Clever Magazine, Winter '06 " Butcher's Paper " (www.clevermag.com)

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A Scrap of Butcher’s Paper
~ a World War II Remembrance

by Jared Carter

It was a stiff piece of paper, not much bigger than a match cover, on which the butcher scrawled a number and handed to my older brother.

Sometimes my brother would let me hold it.

It had been cut from the long roll of brown paper suspended over the counter, next to the glass-bottomed scale, where the butcher had just finished weighing our cans of cooking grease. The number told how much we had helped the war effort by bringing in those cans.

It was the summer of 1944. My brother was ten years old. I was five. I had not yet started to school. Our father had joined the Seabees. He was helping to build airstrips for B-29s on the island of Tinian in the South Pacific. He had been gone for two years. At least twice a month my brother and I pulled our red wagon around the neighborhood and collected cans of grease. All the households in town saved cooking grease, tin cans, and newspapers for the war effort. Everyone said the cans were melted down into bullets and armor plate, the newspaper got turned into lifejackets, and the grease was made into oil for aircraft engines.

The older children went on paper drives and scrap drives. Somebody’s uncle would have an old truck, and they would start out at the church, or the school, and drive around picking up bundles of newspaper or pieces of scrap iron, or sometimes boxes of flattened tin cans. They would deliver whatever they collected to the man at the junk yard, and then they would all go back to the church basement for hot chocolate.

Sometimes my brother went on paper drives with his church group, but I was too young, I might fall off the truck. Helping to collect cans of cooking grease was all I was allowed to do. Also, because it was a dirty job, we got paid for it – maybe two cents a pound. Collecting the grease, then, was very important.

People saved it in cans that had originally contained peaches or tomato juice. In the winter the grease didn’t slosh around much, but in the summer it got all over the wagon, and all over our hands and our clothes. But we didn’t care. We were proud to be doing our part.

We would fill up the wagon, and then take turns pulling it all the way to town and up the brick alley next to the lodge hall, to the back door of the A&P supermarket. We knocked until the butcher opened the metal door and let us in.

The butcher was a large, friendly, red-faced man in a checked shirt and a white apron that was streaked and smudged in places. He and his wife were members of our church. He knew who we were and called us by our first names.

He helped us carry in the cans, and while he weighed them, I looked at the cold cases with their frosted windows, the slabs of hanging meat, the freezer with its heavy door and thick metal handles. There were racks of knives and cleavers, and a maple chopping block all cris-crossed with lines, and jagged saws hanging from hooks.

The piece of brown paper the butcher gave us, with the cents figure written in pencil, was irregular, but it was not jagged or torn. It was carefully cut. The butcher kept a large pair of scissors on the counter.

He would make a supply of squares in advance, for paying out small sums.

We would take the scrap of paper to the cashier at the front of the store, and she would count out the coins. On a good day we might make forty or fifty cents. I don’t remember what we did with the money. Ice-cream cones were a nickel back then. So were Cokes and candy bars. We might have bought something along the way as we pulled the empty wagon back home. Most likely we gave the money to our mother.

She wrote to my father and told him how we were helping out, and he sent back a V-mail letter and said we were doing a good job. My brother said that at least a small portion of the grease we collected probably ended up inside the engines of some of those B-29s that were taking off from the island of Tinian.

In later years, I came to doubt that this was so. But when I was five years old, and the butcher handed us the piece of paper with the number, I knew it was true.