Motion Pictures Scrap Drives of WWII...

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Scrap Drives of WWII...

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Three window appears to be a General Motors vehicle. Chevy?

 

Mike and Frank would have a fit!

 

A different time. Interestingly enough, the victory gardens of WWII have come full circle and are now community gardens.

 

If it wasn’t for that we may not have the post war cars we’re used to. And we might be speaking German now.

 

Kind of painful too see, but it'd been much more painful if we'd not pushed back and defeated the Axis!

 

I agree, the loss of those automobiles, childrens toys and many other things we now consider valuable was a small price to pay. and let's not forget the men who paid the ultimate price.

 

Yep, a small price to pay for victory/freedom.
Some great photos in this thread:
https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/scrap-drive.1088272/#post-12334172

 

There is a very early car in town that is missing everything that was brass on the car. All the brass was removed for a scrap drive. I only saw the car once thru a garage window, so I'm not sure of the make. Rumor has it that it was the owners mothers car and not for sale. I can't imagine where you would find all the parts to restore the car.

 

There is a fire engine in Kemmerer, Wyoming that was hidden in a barn to keep it from being donated to a scrap drive. It now resides in a little area in the VFD station.

 

Lady Bird Johnson's - Beautify America did away with a lot of vintage tin as well.

 

not only scrap but also fat,,a can of fat got you into the Saturday movies...one of my great uncles was the collecter of metal and fat that went the smelter.. Friday nite he would give all the kids a can of fat cause they didn't have money....I still have a frying pan that he would,nt let get melted

 

All the more reason to buy American manufacturer cars and trucks and not Japanese names made in the US. The money still gets back to their home.

 

What he ^^^^^^said!.....

 

My old-timer friend and fellow car-builder turned 93 this year. He's been working on old Fords since they were new: started in 1939 for 10 cents an hour(!). He's told me how the scrap drive guys would come around to the shop he worked at and give his boss a hard time for not having enough scrap cars and parts for them. They particularly wanted Model T and Model A frames because of the high-quality steel (vanadium). He said they cared less about the bodies than they did the frames.

 

Fat? You mean like the girls at the bar at closing time?

 

Of scrap drive interest...
https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/need-to-learn-about-barney-pollards-collection.213230/

 

It was said several times, but a that time all these things were just used and unwanted.
The U.S.A. had to build Tanks, Ships, Airplanes, Jeeps and Bullets.
We won the war and I say it was a small price to pay for keeping our freedom.

On a side note my aunt just me gave these.

A recognition for a WWII scrap drive my great grandfather's (Harold Kellerhouse) business Arco Oil (Cities Service distributor) in here Grand Gorge N.Y.



My Grandmother Marian (Kellerhouse) Palmer's Civil Air Defense armband.

 

My house was built in 1939....
When I first moved in there in 1992, I cleaned out the garage a little so I could park my car in there.... One of the items I threw out was a vintage civil defense helmet that looked just like this one....



I kicked myself in the ass for not hanging onto it...

 

This has probably been posted somewhere here before but since it's on-topic...this is a one-of-only-two-built 1933 Judkins bodied Duesenberg on the scrap metal scales. It was purchased by Mr.Frank Yount at the 1933 Chicago Auto Show for his wife Pansy. Yount was a wealthy oil baron and after his sudden death in November of 1933, he left all of his $45 million estate ($866 Million in 2017 dollars) to his wife Pansy who donated the Duesenberg to the local WWII scrap drive. Afterwards, the guys running the drive squirreled the Duesenberg away for themselves but Pansy got word of this and demanded it be scrapped for the war effort.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Franklin_Yount

 

This was all about conservation of Rubber not conservation of Gasoline. These are real gas ration stickers.

 

Here's one from my hometown

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Big classics from the WW1 and twenties era were real prizes. Some of them had a thousand pounds of aluminum and brass in the engine, trans and body plus a couple of thousand pounds of high grade steel. Rolls Royce, Pierce Arrow, Locomobile, smash em up for scrap they aren't worth anything and you can't get gas to run them anyway.

I know a local wrecking yard run by the Elliot brothers managed to keep most of their cars by scouring the countryside for old cook stoves, farm implements, barbed wire etc to keep up their quota of scrap. Not sure what the idea was, perhaps they felt their cars were more valuable for parts which were in short supply then.

Barney Pollard had hundreds of old cars stored in barns around Chicago, he managed to save most of them but had to take them out, take off the tires and turn them in. Even though most of them were so dried out, cracked and mummified they were worthless even for scrap.

 

I see Highlander and Rusty mention my grandfather (Highlander references the thread) Barney Pollard (in Detroit as opposed to Chicago) in regards to the scrap drives. I went into greater depth on my article for the AACA article I wrote on him. When I was a kid in the 50s and 60s we still had a large scrap pile just outside the property. It was a practice going back to the war when my grandfather would salvage tons of steel out of old factories and buildings at his expense to keep the government from taking what was hundreds of collector cars. He had to go to Washington and plead his case to Congress which he did on more than one occasion. In exchange for him substituting scrap that was not easily accessible (like cutting up old craneways in defunct auto factories long closed down) he was able to save most of his cars. The deal he made was one car a week which had to be taken to the Ford Rouge and then the allocated tonnage of steel and aluminum he had to come up with. He cut up his trucks including some of his old Macks he wanted to preserve but he told me there was a lot of iron in those trucks. He knew Henry Ford and they did not get along so my grandfather took only Fords to be melted which only turned out to be a few.

Here are some pictures of him cutting up his trucks. The tires he supplied were never used and he told me recycling of rubber was pretty much theory moreso than reality at that time.

 

The United States and our allies came out on top and that is a small price to pay for stuff,the lives lost we the tragedies.

As far as the toys and the cars they are still out there waiting to be found & uncovered. HRP

 

Well for a little while anyway. Detroit today looks like it was nuked, at one time easily among the world's wealthiest cities. Know what I mean? Really sad what's happened to this country.

 

No need to abuse your self to bad.....if you feel you really need one of them helmets .... I could help you out ..... I have one that I found in a house I was painting years back....the people bought the house in the late 30's I guess ...they where cleaning some stuff out of the basement garage one day that I was there and I noticed it hanging in a cabinet I inquired about it they said they put I there during the war they also had all of the other Civil Defense item's with it ,first aid books, a radiation detector, posters showing pictures of military air craft from the bottoms as if you were looking up at them from the ground so you could identify them , arm bands and other misc. things....they said I could have it all so I loaded it up.... I know of a few of the old logging towns around my area had old steam trains that had been used in the early days of logging on static display in a park and or WWI Cannon's that got turned in for the scrap drive's....

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Guffey you have to remember that a pretty decent amount of collector cars survived. Some were hidden and others were given a certain level of dispensation. James Melton's cars and Henry Austin Clark who collected cars back in the 30s like my grandfather were able to save all of their cars. I also believe old Henry Ford saved more than a couple while he was being forced to melt down the examples my grandfather took to the Rouge plant. I have seen a fair number of original cars dating back to the teens at least. After the war my grandfather continued to find original cars that were squirreled away, some from the original owner's families.

You are fortunate that your prized example was saved as well. If the original owners owned it through the war they very likely had a nice comfy place to keep it. Not too many scrappers coming up the winding drives of the upper crust.