Remember When: Post-war 1946 included sales and offers from local businesses

The war is over and canned food is back

With remarkably few exceptions almost everything we ate when this Kroger ad ran in the Feb. 7, 1946 Lancaster Eagle-Gazette came in a glass jar or a tin can. The waste of material was phenomenal: there was always a distinctive clatter when you emptied the trash, and city dumps were mounds of jars and cans. But no more: frozen foods went on the market in the 1950s, plastic containers came to dominate our trash, and canned goods occupy just one aisle of our local Kroger store.

Hurry in and wait

This Firestone ad from the Feb. 6, 1946 Lancaster Eagle-Gazette is fairly self-explanatory, and it’s quite representative of that first post-war year. Come in and get your new tires, they say. Only we don’t have tires yet, so we’ll re-cap your old ones, and then you can wait.  It was quite a decent deal, but likely rather frustrating after years of war. I have a 1946 Sears Spring catalog almost completely composed of promises like this one.

Nylons at the Palace

I don’t know which feature was showing when this offer from the Palace Theater ran in the Feb. 7, 1946 Lancaster Eagle-Gazette, and it’s quite possible that some of the ladies who attended that evening didn’t either. For while nylon was developed by DuPont in the late 1930s, it was rationed unto unobtainabilty during the war years (it made great parachutes and ropes) so hosiery continued exclusively in delicate silk or unexciting rayon until the late 1940s. 

Wartime whiskey rationing continues

This little notice, which ran on the front page of the Feb. 7, 1946 Lancaster Eagle-Gazette, deserves a place in the Remember When Hall of Mystery. Whiskey production stopped during World War II, and existing stocks were carefully rationed. And while Old Grand-Dad returned to store shelves after hostilities ceased, he continued to languish under the strict supervision of Ohio’s liquor control board, apparently due to an unexplained reduction of alcohol stocks. Even so, a bottle of whiskey every two weeks would seem to be pretty adequate.