Waste Not Want Not

The time that typifies this saying the most for me is maybe the 1930s and the 1940s.  However, I grew up in the 1950s when gas was cheap in relation to wages and a young man could drop out of high school (if he was strong and willing to do it) and get a job as a carpenter or Garbage man and immediately (for as long as he could do it) support 5 to 7 people the rest of his life until he retired.(if he ever retired).

But, with 25% unemployment during the 1930s until World War II "Waste not want not" became the byword of the U.S. for most people. Almost nothing usable was thrown away. You tended to look at everything as to what you could do with it next. If it was metal of any kind you usually didn't throw it away because you might remake it into something else. If it was cardboard like a box of cereal you might cut it up to use it to write notes on or to let kids draw pictures on to become better artists. You might even take charcoal out of the fireplace to let kids to charcoal drawings or writings with. Almost nothing was thrown away. Also, during the 1930s but also all the way back to when the U.S. was first founded often people made their own custom made clothes either by reworking older fabrics into new clothes or by making their own clothes from scratch and even weaving the fabrics themselves. But, after milling devices became automated in the 1800s it often became cheaper to just buy fabric and then to design or create your own clothes. Until the 1950s much of the women's time for those who raised children or stayed home to keep house and take care of their husbands was used to make wonderful dinners (No TV dinners until TVs became big in the 1950s and after). What we call "Frozen foods" today started out as frozen peas and frozen corn likely in the 1930s and 1940s. My first wife's grandparents started  a large well known Frozen Foods company for example.

During World War II people started growing "Victory Gardens" in their front or back yards to feed themselves and their neighbors to cut down the cost of transporting food and buying food. This is one of the many reasons why the U.S. won World War II was by being very creative and innovative.

My father and his brother who worked wiring up Liberty Ships during World War II in Seattle, Washington decided they wanted to drive over to Yellowstone to see it on a vacation. However, gas during World war II was rationed for everyone. So, you could only buy enough gas to get to work and back or for farmers they could get enough to get their food to market and stuff like that.

So, being very innovative my father and his two brothers decided to convert a large touring car to fuel oil which wasn't rationed. So, they converted a large older touring car so they and their wives and friends could take a trip to Yellowstone and back from Seattle. They built a platform and attached it to the back end of their old 1930 Duesenberg Car and drove to Yellowstone in it around 1943. They put two  50 gallon drums of fuel oil on the back platform and Dad said it ran fine except it sent out 20 foot diameter rings of blue smoke out of the exhaust. However, Catalytic converters and smog devices weren't invented until the 1970s or 1980s. So, exhaust was pretty bad on all cars and they were burning leaded gas until around 1970.

 Later in the 1960s and 1970s people started living in their cars sometimes during or after college to save money because gas was still cheap relative to wages until 1973 during the Arab Oil Embargo when it went suddenly from about 17 cents a gallon to 85 cents a gallon overnight which upset everyone terribly. This caused recession after recession starting in the mid 1970s and started to drive unemployment up from around 3% average to 5 to 7% unemployment eventually. And coupled with this the Viet Nam War sort of bankrupted the country too except the world needed the U.S. and so the rest of the world loaned the U.S. money then to make it forward after the Viet Nam War which was surprising to me during the 1980s.

Young people realizing that motels cost a lot of money even then sometimes took out the right front seat of their cars and built a little bed stretching from under the dash board to the back seat or even into the trunk of their cars to save money while traveling to visit girlfriends or other friends or relatives especially when in college back then.

This slowly morphed into people buying stationwagons and vans (especially VW vans) to save money on staying places. This was very common until 1973 when gas went up from 17 cents a gallon for regular to 85 cents a gallon or so overnight. Then a lot more thought had to be given to traveling by young people then.

For example, my friend and I could drive round trip from Los Angeles to Mt. Shasta and back for under 10 dollars which is really amazing looking at it from this point now. He had a 1959 oval window VW Bug. Today you might make it only 60 or 80 miles now even if your car got 30 miles per gallon. However, going to Mt. Shasta and back from Los Angeles from where he lived in Palos Verdes we could buy gas at a cheap station for 17cents a gallon and drive 1200 miles round trip for around 10 dollars then. And when we arrived then we would camp out and climb the mountain and often stay in the vicinity of Panther Meadows or Castle Lake. For two guys in college this was a dream for mountain climbers. We made a lot of friends doing this because often we might pick up hitchhikers back then as it was much safer to do that at that time than now around 1969 and 1970.

So, being frugal sometimes you can still live really good and happy lives. You just have to get your priorities straight.