In 1883, the French author Guy de Maupassant wrote a short story called “The Piece of String.” The story tells how, by a single, innocent act (picking up a piece of string), a person’s life and reputation could be forever altered.
This is not such a sardonic story. Not too long ago, I was looking for a piece of string to tie up some bundles of cardboard to put in the recycling, and I couldn’t find any in the garage. How could that be?
When I was a kid, there were always several large balls of string in our house. Lots of things we bought came wrapped in brown paper and tied with cotton string — meat and cheese, for example.
If you went to Spiegel’s grocery store in uptown Oconto Falls and bought a pound of hamburger or a chunk of cheddar, the butcher would wrap it in brown kraft paper. (Grandpa called it “butcher paper.”) He’d reach up and grab the loose end of string hanging from a conical spool on the ceiling, cut off a chunk with his meat cleaver, and tie the package with it.
When we got home and unwrapped the parcel, we’d tie the string onto the end of a big ball of string in a basket on the cupboard. We usually had two or three softball-sized balls around the house and a couple in the tool shed. Never knew when you might need a piece of string!
We also had balls of “tinfoil” lying around. We saved the foil wrapping from any commodity that came wrapped in it — chewing gum, candy bars, whatever. During World War II, people were encouraged to save all kinds of stuff. I was really young and didn’t understand why we saved some of it. It wasn’t until I was a lot older that I heard (or read) what tinfoil was used for in World War II.
I read that tinfoil (not the more modern aluminum foil) was used as radar-confusing chaff. The balls of tinfoil we collected and sold to the scrap buyers were shredded, and the little flakes were dropped from aircraft when they entered enemy airspace.
The chaff caused radar-controlled weapons, such as the ones Germany had, to miss their targets and to confuse radar operators as to the number of incoming planes. So we were doing our part for the war effort by saving our tinfoil!
As I said, I was pretty young, but I remember hearing my folks talking about the Victory Program, which was organized during the war to collect materials that could be recycled and used for the war effort. Rubber tires and inner tubes, metal objects and newspaper were some of the most sought-after items.
People collected rags, string and used nylon or silk stockings. Community organizations, clubs, schools and churches often sponsored activities and “drives” to collect the materials.
Old nylon and silk stockings could be made into military parachutes, towropes and gunpowder bags.
The metal collected from scrap metal drives was melted down to make airplanes, ships, guns and weapons. Rubber from tires, inner tubes and shoe soles was recycled to make tires for military vehicles.
I never knew anyone who did this, but I read that women saved their cooking grease and oil and took it to a collection site. There it would be poured into barrels and sent to rendering plants, where it would be made into fuel oil used in the factories that made weapons and supplies for the war.
The Victory Program did more than just help to solve an economic problem for the United States during the 1940s. It joined the nation together with social activities and events that helped to raise the spirits of all Americans during troubled times.
So the modern concept of “reduce, recycle, reuse,” which we hear all the time in reference to our war on pollution and global warming, was a way of life for Americans during WWII. And people usually didn’t have to search high and low for a simple piece of string!
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