01-20-09
A CHRISTMAS VISIT
to
WORLD WAR II
Always need more Christmas pictures from this era, so if you have old photos from this time, they'd certainly be appreciated!
Again - large-scale blowups will not be available for many of these, but are included
if they were to be had.
I have an uncle just 7 years older. more like an older brother, born in 1934. He remembers the Christmases of World War II as the pits for kids on Christmas morning. No trains. No bikes or BB-guns. Nothing electric or made of metal. Only wood or cardboard or things made out of glue and sawdust pressed together. Hard times getting food or gas, - tires and radio tubes near impossible, meat and sugar - almost everything was tightly rationed.
Bleak as times look now, we just have no idea ....
I used to be appalled at finding old light strings like these, all gummed up with tapes, bare wires showing, sockets missing. Most of these are Depression era, worn and patched beyond the danger point and it's obvious that people were actually using stuff like this! "How cheap can some people be?" I thought! But now I think that they were simply trying to keep this junk alive, because you just couldn't get anything to replace it with for The Duration. No Christmas lights were being made by anyone. Noma and the rest were all converted into war production.
So now I wonder - just how many Christmas-tree-fire casualties did the "Japs" and Nazis inadvertently inflict upon our civilian population via this Wartime shortage situation?
A store window, Dec. 1941.
Tell your folks to buy every Christmas light in that window, kid, because you won't be able to get any in '42, - '43, - '44, - '45 ....
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December 1941: The A.C. Gilbert factory in New Haven, CT. Yes, the "Erector" Set Gilbert. who bought out the old Chicago American Flyer train company around 1938 and added electric trains to his other lines. But he did not use their train designs - just the old and venerated name. Up until the month seen here, he made a rather odd line of 3-rail trains in 0-gauge, but in 3/16 scale that are not especially sought by collectors. It's thought by some that this was done to use up stocks of track and accessories that came with the Chicago Flyer purchase. In 1946 he came out with his S-gauge, two-rail line of trains, still best known and favored as "American Flyer." Here a girl assembles a number of the last of the Gilbert Flyer 3-rail, 0-gauge engines. Looks like the model #565.
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February 1942: The A.C. Gilbert Factory - just weeks later. The same girl and another now assemble parachute flare cannisters for the War, using the same electric screwdrivers that had been used in making trains.
1941. Typical of the sort of things kids got in Wartime - mostly wood or paper.
A Woolworth's in 1941. Washington DC. Oh, do I remember those foil covered paper bells! Looks like an awful jangle, a rush to find anything at all for Christmas.
1941 - Same store.
We see no Christmas village houses in these pictures already in 1941.
See also -
| * WW II * |
"I found a million-dollar baby - in a five and ten cent store..."
Macy's Santa in 1942:
This must have been a bitter-sweet job to have in '42, gently lowering those bright-eyed expectations..
This is one of Macy's windows that same December of 1942.
1942 also. Macy's, also. The picture was captioned "The $100 Hobby Horse." Perhaps the last of some things that still had some metal in them. People were desperate to find toys for their kids. One year my Dad tried to make a little extra cash by making wooden machine guns with a clothespin ratchet clapper and marble pin-ball games in the basement. They nearly tore our doors down. War production had employment at 100% and jobs were going begging. Everyone had money; there was nothing to buy with it. Just War Bonds....
Caption: Washington, D.C. A sailor getting some help in wrapping his Christmas gifts at the United Nations service center. (Dec. 1943)
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Rob Schoeberlein sent me these photos taken by an Annapolis photographer name of Adolph Torovsky of his own modest Christmas garden ca. 1942-44. Rob is with the National Archives in Maryland. This is not a huge display, but is very interesting in that it shows that people kept their prewar putz items despite the intense anti-Japanese feeling of the times. Of course many people did. Otherwise we'd not have had the survivals that we now collect from the prewar era.
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I see the small gray castle in my own collection. Actually I have all three houses, and lots of those ubitquitous celluloid reindeer that I still adore.
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| A CHRISTMAS VISIT TO THE 1920s. |
| A CHRISTMAS VISIT TO THE 1930s. |
| CHRISTMAS VISITS to pre 1920 |
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