Oral History Interview with Martha F. Hilliard, February 28, 2002 Page: 5

                                
What are some other things?
Mrs. Hilliard
Every tin can - you cut the top and the bottom out - and you smashed them and put the tops inside. We saved our
toothpaste tubes. They were made out of lead and now we just have fits if something has lead base in it. But, our
tooth paste was in lead tubes and we saved those. Even the tin foil off of our chewing gum, when we could get
gum. Chewing gum, chocolate those kind of things went to the service men and we didn't care.
Mr. Misenhimer
Did you work on any scrap metal drives?
Mrs. Hilliard
Oh, yeah. We all picked up scrap metal. We went out to farms and got all the extra scrap metal out there. I
sometimes wish that we would have one of those around here now.
Mr. Misenhimer
And rubber tires?
Mrs. Hilliard
Rubber tires and inner tubes. I also can remember, my feet grew very fast one year. I had had my limit of shoes,
so I had to cut the toes out of my shoes. But, other kids did the same thing.
Mr. Misenhimer
How about gas rationing?
Mrs. Hilliard
Yeah. We didn't have a big car. We had a little Chevrolet Coupe, that was a 1941 - my mother's car. We had
gasoline rationing. We had those little coupon books. The summer of '43, my mother moved into what we called

the teachers' home. La Grange, Georgia, where I did my junior high and high school years ...... Mr. Callaway had
built 7 cotton mills in that town (Troup County). Each little Cotton Mill had a little village with a barber shop,
beauty shop, dime store, grocery store and drug store and then he built a school. The teachers that were not
married lived in our house, plus secretaries and chemists. We had 27 women in it. It was my mother's job to feed
them. We had 3 black people that lived in the back yard - Jimmy Lee and Ruth Wilkinson and Maggie something.

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