Blue stars, small change, and calculating your chances

[villa66]

Connections again…my favorite part of coin collecting.

We found a box of old letters and pictures that had belonged to my Great-grandmother. Belonged to my Great-grandfather too, but he died years before I was born and I wasn’t lucky enough to know him. One of the things rolled up in the box that interested me most came from a later chapter of their lives together….

[villa66]

Similar items must still exist in many other countries, but this little banner—in its various forms—was a fixture of the American 1940s. (Note the 48-star flag of 1912-59, superimposed over the WWII “V” for Victory.) Blue stars, of course, meant sons or daughters in military service. (Our family, fortunately, never needed to convert one of the three blue stars to a gold star, which indicated a death in military service.)

I’ve seen these things a hundred times over the years, but there was something about seeing this particular one, from my own family—carefully preserved and accompanied by the stacks of letters that the boys had sent to their folks those years ago—well, it really struck me.

Part of it was the stamps, and what they cost, and how dear had been those little coins at times in my family’s life. Six cents for an airmail stamp into March, 1944….

[villa66]

Or the three copper cents below for the regular rate throughout, or for airmail after late March, 1944, all eight cents…

[villa66]

My Great-grandmother was a farm-woman about as poor as dirt (as my Grandmother used to describe her mother), and the family lived several miles away from the nearest town. Yet that small farm in the middle of nowhere had been dragged into the wider world for a few years.

Great-grandmother could walk out her front door and turn east, toward one farm chore, and think about her two sons 7,000 kilometers away across the Atlantic in Europe—one of them sometimes 7,500 kilometers away and 20,000 feet high if the 8th Air Force was active that day. And if Great-grandmother walked out that same farmhouse front door and turned west, toward the Pacific, she might think about that third son of hers—10,000 kilometers away off the island of Iwo Jima or Okinawa.

Worrying when or how--or even if--they might get home was a common experience in those years, and not only in America, of course. But among Americans there were two rhyming catchphrases which stood for the competing schools of thought…

[villa66]

“Home Alive in ’45.”

[villa66]

And for the less optimistic, “Golden Gate in ’48.”

[villa66]

I suppose that if the war had lasted until 1948, this second half dollar would still have been a Walking Liberty.

But there are another couple of connections I picked up while coin collecting….

I did an Internet search for “The Golden Gate in ’48,” to make certain I had remembered it correctly. I had, but I also learned something about WWII soldier-speak: the usual answer to the sardonic “Golden Gate in ‘48” was an equally sardonic “Bread-line in ’49.”

[villa66]

The allusion, of course, is to how tough things will be after the war, like perhaps a return to the hard times of the 1930s and the Great Depression. The phrase “Buddy, can you spare a dime?” springs instantly to mind. That (sometimes humorously-needy, sometimes desperately-needy) phrase descends from the Depression-era song—so popular and so timely that it left this permanent trace on the culture—Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

In 1932 when the song became popular the old Barber dime of 1892-1916 was still in wide circulation, but the Mercury dimes of 1916-1945 were the real contemporaries of the song title’s entry into the language.

There were no Mercury dimes coined in 1932 or 1933, appropriately enough—times were so hard that none were needed. But this 1940d dime is a good date for the purpose here; by 1940 the country was fast escaping the Depression, and the phrase “Buddy, can you spare a dime?” had lost much of its bite.