A volunteer's heart: Helping people one stamp at a time

Jul. 2—Melba (Pollock) Franks, of Duncan, said she's kept a little pin, a piece of memorabilia, inside her keepsake box for many years. That pin, Franks said, takes her back to when the now 90-year-old volunteered as a teenager at the ration stamp office.

During the 1940s, many faced a shortage of food supplies, dry goods and other various items — one of the many impacts of WWII. Because of these supply shortages, government-induced rationing took place. One of the methods for purchasing these scarce goods came in the form of ration stamps, which ultimately found their way to the ration stamp office where Franks worked.

Around 13 or 14 at the time, Franks said she lived on the south side of Duncan at the refinery, just north of Comanche, when the DC Corner still existed. Duncan had a bus system then, she said, and she and her lifelong best friend, Jo Arner, took it every Saturday for only a dime so they could work at the ration stamp office, located on Main Street.

"We always rode the bus from the refinery, into Duncan, took our piano lesson and then would work at the rationing board," she said. "Sometimes we got to go to the movie before we rode the city bus back home on Saturdays."

Their work consisted of stuffing envelopes and accurately counting stamps.

"I got this little pin during World War II, when Jo and I would volunteer at the Rationing Board," Franks said of her memorabilia. "We helped count stamps, fold and stuff letters in envelopes. After we worked so many hours, they gave us these pins for volunteering."

According to Franks, those who collected stamps could purchase food at the grocery store, as well as dry goods, in exchange for the stamps.

"When they filled up a book of stamps, you had to turn it in," she said. "Before mama could buy groceries, she had to have a certain stamp to tell her if she could get sugar. You had to have a stamp that was so many points. All the grocery stores had to take them. A lot of the dry goods stores too. It depended on whatever the goods were that people wanted to buy."

Items such as sugar, flour and meat were among those that had ration stamps during this time.

When she came across the pin in her belongings just a while back, it reminded her of today.

"The main thing I thought about is so many things missing from the grocery store shelves," she said. "Now, we didn't have a lot to choose from back during the war, but the basic things like sugar and flour, such as that, we could usually get, but you had to have those ration stamps to get any of it.

"I know my mother used oleo when we couldn't get real butter," Franks said. "Oleo would come — now not every brand, but some brands — would come in a white color and there was a little gold colored flavor in a plastic bag with each pound and you would have to mash up the squares of the oleo and mix it with this color to make it yellow like butter."

At that time, Franks' brother, in the service, worked in Europe where he and fellow enlistees helped to liberate Holland from the Germans.

"He got acquainted with one family there in Holland and he wrote to my mother and said, could we possibly send some sugar and coffee to those people, that they were nearly starved to death," Franks said. "And so mama took our ration stamps, she managed to get sugar and coffee, and he asked for her to send yarn — the lady knitted, she knitted socks for the soldiers and things like that. We could only send a box five pounds at a time but we sent things to them two or three different times. She had to use those ration stamps to get the items we sent."

But kitchen items weren't the only things under ration. Tires and gasoline — which cost $4.59 Thursday, June 30 in Duncan — were also among those needing stamps.

"Back then you couldn't buy tires. If you bought gas, you had to have the stamps to go with it," Franks said. "It was a lot cheaper to ride the bus than buy the gasoline for the car that you had to have ration stamps for. There was a lot of things like that."

Duncan's ration office, she said, served as the hub for Stephens County, where everybody had to report.

"Everybody was in the same condition," Franks said. "Everybody was poor, some were just a little worse than others. But everybody managed, a lot of them had big families and children, but if they were on a farm, the kids worked to help get the crops in. Of course, when the war was going on, the young men were drafted and had to be gone. We just managed."

With inflation and shortages today, Franks is reminded of the struggles people faced during early war times.

"I'm sure that it probably happened back during WWI, too," she said. "My mother and dad were both alive at that time and I've heard my mama talk about the soldiers from Fort Sill being over here on the weekends, different families would take them in their home for a meal maybe."

During her mother's time and her own, they "just learned to manage, to get along with what we had and what we could get by with," she said.

But after piano lessons and work at the office, the day was Franks' for the taking.

"We'd be over there like a half a day and the rest of the day was ours," she said. "We just spent it in town having a good time."

These volunteer days, the experiences of summer fun in Duncan on Saturdays — like getting a coke and hamburger and visiting the movies — and the little pin Franks keeps as a reminder of her service fill Franks with a sense of nostalgia.

"So many years have gone by," she said.

The pin also serves as a reminder of the importance of volunteering.

"Volunteering to help people, you learn patience," Franks said. "It would be good if all teenagers found some little job to work at a while where they had to realize where their money comes from and to respect the people they're working for."

She showed the pin, a little plastic piece reading "War Price and Rationing Board Volunteer."

"It's made out of just plastic, but I was as thrilled over that pin as I would be today if it was gold," she said. "I never had anything given to me like that before. I was thrilled over it, I kept it all these years."