Article by Orville Wright
Salida history – May 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
NOW THAT THE Liberation of Iraq is underway, the United States once again finds itself engaged in armed conflict. Personal reflections about another conflict that turned life upside down almost 60 years ago seem to be in order.
Kids in my age bracket were about six years old during World War Two. Looking back on it, I realize how much sacrifice must have been involved to keep the horror of war out of our young lives. For that, I offer much-belated thanks to everyone who made it possible.
Thanks to modern technology, children in today’s world may not have that same protective layer. Even though what we see is sanitized to a certain extent, the reality of war is as close as the television with real-time reports direct from the battlefield. How will they react? Will it affect them in the long term? Time will tell.
Some of what follows might be humorous to read, but when it was happening, things were deadly serious for everybody involved.
World War Two ended in 1945. At some point before that, I had started to take notice of and remember things that were happening in Salida as well as on the world scene, and other children undoubtedly were doing the same. Our parents and other adults must have thought we were too young to understand adult talk, so a variety of interesting subjects were often discussed in our presence.
Mostly, things the old folks were talking about went right over my head. (Not only was I pretty short back then, but I simply didn’t understand some of the things they discussed.) I didn’t understand what a Black Market was, although people talked about one quite a bit. Upon hearing something about getting horsemeat at the grocery store, there also was confusion. We ate meat for supper once in a while, but I thought it came from cows or pigs. A Profiteer was also a mystery.
Once in a while though, certain things made sense. The term Rationing made sense because my folks and lots of other people always talked about it. It meant you had to give the person at the store some little stamps when you bought things. If you didn’t have the right kind of stamp, you couldn’t buy certain things. We also had to go to a certain place in town every so often and stand in line to get our new Ration Books. Everybody had one — even little kids and babies. While waiting in line, I sometimes heard grownups talk about how they could go to another place in town and buy Ration Stamps that other people didn’t use. I didn’t understand that part of it, because the ones we got didn’t cost anything.
Being quite young, my perception of tact and behavior were still in their formative stages. Like most youngsters, my audio volume was usually set on high, and in retrospect, I realize that I caused misery for my parents on more than one occasion. I remember one incident quite well:
MY FOLKS ALWAYS TRADED at the same grocery market. It was just a tiny place, but the man let people charge their groceries as long as he got paid back regularly. One Saturday shortly after I heard my folks talking about the horsemeat, I went to town with my father when he paid the grocery bill. For some reason, that day was the first time I noticed the store front was trimmed with black paint.
Going to that grocery store when my folks paid the bill was a treat. The grocer always gave me a dill pickle from the big jar sitting on the counter and I got to pick the one I wanted. Usually the pickle I chose was at the bottom of the jar, and the grocer would reach waaay down into the jar with his bare hand and get it. The store also sold homemade sauerkraut. The man got sauerkraut out of the crock with his bare hand, too. But, I digress….
There were colored drawings of a cow and a pig hanging on the wall above the meat counter. Around the edges of the poster were little pictures of the various cuts of meat with arrows pointing to different parts of each animal. I asked why the store didn’t have a picture of a horse on the wall too, since they sold horsemeat. I followed up with a statement related to the color of paint on the front of the store and asked whether or not this grocery was the Black Market Mr. So-And-So was talking about. Hindsight being 20-20 , that was probably why I didn’t get any more pickles at that grocery store.
For children in my age bracket, those challenging years were all we knew. It was perfectly natural to put cardboard in your shoe when the sole had a hole in it; you just had to remember not to walk through puddles or your feet would get wet. Getting hand-me-down clothes and shoes from family or neighbors who had older kids wasn’t anything to be ashamed about. So what if you had to roll up your pant legs and stuff paper into the ends of your shoes to make them fit — they were new to you. That was how things were done, then. Friends took care of each other without making anyone feel indebted.
SEVERAL YEARS LATER, OLDER and better able to understand what was going on, I finally learned the terms Profiteer and Black Market applied to the people who used to sell unused Ration Stamps and other things that were in short supply. They used the war to make a lot of money. That was why other folks in town didn’t like them very much.
The jury is still out on horsemeat. That subject faded away soon after the war. The trim on the front of the little grocery store was still black when I left for the service in 1957. If we did eat horsemeat, it was probably more healthful than some of the stuff we get now.
The last time we were in Salida was in 1998 for my wife’s 40th high school class reunion. For some reason, the lack of something caught my attention — almost like the sound of silence, if you know what I mean.
Most of the south wall of the building that once housed Alexanders Drug Store used to display the names of the men and women from Salida and Chaffee County who served in the Second World War. Several of the names had a Gold Star alongside. The city and the various veterans organizations used to keep it maintained. For some reason at some point in time, somebody chose to cover it up. Shame on you, whoever you are (were)!! That was as much a memorial to our veterans as the monuments at Fairview Cemetery are.
Hopefully, the memorials established to honor the veterans of the Middle East conflicts will be treated more decently in the years to come.
Orville Wright grew up in Salida, went on to retire from the Colorado State Patrol, and now lives in Broomfield.