lee, author, historian, and vintage foodie. I'll be exploring the logistics of food rationing, featuring wartime cookbooks and recipes, and highlighting real home front experiences. We're going to be learning exactly what our grandmothers had to do to get their food to fight for victory. Hello, welcome back to a new episode of the Victory Kitchen. Uh, I it's been a while, and this last semester was tough. So I appreciate your patience in any new episodes, but it was really important that I focus on my studies and getting a good grade. Uh, but like I said in the introduction, there are a lot of books that I've read through my, you know, school years, um, since I started in 2023. Wow. That I thought were really great and they're really fascinating for studying the World War II home front. And so I thought I could make an episode about that just to discuss it. I've shared a few of the books on Instagram, but I thought it would be great to talk more in depth about them here in an episode. So this is a little bit different than what I normally do, but I thought it would be an interesting discussion, and I would love to hear your World War II book suggestions. There's a never-ending supply, which, you know, I think is great. I think there's so many different perspectives to study this war from and this time period from. So all the more perspectives, the better. So a little bit of background. Last semester I took a directed reading course, which involves a chosen topic and a curated list of books I had to read to learn about the topic more in depth. I wanted to learn about wartime food, of course, uh, because I don't teach a class specifically on that at my school. But because I tend to focus on that a lot, I knew I had some knowledge gaps about the American home front and the larger wartime situation as a whole. So this list I put together was designed with that in mind. Um my professor suggested books and I added to that list until I had 12 total with a lot of extras as backup. I won't be sharing every single book I read, but I will be sharing the ones that I feel dealt with food and the home front the most, since that's what this podcast is about. I'll have the entire list up on my substack because I'm all in favor of adding to your own never-ending to read list. The stack of books for this episode sitting next to me is very tall. So let's get started. So I've divided these books up into three really broad subjects. One is the home front, the other is world kind of perspective, and then the third is the Roosevelt's. I guess they just needed their own category. And also, uh, well, I'll give more background on the class I took later. So for the home front, I'm gonna start off with this book called A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression by Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe. Now, this book's theme is how the foundation of a country's success in feeding their people in peacetime or war reflects on the country's ability to be successful. It also discusses how the economic collapse of the Great Depression, coupled with environmental disasters, shaped how Americans ate during the Depression. So, already to me, this is really fascinating. Now, this book charts the history of food during the Great Depression. It's arranged in kind of like a rough timeline format, uh, laying the culinary groundwork of how Americans were eating before the stock market crash in October 1929, and it goes on from there until the U.S. entered World War II. It explores the evolution and impact of government control in food and agriculture, and the rise of home economists' influence, which is really interesting too. Other highlights include school lunch programs, the creation of the country's first food stamps, the turn from cultural comfort foods to scientifically designed menus, and an emphasis on nutrition and vitamins. And this is the time period where vitamins were discovered. The book also does a really good job of highlighting the complexity of national government versus unbalanced local intervention for feeding hungry people and the various ways Hoover and FDR experimented with government quote-unquote handouts. An important feature was also digging into the country's long-standing view of quote the deserving poor and their treatment. And I felt this was a really important argument in the book because this feelings/conflict still kind of pervades modern charity giving. And that's, I think, something that requires some deep pondering. So I thought this was really important in the book. Now, this book is about the Great Depression. Why did I include this in my list of World War II home front books? Well, I felt it was really important in my study of gaining greater understanding of World War II home front food situation. We needed, or I needed to have a better understanding of what was going on beforehand so that there's something to compare with. It really helps me better understand why people or how people were suffering during the Depression, especially in terms of food and the economy and leading up into World War II, how that war, as terrible as it was, was a huge turning point for our country and its ability to be successful. So I really recommend this book. Excellent, excellent read. I really enjoyed it and learned a lot. Now, the second book I read is called Americans Remember the Home Front, an oral narrative of the World War II Years in America by Roy Hoops. Now, I really wanted to include uh an oral history book, at least one. I actually had another one in the list, but we had to cut it just for time. I didn't have time to read it. But this particular one uh was published in 1977, and this date is actually really important because if you think about it, it's only about 30 years after World War II had ended. So their memories that of people who lived through it were much more fresh than if we have an oral history in like 2020s and or even 2010s. A lot more time has passed, so people's memories might be a little bit different. So the purpose of this particular project of this book was to record in a written format conversations with a wide variety of Americans who lived through the war years. Americans remember the home front is a collection of these memories or oral histories from World War II gathered into various themes, including how people reacted to the attack on Pearl Harbor, how they coped on the home front, how everyone got involved, and their reaction to hearing about the dropping of the atomic bombs. This collection of oral narratives provides us with valuable personal remembrances of World War II on the American Home Front. In this sense, no two oral history books will be the same because the interviewees will be different, the questions are different, the interviewers are different, and so what they choose to focus on is different. And uh this particular book is a key contribution because of these unique memories. Now, the variety of people interviewed um includes people from all different backgrounds, careers, race, even one conscientious objector I was very happy to see, though the majority did seem to be white men. There were quite a few women interviewed, but I felt they were a bit offbalanced by the men. This was surprising to me because the home front, at least narratively, is always touted as women taking over everything. Of course, there were a lot of men who did not qualify for the armed services or, you know, based on health or age or their jobs. Their stories are important for the texture of the home front experience. But I was just disappointed that uh more women's voices weren't included, especially in the home front section. On the other hand, I actually was surprised by how many women were included because at this time period, 1970, late 1970s, women's history was just beginning its push into the history field. So uh the lack of prevailing women's historical narratives, you know, may have had a subconscious impact on who uh Roy Hoops chose to interview. I also noticed how many of the stories were from the East or the West Coast, and not very many from the central or southern states, but this may or may not have had to do with who he was able to interview, which is understandable, but at the same time, it reveals the importance that more is better in oral histories when it comes to reconstructing a well-documented history. So I felt that his book added to other oral histories, and together they're invaluable. Now, one thing that stood out to me from this book was the amount of negative feelings about the war. I guess we don't really hear those a lot. So I was very surprised by how many jaded people there were. Uh, this one instance in particular, they're talking about the Willow Run bombing plant and how, you know, the press or like the government officials were coming to tour the factory, and they had just opened, and so they weren't really up and running very well. And so they just were told to s like look busy, but they weren't actually doing anything. And then there were these two stories involving gasoline that just I wrote exclamation marks in the in the marches, if that tells you anything. So this is what it says. Uh then gasoline had to be rationed. A cousin of mine was a big-time lawyer. He got sent to someplace in Washington and came out a full kernel, but he didn't want to suffer for gas when he came up here, so he bought surreptitiously a 5,000 gallon tank and had it installed below his house and filled it full of gasoline. 5,000 gallons. That just blows my mind. Sometime in the next year or so, it was discovered to be empty. The thing had a leak in it, so the gas all went down into White's pond. Oh my gosh. The other one is just as astounding, if not more so. Um, oh, oh darn it. Oh yeah, this was that story was from Newton Tolman, who lived in New Hampshire. And this one comes from Lillian Williams, who lives um during the war. She went down to Southwest Harbor where her husband worked in the boatyard. So she said that we had a problem with gasoline because people stole it all the time, siphoned it out at night. Like that's really something you don't really hear about. Um, they also had a radio, uh, a new radio with shortwave on it, and they had it turned on in the evening. At a quarter past five every night, it would come on that oranges are orange, coal is black, mashed potatoes are white. So that's what it would say on there. They'd repeat it over and over and over. So about the third night, my husband told one of the Coast Guard officers that lived right next door to us, and he looked into it. Somebody on the shore was repeating this so that the German submarines could come in and fill up with gas. They had big oil tanks in an old cellar. Enemy submarines were getting gas, but they put a stop to it. Oh my gosh. That just uh was it a money-making scheme? Were they true? Like traitors to America? Like, I don't even know. That's crazy. Uh these are stories you don't hear about, but this is why oral histories are so important because we get these things that were not published by the government or the newspapers, because maybe they just got the surface stuff, and these oral histories uh reveal maybe some other stories. And so these are this is great. I thought it was hilarious. Um, because you know, usually it's like, you know, yay, victory, go us, and um, that was not always the feeling that people, you know, they did not always care about the war. Um, in fact, some people were dead set against it. So important perspectives. The next book is called Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen by Bob Green. I uh I'm sure some of you have heard of this one. It's a popular history, so not necessarily a scholarly book, but it was very enjoyable, as popular histories usually are. They're very enjoyable to read. This book is the story of the people of the north of the town North Platte, Nebraska, who organized together and met every troop train that came through their depot with food, music, smiles, and encouragement. Through interviews with those who experienced it firsthand, Green highlights the huge impact North Platte had on the soldiers who benefited and the surrounding communities who participated. So, besides a very charming look at the home front history, this book adds a tremendous amount to geographical, transportation, Midwestern, and Nebraska histories. The town's location in the central U.S. and as a place the train took on water and coal makes it a unique stopping point that helped make this canteen successful. It's a fascinating look at the movement of troops and is a fantastic case study for such a hub of troop movements. Besides that, this book provides a detailed examination of how one town, or one woman rather, took a desire to help the war effort and turned it into an incredible, unrelenting service to troops during the war. It's really fascinating reading the different accounts about the food, how they got it, where it came from, and the sacrifices that were made to make sure every soldier was fed. The logistics of that must have been incredible, and I would have loved more detail on how it all functioned on an organizational level. Like it's a little mind-boggling the sheer amount of food that was produced from just this tiny region and fed to these troops passing through. I especially love this. There's two stories I really loved. One was about the birthday cake, about these women would make birthday cakes and they would ask a soldier, is it your birthday? Just a randomly selected soldier, and they usually were like, No. They're like, Well, happy birthday. Here's a cake. And there may have been singing involved. I don't know. But I just thought it was so charming and so wonderful because it was his birthday sometime, even if it wasn't that day. The other story that I found amusing was about popcorn balls, these one family in particular, I think, or a group of families, they made these popcorn balls. And inside was the name and address of young their their daughters, so that the soldiers would have somebody to write to. So that was a pretty funny story. You know, this book is decidedly optimistic with many heart-touching and humorous moments, but it's not without the somber moments, too, since so many of the townspeople knew that some of the sailors were heading for their deaths. So overall, I felt that this was a very important history that highlights the goodness of people that is so lauded during World War II. And something I learned from reading other books was that this was not the only instance. There was, I believe, a canteen in Ohio that had a similar type of situation. And then there was also a canteen in Baltimore that was catering towards the sailors who were shipping out, or the soldiers, I guess, in general, that were shipping out from the Baltimore port. And that was, I believe, a 24-7 canteen. So really interesting. And I I think it's really amazing to hear these stories of how these communities came together with food for the soldiers, perfect strangers, but they were taking care of them as if they were their own. The next book is called Bitter Fruit: African American Women in World War II by Maureen Honey. And uh this, I wanted to include a book about African American women because I feel like, while I have read some, I feel like my knowledge can definitely be expanded in understanding their experience during the war. Now, this book is a collection of essays, fiction, poetry, and photographs from World War II correcting the narrative of African American women during the war. So I felt this was actually a really unique perspective and is a really valuable addition to the home front um knowledge, and that it deepens the conversation surrounding the African American women's experience on the home front in their own words, or as it was presented to them in their community's magazines or newspapers. So this collection is drawing from the women themselves, from their own community, to show their personal experience um during that uh wartime period. This perspective is especially important because African Americans um and especially African American women are usually uh filtered through an outsider's lens. Uh and in this book the the author seeks to let these women's voices speak for themselves. The author highlights the extremely difficult challenges these women faced in their jobs, in their efforts to support the war effort, how they navigated gender and racial issues while also supporting African American soldiers. She expertly provides a platform for these women to express their pain and anger and hopes for the future. It was a very moving book that should be included in any discussion of the home front. I think it was really important work that this uh that uh Maureen Honey did. Now, there were a lot of things that struck me in this book, but uh one in particular that stood out to me was this well, it was uh somebody had sent in a letter uh protesting um a picture, an article that had appeared in Life magazine. It's called Dear Dixie from the Negro Digest, May 1945. And um so in response to this letter protesting the appearance of black and white uh uh people appearing together at a club, this uh person responded. This is Barney Josephson, owner of the Cafe Society in which the picture was taken. He responds November first, nineteen forty four. In uh quotation um in parentheses, it says 79 years after the Civil War. Let's see, later in the letter it says, it is our opinion that the color of one's skin is not the determining factor which makes for decency. Finally, we point out to you that your work in helping the war effort is totally inconsistent with your prejudice against the Negro people. Why fight German Nazism with its hateful racial theory? Why fight for the four freedoms if you want a section of our population subjected to the same theory and denied the same freedoms? There's a new world a coming after this war, and one of the things a coming is the completion of those rights over which a civil war was fought in this country. This highlights uh something that I have seen uh in you know my various research for the podcast is this double standard, the hypocrisy of fighting for these quote unquote four freedoms when not everyone in our country could enjoy those four freedoms. We're fighting against Nazi Germany and their racism while being very blatant about our racism, uh especially against African American troops. And this is a really important discussion. I actually have a list, I mean, I have a book in my list of uh two read books. That is another one I didn't get to read, but I will highlight that later. Anyway, that really stood out to me. Really excellent book. Next on the list is Boomtown Portsmouth: The World War II Transformation of a Quiet New England Seaport by Rodney K. Waterson. Both my professor and I really wanted to find a book about Boomtowns because we were both fascinated, we're both fascinated with the idea of uh the population booms and how different towns coped with that. There was some like in my episode on the trailer parks, I touched on that a lot. Um, about all the various ways people struggle to find uh decent living quarters, d decent places to live while working at these boomtown these these factories and these small little towns that previously had, you know, maybe you know, a thousand people suddenly had, you know, eight thousand people. It it was it's quite the challenge. So this particular book is about Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and this was a place where they built submarines. This was a really fascinating look at a very unique boomtown on the East Coast. So my biggest takeaway from this book was that there are that no two boom towns are alike. Portsmouth had a unique, positive footing going into the war. And it also talks about how the local officials were looking ahead to the future of their town, and they worked really hard to avoid the pitfalls that boomtowns normally were subjected to after the war. And um the author was very successful in constructing this boomtown narrative with all of its challenges and benefits. He covered social history, women's history, economic history, environmental history, and military history very successfully. I came away knowing a lot more than I did going in, and I really applaud his meticulous efforts. The things that stood out to me the most were the environmental pollution and the population boom chapters. These were the most valuable to me, I felt. One thing I feel like there isn't a lot of discussion about, at least not that I've encountered in wartime books, is the discussion of the environmental impact of the war. He really highlights this because it was such a problem in Portsmouth. If you think about it, when there's a sewer system in place to support your town of 600 people, when all of a sudden there's, you know, 5,000 people, that is a huge strain on all of the services from sewer to electrical to um schools to hospitals, just everything you can think of. And how are these problems solved? Now, the environmental thing especially was a problem, not just the suit extra sewage running into the river, like they're just piping it directly into the river, weren't treating it or anything. Um, and this is a tide water uh town, so it's not directly on the ocean, it's on this tidewater river, so it the tides move the water in and out. So they were lucky in the fact that they did have some of this tide working for them to move all the pollutants away. And it wasn't just sewage, like I said, it was the pollution coming from the docks where they were the dry docks where they were building these submarines. There's a lot of chemicals involved. Who knew? Like, I just didn't even know. And they were lucky in that it wasn't as bad as some other boom towns where they did not have tidal waters. It it was it was bad. It was just so not great. And it's crazy, I think. Like, why haven't we heard more about this? I feel like this should be a pretty big deal. And if you think about some of these chemicals that they're using, like and he talks about this, some of the chemicals that they were using to to create these submarines are still polluting the area, and they have to do a lot of reconstruction and rehabilitation of the environment. Um, so this I just felt like I don't know, my my brain was just like going crazy because I'm like, whoa, I've never read about any of this stuff. It was very exciting. And then the population boom, I mean, this is the reason why I re I read this book was to learn about what did that mean? Like what did a what does a population boom town mean in the impacts on the people? And another fascinating thing was the politics. This they had a woman as their mayor, and that in itself was very interesting to read about. So really cool things I um I read in this book. Now, there were some things, um, especially about rationing. I was like, uh this doesn't sound right, and I felt like some of the research was off. But I also like I do understand not everyone hyperfixates on rationing like I do. So I understand uh that you know it's not always gonna be 100% um meticulous. Uh that's fine. But um there was also something weird about the chapters. They were chapter one was on page one, chapter two was on page two. So I think that slipped by the editors. It was kind of complicated navigating chapters, like when I wanted to go back and read, because there weren't any page numbers to help me um on that. But anyway, still really, really fascinating. I would recommend this book. Just I I thought he did great, covering so many interesting topics, and really broadened my horizon on what it meant to live in a boom town. There might be more books out there about boomtowns. If there are, please let me know because I would love to read about them. All right, the next book is called Crossing the Pond: The Native American Effort in World War II by Gier Bishop Franco. I think I pronounced that correctly. I wanted to include some Native American perspective on the home front because this is another area. Like I have had this idea for a podcast episode for a really long time to talk about the Native Americans on the home front, but it was it's really intimidating because I just feel like research is very hard in this topic, and I don't know as much as I want to know, and I feel like um I really want to hear it from their voices. So, and and this author acknowledges that this is a growing field. There's not enough work done, there's not enough scholarly research in this area, and so she's calling for that in her introduction. She's calling for there to be more. This particular book is about the Native American War effort in World War II, with a focus on things happening at home in the U.S. with some discussion of military experience overseas, which this is why I really like this book, because a lot of the discussion is about, you know, like the code talkers and things like that, which is great. But there were a lot of people still home doing things, and I wanted to read about those people. Uh Franco, the um author, endeavors to tell the story from the Native American perspective, uh, with a focus on behind the scenes politics, a bureaucracy, and government agents who were making decisions on behalf of Native Americans. The author argues that the World War II generation of Native Americans exercised agency by taking advantage of wartime and the post-war era to gain political, economical, and educational opportunities. She makes a point of saying that her book is not pushing the continuing narrative of assimilation or acculturation, but instead argues that Native Americans never lost touch with who they were or the goals for their people. They wanted to help fight for their country, but it was with the intention of returning to the reservations and their communities, and was not what the white Americans hoped would be a huge success of further assimilation. I found this book to be really refreshing in that she covers aspects of the war and Native Americans on the home front and in the military in unexpected ways, like their donation of resources, the selective service, and the work of Collier at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She uh acknowledges additionally that much more research needs to be done about Native women and their work on the home front. That's something that I actually I've been very curious about, that I really would love to talk about. Um, but it's very, like I said, it's very hard to find information. She does discuss Native women's war efforts to a small extent, but the focus of her work is mostly on the men. One of the most helpful chapters was about the selective service and explaining that despite laws that had been passed previously in the 1920s, uh, how much confusion there was over whether Native Americans were citizens. They were, whether they even qualified for the draft, and with tribes themselves thinking they were exempt due to various treaties from the past with the government, this led to so much confusion. Reading about the breadth of Collier's work to help further in his way the Native American cause was fascinating. He did seem to want to help them, but at times his efforts were very paternalistic. She also talks about Native soldiers and how they navigated military life, forming friendships and staying in touch with family at home was also a valuable aspect to this book. One thing I felt like the book was it was heavy on the bureaucracy and you know how the just the bickering between the different government organizations and uh that was kind of tedious. I think it's important history that we need to know, but it was very tedious to read through. Uh, I really loved reading about the native soldiers and how they, you know, maintained their identity um despite being in a very unfamiliar place surrounded by unfamiliar people. You know, I I think that reflects the larger soldiers, like having to, you know, they're put into these really comp difficult circumstances um to fight this war. One of the things that stood out to me the most was about how they donated their resources. This was something I did not know about. I in some ways, after reading this book, I I felt a little bit cheated from my own history upbringing. There's so many wonderful stories and heartbreaking stories of um the Native Americans in our, you know, in our country. And I wish that I had grown up knowing more. So this book was really transformative for me. I I really learned a lot, and I would love to see or read more books on similar topics like this. Now we're turning to the global front. I've only got a couple books in this category before we get to the Roosevelt's. But uh, the global front. I wanted to have a couple a few books that were helping me to see the American perspective, but from the outside, because my emphasis in my degree is Americ on American history. So, but I still feel like when we can see the American perspective from a global sense, it really can reveal things that we might not see otherwise. So, one of these books is called Plants Go to War: A Botanical History of World War II by Judith Sumner. Wow. I love this book so much. I was so thrilled when I found it. I just did a search and found this book, and I was like, oh my gosh, no way. I'm such a nerd. Anyway, uh, this book is such an excellent addition to World War II home front studies in that it approaches the war from a botanical lens. So fascinating. And even the author's background, her father, I believe, was a chemist during World War II.

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Like, I've never read anything by a chemist in World War II. So cool. Um, but she herself is a botanist. So bringing these two things together was just, it tickled my brain so much. Okay. This was very exciting to read because the use of botanical materials was so vast and varied, a little bit mind-blowing. It she talks about how countries approached securing these kinds of materials. They were very different, and sometimes they copied from other countries, as in the case of the American push for using soybeans. So some of these things are food related, some things are not, but a lot of them do have crossovers with food. I was very impressed with how she tackled this viewpoint. It's daunting, just all the things that she could talk about, but she covered so many things and really did her research. She includes some technical slash chemical information along the way. Most impressively was the fact that she didn't just focus on the United States or England, like the obvious things, but covered more Allied countries and the Axis countries as well. She really embraced the fact that it was a world war. Even with the subjects I was very familiar with, I was delighted to see the variety of sources she pulled from, even American Cookery Magazine, which no one talks about. Uh, that really made me so happy. There were many surprising facts and topics I hadn't even considered, like how Australia was a huge producer of food, not only for Great Brita Britain, but for our troops, American troops, in the Pacific. I had no idea. And there was also this fascinating little tidbit uh where she talks about um food storage and preventing food spoilage. She says huge crops required vast areas for cold storage. In Atchison, Kansas, a former limestone mine provided 60 acres of subterranean food storage during the war years, where the Food War administ War Food Administration arranged to store tons of fresh vegetables, fruits, and other perishables at a constant temperature of 32 degrees Fahrenheit. What? Okay, Kansas people. Did you know about this? How have we not heard about this limestone mine for food storage? That just blew my mind. I also love that she includes um military farms around the world, including the Australian ones. Just, oh my gosh, so many cool topics. Um, I I really would have liked to see her touch more on freezing technology and freezer locker plants. You know, that would have been cool. Also on beer making, as this was a huge food source loved by the military that used various botanical ingredients. But, you know, on the whole, it was really wonderful to see a wartime study that touched on so many of the niche topics I've covered in my own podcasts. So I would call this book a foundational book that is a must-read for any serious home front historians. Absolutely must-read. Now the second book in the the world home the world front is called The Taste of War, World War II and the Battle for Food by Lizzie Collingham. I saved the this book for last. This is I've owned this book for a while, and I started reading it, oh man, ages ago. And I've I've remembered things from what I had read in the past, but this time I was like, I'm gonna finish this dang book. It is 500 pages long. It is really long, but it covers a lot of really important topics. So this book is foundational as well for understanding the wartime home front from a global perspective. It was really helpful in laying out how intricately connected the food markets were and how industrialization had improved people's standard of living, which in turn created pressure for more and better quality food. And I don't know, if anything, this book is really helpful for understanding the food problems we have today. There's a lot of parallels because, you know, world markets fair pretty much function the same. It was really fascinating to learn how the different governments handled acquiring food for their people and their military, and how the war changed their approach or made the food situation worse. There is a clear and stark contrast with how the United States handled food versus every other country. The most striking was how Japan expected their soldiers to take food from the land and did not have mess kitchens preparing their food, but instead every soldier was supposed to cook his own meal. So just different approaches. And if you think about it, that method is way cheaper to handle than uh the way the United States did things. It was very expensive to ship all our soldiers, but also all the food to feed all those soldiers. I was most fascinated with the idea of the way some countries exported their hunger. This was one of her main arguments uh that I had never thought of. As in the case, like here's an example is of the United Kingdom, who placed a lot of requests and pressures on other countries within their empire to provide food for the people living in the British Isles. So this was exporting hunger to these other countries. India's situation was especially bad because of, well, various reasons. But one was Churchill's hatred of Gandhi, which caused him to retaliate against India, withholding any aid, and this helped advance problems caused by poor government management, leading to widespread starvation and disease, where millions of people died. And even the United States, they were asked for aid from the United States, and they were too busy to help, um, too tied up in other things. So the level of starvation and malnutrition world. Wide was really difficult to read about. This book was far more depressing than I was expecting. Um, especially considering how much American food and agriculture blossomed during World War II. And this is in stark contrast to pretty much every other country in the world. And oh no, this is my mistake. Here I was talking about Australia. It I got confused. It's not talked about in the previous book about the botany, but it's talked about in this book, The Taste of War. How did I misremember that? Okay, so yes, I enjoyed learning about the huge role Australia had in helping to feed our American troops in the Pacific. This makes sense. Australia was a lot closer than we were, but there were some cultural food differences that some GIs had a hard time with. But I definitely have a greater appreciation for Australia's role on the food front. And I feel like they need to be talked about a heck of a lot more than they are. So I hope somebody's doing that. Uh I didn't I haven't I need to do more research to see. I'm sure there are books published out there. I need to read them. All right, so those are our home front books. Uh I learned so much this past semester. So many amazing books. My perspective has most definitely been brought in, and I'm really grateful for that. And now we turn to the Roosevelts. Now, I took a separate special class that was on the Roosevelts. There are three sections: Teddy Roosevelt, um, Franklin Roosevelt, and then Eleanor Roosevelt. I only took, I didn't take the Teddy Roosevelt one because I was trying to focus on World War II home front stuff. So uh I yes, I took the class on FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt. And the two books I read for Eleanor were one was called Eleanor Roosevelt, The Warriors, and After. And we read volume one, but for my paper I wrote for this class, um, I specifically referred to volume three. There's three volumes in total. And this was written by Blanche Wisen Cook. And these books are excellent. Oh my gosh. If you need a book about Eleanor Roosevelt, get this three-volume series because it is so in-depth, so detailed, and um you definitely gain a different perspective of Eleanor and FDR. I think by the end our class was sufficiently discussed with FDR. But anyway. Very interesting. Uh, my paper I actually wrote about uh Arthurdale and Eleanor Roosevelt's role in establishing and running, helping to run Arthurdale, which was a town in West Virginia. They have an excellent museum, by the way. So if you ever in West Virginia, I highly recommend visiting this little museum. The other book we read was called The Fire Brand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship. Polly Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the struggle for social justice by Patricia Bell Scott. This is really interesting, too. This was mostly from the perspective of Polly Murray, who was uh an African-American woman, an activist, and her relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt. I learned so much from this book. It was really interesting. I did not know about Eleanor Roosevelt's activism herself and the people she surrounded herself with and that she had relationships with. They just, she was really trying to advance all these different causes, and social justice was one of them. So really fascinating books. For the FDR class section, I read two books again. One was Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by H. W. Brands. Surprisingly, I'm sad to admit that. I just did not know very much. And this is why I took this class. I really wanted to understand the president and the first lady who steered our country through World War II and the Great Depression. And so this covers his life and all the things he was trying to do during his presidency. He, this title is very apt. He was a very radical president. Uh, and there's a lot of people who didn't like him. But then again, there were a lot of people who did. So uh this and I I learned a lot about his earlier political career, which I knew nothing about, and when he contracted polio, he did not contract polio as a child, like I just assumed, like many people did. He contracted it in his twenties, and it obviously affected his whole entire life, and the choices that he made. So that was really interesting to learn. The second book I read was called By Order of the President, FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans by Greg Robinson. Now, I was surprised by this book. I guess, I mean, this was really about the FDR's role in the internment of Japanese Americans. So, as you might guess, this book is not favorable of FDR. In fact, this author is very critical of other historians who put FDR on a pedestal. And I feel like this still happens today. Many people put him on a pedestal because of these really significant changes that he made. I mean, we've, or just things that happened during his presidency that he pushed through, like the CCC and obviously like how he dealt with World War II. There's just glowing praise for FDR all over the place. This guy, though, not so much. He was very critical in this book. So it was different than I was expecting, but it's really helps you understand FDR's role in the internment of the Japanese Americans and how he was like, Well, this is a problem, so let's put them in these camps. And then um, like after there's like no thinking of afterwards when they were released, where they would go. They were displaced, and he wasn't very concerned about that. Uh, about where they would go. So, yeah, not the warm and fuzzy feelings going in this book. The paper that I wrote for this particular section of the class was uh how FDR used the radio as a propaganda tool or just as a tool during his political life, and how groundbreaking that really was. And I really feel like his use of radio transformed how presidents communicate with their people. And so that in and of itself, I really love the technology of that time. So this topic was right up my alley. Uh, but these books are really helpful in understanding his life better. Okay, so now we're gonna move on to books I've read for my specifically for my podcast research. And I'm gonna run through these fairly quickly, just have a little summary of each one because I feel like I have talked about them like in my podcasts or on Instagram, uh, but I felt like it was good to have them all in one place. So if, you know, if you're writing down a list of books to read, feel free to write some of these down too. They're not in any particular order. They're just how I wrote them down. The first one is Mexican Labor and World War II: Briseros in the Pacific Northwest, 1942 to 1947 by Erasmo Gamboa. Uh, this was really uh crucial for my episode on Bruseros. There's not a lot of books that specifically talk about this topic and this time period. Some books talk about the Bruseros on the railroad, but that's not very helpful for what I was talking about with Brusseros helping in bringing in crops. So this book was excellent for that. The next book is The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II by Denise Kiernan. I read this book for my episode on the trailer house, trailer houses in the small space living, because I um I interviewed my friend Jesse for about the um atomic city in Tennessee. And so reading about these women's lives and how they were contributing was was fantastic. It was really fascinating. The next book is Richie Boy's Secrets: How a Force of Immigrants and Refugees Helped Win World War II by Beverly Driver Eddy. Now that I'm thinking about it, I don't know if I ever included this in my podcast episodes, but I put it in here for some reason. I mean, I did do a project. Fort Ritchie is just about 30 minutes from where I live. And so I was working with the museum and um writing or making a project about the buildings that existed in the fort during World War II. And so this book was specifically important. Um, but yeah, that's funny. I put this in the list for my podcast research. Maybe this is the sign I need to do a podcast episode. But I do have my project that you can view, and I'll have a list. I mean, I'll have the link for it uh in my Substack post. Uh, I'm really proud of that project, and I've been planning to give a couple friends of mine a tour of the fort just based on this project. You know, this building was here, and this is what they did there. The fascinating thing about this is that, you know, the museum there has not been around for very long. They are discovering new things about the Reggie Boys all the time. In fact, I was just speaking with the museum director the other day about these new things that they've discovered, and and people are donating things to the museum, and and so there's just new information all the time. It's so exciting. I'm so excited for them over at that museum that there's it's so dynamic. So there's even though we've been studying World War II for 80 years, you know, since the beginning, people have been, you know, studying it, analyzing it. Uh, even now, we're still discovering things, and that's pretty exciting. Uh, there's two other books, and these are kind of related: Dear Dodds Letters from a Conscious Objector in World War II by Art Bryant, and a different kind of war story, A Conscientious Objector in World War II by Edward M. Arnett. The first one is Letters from a Husband Who's a Conscientious Objector to his wife. He was in the military and an unarmed medic. I think he did, wait, I think he did secretarial work too. Maybe it was yeah, anyway, it's been a while since I've read that one. That was very interesting. I really enjoyed that book. The second book, he was, I believe he was a smoke jumper. And this one left an impression on me because I I believe it was in this book that he talks about how, in like these reunions of firefighters, that the conscientious objectors were not acknowledged at all for their service in fighting fires during the war, which is really such a shame. The uh the next book is Michigan POW Camps in World War II by Gregory D. Sumner. I really love this book. I just ate it up. I was so fascinated with Michigan in particular, they had such a diverse um agriculture, and they've got several different types of food plants, and then there's the POW camps. So just all of that combined together made for a very fascinating um read. So I'd really recommend that one. Uh the next one is On the Farm Front: The Women's Land Army in World War II by Stephanie Carpenter. Now, I think it was was this season two or three? Oh, it was so long ago that I read this book. But I I remember at the time how excellent of a book this was. It's really a shame. Like, I actually did read a book this past semester that was well, that was supposed to be about the women's land army, but it was, I don't want to say terrible, but it was okay, it was terrible. It was not not good. And I was really disappointed. And then later I went to my shelf and I saw this book. I'm like, oh, this was the good book that I read. So this is probably the only book that I would recommend on the um about the women's land army in America during World War II. So many of the books, rightly so, focus on the British Women's Land Army because they were kind of the flagship women's land army that other programs were copied from. But but each of their programs are so different. So this one was really important for the American perspective. Another book for my podcast research is called Of Sugar and Snow: A History of Ice Cream Making by Jerry Quinzio. And you're probably wondering, like, what? I don't know, maybe not. But uh I had two episodes about ice cream, and while the whole book is not about wartime ice cream, they do have like sections about it, and that was very helpful in understanding the ice cream situation during World War II. Another one is called Bees in America: How the Honeybee Shaped a Nation by Tammy Horn. This is kind of half on my two-read list because I only for my episode, I didn't have time to read the entire book. Maybe this is the time. It's the the 250th, and this is talking about like beekeeping from the colonial days. So maybe this is the year I need to read it, but uh there has an excellent section about World War II and how honey really and beeswax helped the war effort. And that was one of my favorite episodes that I recorded. So uh yeah, really cool topic. Okay, finally. Uh, this is a book actually that's gonna be useful for some upcoming episodes. But uh it's called What's Cooking, Uncle Sam? The government's effect on the American Diet by Alice D. Camps and it uses records from the National Archives. This is, I guess it's an exhibition book, it would be considered that, but it's more than that. On the very last day of this particular exhibition, my husband was like, You gotta go see this. Uh, and I was like, Okay, let's go. So we went down to DC and um to the National Archives to see this particular exhibit. And oh my gosh, I was in love. Like just all the things that they were talking about, they were showing. It's about, like it says, the government's effect on the American diet. And it includes so many things, and it talks about like school lunches and the depression, food programs, oh, just so many things. And of course, because it's the exhibition booklet, it is very detailed with pictures, which I totally love. So if you can find this one online, I think you can even get it from the National Archives uh website, possibly, I'm not sure. I'll have to check on that, but um, because this is a pretty old exhibit pre-pandemic. So anyway, love that book, and that's gonna be used in an upcoming episode, which I won't say what it is yet because yeah, it's it'll be a surprise. All right, so that is the culmination of my books that I've used for school and my podcast. I hope that um some of these books have been inspiring, and I will have a list of these on my Substack post. Today's cookbook feature is Victory Vitamin Cookbook for Wartime Meals by Florence Legonc Harris. I think I pronounced that correctly. And then as a little subtitle, it says 62 meats, substitutes, extenders, 38 drinks, only five coffee or tea, 66 desserts that save sugar, 101 vegetable recipes, and 400 recipes in all. That's just on the front cover. Now, this book, as the title suggests, uh really puts a huge emphasis on vitamins and nutrition. And I thought this was a good choice for this particular episode because uh we've talked about how the 1930s is when they discovered vitamins and the importance to our health. So in the for So this was published in 1943, and the foreword states a healthier and happier life lies within the reach of every person who will take advantage of the new knowledge which scientists have discovered in the last few years in the field of nutrition. We know now that the difference between radiant and buoyant health on the one hand and poor health on the other hand may be entirely, in many cases, a matter of the diet. Shortages of certain essential food factors, usually vitamins, but sometimes minerals or even proteins, may be the reason. It was known more than 20 years ago that a complete absence of one or more vitamins will lead to serious disease. If vitamin A is missing, the eyes suffer and night blindness may result. Absence of the various members of the vitamin B complex leads to beriberi, pellagra, and other diseases. Scurvy is a result of the absence of vitamin C and rickets occur when vitamin D is missing. However, the important discovery of recent years has been that it is possible to suffer from a shortage of vitamins even though the shortage may not be great enough to cause the clinical symptoms of one of these diseases. This shortage may be just enough to cause generalized feelings of ill health, loss of appetite, fatigue, and lowered mental efficiency. It is against these subclinical manifestations of vitamin, mineral, and protein deficiencies that medical men are warning today. The nutritional experts of the Army and Navy are taking every precaution to see to it that the diet of our armed forces contains adequate amounts of these necessary food factors. Not long ago, the National Conference on Nutrition for Defense was called in Washington by President Roosevelt to discuss problems of nutrition and make recommendations to the nation. The chief recommendation coming from this conference was the warning to all citizens to see that their diet contains sufficient amounts of these essential food factors. Talk of vitamins, proteins, and the like most often sounds technical and dry. But as Dr. Morris Fishbein, the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, has pointed out, there is no reason why healthy food should not be appetizing and enjoyable as well. This is the opinion of Florence Legon-Harris, long known as an expert in the field of home economics, and she has demonstrated the fact in this most admirable book on the subject of food, David Dietz, Scripps Howard Science Editor, Cleveland, Ohio. And then it also has a little note to the reader that the telling them that the first two chapters, like if they'd like to learn more in depth about the whys and wherefores uh about new this nutrition, then they can consult the first two chapters of this book, which is where they focus on them. And then it says, you may, if you want to skip the first 20 pages in this book, start with the adequate food guide, use the recipes, and you will have good food from there on. So this cookbook really is helping the reader to include all the necessary nutrients, and they do so in these recipes. I found that the the chapter headings were really telling about what this cookbook is about. It's uh they're titled Why Food Will Help Win the War. Now you're in the Quartermaster Division and doing KP as well. Wartime Problems on the Home Front. And then recipes. So uh, and then the recipes cover uh beverages, breads, cheese, desserts, eggs, meats, food. Fish, poultry, legumes, salads, soups, vegetables, and then there's timetables for cooking vegetables and then menu hints throughout. And I really like a the look of a lot of these recipes. There's some interesting ones. One that's called Sailor's Duff. Coventry Tartlets. There's just really all just all kinds of interesting, some very classic American dishes. And um there's tamale pie. That seems to be a pretty um popular dish I've seen in multiple wartime cookbooks. One thing I've been wanting to explore more is wartime salads. The variety of salads I've tried has been very delicious and surprising. Uh, and I I don't think we see salads like these today. And I'm not talking about gelatin salads, I'm just talking about like vegetable salads. And so I think this is a sadly unexplored aspect of wartime food because, you know, it's the fruit of the victory garden in a bowl. And they have really delicious homemade salad dressings. Ever since I had to make a French salad dressing from scratch for a wartime recipe, I have never gone back to store-bought. It's just it can't even compare. And it's super easy to make. So the heading of the salad section says, Here's where the American woman goes to town. Too much so, grumbles her husband, but not when she drains her well-washed salad greens, when she uses a well-flavored, almost snappy salad dressing, and when she stops before she has combined in one salad everything in the kitchen, including the sink. Salad should be simple, should be served cold, should be fresh and perky, should look casual and not all dressed up, should omit what we are calling sweetness and light. They are forthright, straight from the garden affairs, lusty enough to satisfy the appetite, good-looking enough to please the artist, rich enough in vitamins and minerals to satisfy the nutritionist. And I have to say that when I read wartime salad recipes, it makes me want to eat them most of the time. And this is saying a lot because while I do enjoy vegetables, putting together salads can kind of feel um just like work, like a lot of work to put it together. Uh but I am always excited to read their different, very fascinating ideas. So for their fruit salads, here are the possibilities: orange grapefruit, Julianne strips of green pepper. Uh, then there's raw cranberries, chopped avocado, grapefruit sections, pitted steamed prunes stuffed with cream cheese and pecans, honeydew and cantaloupe balls, canned or ripe pear strips, blackberries. And then any one of the salad leafy greens may be used as a base. Then there's bananas and pineapple, which are the mainstay of many fruit salads, have been omitted because of scarcity due to shipping difficulties. Salted almonds, which add flavor and crunchy texture, are omitted for the same reason. Pecans and peanuts are still plentiful. Ah, I did not know that. I did not know that almonds were scarce, and so they were using pecans and peanuts as a stand-in. Interesting. Now I was just at a World War II event, and uh a couple that I'm friends with, they have this wonderful victory garden display, and they were serving watermelon balls, and they were these little balls made with a vintage water like melon baller. And I didn't even realize that they came in that size. Today, if you get a melon baller, it's pretty big. Uh, it makes very large uh melon balls, and so I was delighted to see how tiny they were. It's I think that says a lot about portion size, but also how different kitchen tools have changed over time. So when we're reading a recipe that calls for something like melon balls, it it's very illuminating when we use the original tools to make it. It changes the recipe. So I just wanted to throw that out there. Okay, now we're gonna get to the recipe. I made one recipe, although I'd love to make more, I just didn't have time. So but this is for gazpacho salad. Now, gazpacho is, I believe, a cold summer soup and it, you know, made with vegetables. So that's kind of the concept, but it's in salad form. It uses vinegar and water as the salad dressing. There is salad oil, but interestingly, it is mixed with the a hard cooked egg, like a hard-boiled egg, just the yolk, and then mixed into the salad. I don't know. This one has some interesting things. So we've got the quarter cup vinegar, quarter cup water that you mix together, and then you add a clove of garlic, like a crushed clove of garlic. Remove the garlic after one hour. So this is the case of we just want the hint of the flavor in there and not overpowering garlic. I think our tolerance for garlic is much higher today. So I did not remove the garlic, I just kept it in there. In fact, I think I used more than a clove's worth. Then you uh wash and slice cucumbers, two cucumbers, and sprinkle it with a half teaspoon salt, and you mix it together and then let it sit for a half hour. Then you drain it, and then you add the vinegar and water. After that, you slice three tomatoes, the then one mild white onion, one green pepper, one sweet red pepper, and then you you know put it all together. Then you take the two tablespoons of salad oil, which is just a mild oil, like vegetable oil. I used canola oil because that's what I have in my kitchen. But I'm sure you're free to use olive oil if you'd like, or avocado oil, whatever. You add the oil to the mashed egg yolk and you chop the egg white and then you mix it all together with the salad. It's just one hard cooked egg, and then you season it to taste with salt and pepper. And then when you're ready to serve it, you add uh toasted cubes of bread, like croutons, that's made from two slices of bread that you've cubed and toasted. So what I did, I had a little uh French bread baguette, like a mini one. So I cubed that up, tossed it in a little bit of olive oil, and then toasted it in the oven. And it doesn't say to use oil to do that, but I did because I like it. And they were delicious. I didn't even put salt on them, and they were so good. So mixing, I mixed up the salad, let it sit for a while. I think that's important to let this particular salad marinate because it draws out the juices of the vegetables and kind of softens them a tiny, tiny bit, especially the onions. I have to say it was delicious. I ate a nice sized bowl of this salad, and I felt so proud of myself because I had eaten so many vegetables. And but I do have to say that there's a bit too much onion for my taste. It was a maybe a medium-sized white onion. I wish I would have added just half of the onion. It was just too much. I'm not a fan of eating like I mean, I like raw onions, but not like a lot. So that's just my preference. And so the egg, the boiled egg, I was very confused by. I don't know what was the purpose of it because it makes quite a lot of salad. Three tomatoes, a whole onion, two cucumbers, and two peppers. It makes quite a lot, and the one little boiled egg just could not compete with the amount of vegetables. Like, I don't know what the purpose of it was. So I don't know. I don't even think it needs it necessarily. Maybe it's to add a little bit of protein, like a tiny bit of protein. I feel like I could have added the oil with the vinegar and water and just made a regular dressing. So I don't know. I think this was a fantastic salad. I ate the bowl of salad and and then later my husband and I went out on a date night and we had pizza. I was still full from that salad, so I had like one slice of pizza. And so that to me is a great sign. Yeah, so I really enjoyed this and I loved the loved it with the croutons. I would definitely make this again. I'm actually really a fan of pickled onions. I wonder if this would, I would enjoy this more if the onions were pickled as opposed to raw. I would love a lot more of those. So anyway, nice refreshing salad. If you are growing cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, and peppers in your garden, you have got the makings of a great salad. I did not have these growing in my garden, so I did buy them at the store, but it's a just a really great summertime recipe. I will have this recipe on my substack for you to give it a try yourself. For today's home front highlight, I wanted to read one of the stories from Americans Remember the Home Front, an oral narrative of the World War II Years in America by Roy Hoops. This was one of the books that I talked about, and there were many fascinating stories, but I really like this story. I've got uh quite a few passages underlined in in this one, and I think it gives a really good, kind of general look at home front life. So this story is from Hugh Sidey. He was in high school during the war in Greenfield, Iowa, population 2,500. He says, We had a boy in town who was killed at Pearl Harbor. He was on one of those battleships. His mother worked for my mother, so instantly the war was brought home. And I think the mothers understood it, but we kids didn't look that far ahead. When my brother turned 18, he enlisted, ended up in the medical corps, and was over in Europe, in field hospitals that followed the troops. It was kind of exciting. I didn't really understand it, but it began to come home. We had a bunch of fellows that were lost. Red Oak, Iowa, nearby, lost more men than any single town of its size per capita or per unit than any other place in the United States in World War II. Their boys made up a good part of the 34th Division that was hit hard in Tunisia. That was our National Guard division. And then curiously enough, there was a bunch of guys who ended up in that glider infantry and that was brutal. A bunch of them were wiped out in England when they were training. Then they went over to take part in the D-Day invasion using gliders, and a whole bunch were lost over there. From our area there must have been twenty guys who were bunched up there. To understand the effect of the war on us, you've got to remember that we kids all came out of the depression. It was a deprived existence by today's standards. We didn't understand that. Nobody had any money. We had been through miserable times economically. Businesses folded, the drought, soil dried up and blew away, no crops, mortgages foreclosed. There was just a lot of suffering. My family was never cold or hungry, and we had clothes, so we were relatively alright, but we had nothing else. My dad never took a vacation, we never went out of the state, there was no travel at all. This little town was all you had. In many ways, it was a marvelous life. We made kites, we'd buy a nickel orange crate and cut the lumber up and make model planes, hiked, we swam in the old creeks around there. We were totally happy, but there was no money. Out of that, we just went from one kind of restriction to another, gas rationing. I remember we cancelled some football games, and we canceled music contests, and there were no vacations. You stayed right there. Our diet was affected a little, not much, but you had the rationing, meat stamps, shoe stamps, sugar stamps. My dad had a pretty good gas ticket, a bee sticker, because he was a country editor and got to drive around. But in those small towns, you walked or rode your bike. It didn't have that much impact on us. We never went any place anyway, so we didn't feel deprived. Fortunately, we had just gotten a swimming pool from WPA before the war, so we had that in those years, but there wasn't anything else built around the town. There was another benefit, though, in human relationships. In the graduating class of thirty three people, about nineteen had gone all the way through kindergarten and high school, and we were thrown together through the depression and the war so closely that it's a bond that still exists today. When we have a high school reunion, almost all of those who are still alive, about fifteen of them, come back from wherever they are to see each other. Paris, New York, California, they come to that little town. Our activities were in the school. School plays, basketball, football, baseball, walking around the square on Saturday night, church groups. Then there were other things. Aluminum drives, paper drives, about every other month there would be one of those. My father's newspaper business was good. We began to come out of the depression because of the war contracts. So now it became very difficult to get help. He needed linotype operators. He had machines that broke down, presses, that sort of thing. But he was a handy guy and he improvised a bit. He had to work awful hard, and he but he made more money, and one of the reasons he made money was that there wasn't any help to hire. I worked at the paper in the mornings and after football practice. I took pictures of all the draftees leaving, and by this time, when I was in high school, they they were friends, only two to three years older than I. The old trailways bus would come to the hotel, which was right beside my dad's newspaper, to take the draftees into Des Moines, and Dad insisted on a picture of every guy. Almost every day it seemed there would be another ten or fifteen, and they all lined up in their farmers' clothes with their cardboard suitcases. I'd go out there with my speed graphic and shoot a picture of them lined up. I'd see them go off, and a year or so later, in some instances, two years later, suddenly would come news that so and so was lost in a bomber over Britain or killed in the Pacific. So I was very much aware of the war. Then there were the boys coming home. They'd come around to the high school and we thought they were the greatest guys in the world. There was even a flyer of or two who came back and buzzed the high school, and then they'd write about it later. Airplanes were still novelties and everybody would go out to look at these guys flying over. One guy flew over in a B-25. They'd be ferrying these planes and they'd come low, you know, circle a couple of times. It was a marvelous thrill. We did have a little bitterness in our part of the country. They deferred farm boys. A lot went, but some took those agricultural deferments to work on farms. Quite legitimate, but it caused a bitter feeling, no question about it. There was a sense of exhilaration during the war that brought people together. There was no real hardship and there was no fear like people on the West Coast. Nobody was going to get to Iowa. There was no deprivation despite the rationing, so we didn't have enough stamps for meat. My uncle butchered a cow. There was no problem except for those families that lost sons. Even there, there were some people who took that as part of their duty, the lost sons. It was a sense of pride in some way. So I really I I really like this story because it he talks about the depression and how they went from the deprivations of the depression into the war, so it wasn't really much of a change. And just I like also that he mentions a swimming pool that they had, how that experience growing up all the way through the depression, the war years, and you know, graduating, you know, from kindergarten to high school graduation, they were together. And that was such a strong community bond that they'd come back years later. I just really, really love that. Anyway, I there's there's so many more of these stories in here. I after reading this, I would love to read more oral histories because this is where we find the unique tales that you just don't get in like general histories of World War II. So thank you so much for joining me on this episode. And once again, thank you so much for your patience as I navigate school and life with uh the podcast as I can fit it in. I'm not quite as active on Instagram. I post more on Substack. It's just uh easier for me because not only does it post on the site, but it also goes to uh subscribers' inboxes so you can see what I'm up to. And uh one thing I wanted to mention was that on Substack, I've started a World War II film club where every month I will introduce a film and we can chat about it in the comments. Every other month we're gonna alternate between modern films about World War II and older films about World War II. So I'm really looking forward to I love films, and so this was a great, this is a great project for me because I don't really have time for book groups, like reading books every month. Uh, but uh I thought, hey, I can do films. They're short, two hours, and then they're done. So uh I I hope you join me over there. It's victorykitchen podcast.substack.com. Uh thanks again, and I will talk to you soon.