Reply to Dark Family Secret

Forum Index » Family Relationships

Reply to "Dark Family Secret - WWYD?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Sometimes the dark family history is the most interesting. My aunt always said that my great grandparents made their money by selling extra rations of gasoline during WW2 as they owned many gas stations. Grandma denies it fiercely. I think her generation never talked about the bad. [/quote]

Actually, this was not at all a bad thing.  I had family members on both sides of this black market.  One side had a mother in another state dying of cancer.  He regularly bought extra rations so that they could go visit her.  Otherwise, they would not have been able to see her for many years.  (She died right after the war.)  Another side of the family ran a gas station.  My dad pumped the gas, and said that the ration system was set up to account for the fact that there would be spillage and evaporation waste.  If you were very careful (which my dad was), you did not have that waste, and would end up with extra gas that was not on the ration system.  They then sold that extra gas for cash, not rations.  (What were they supposed to do with it?  Throw it in the river?  Drive around town themselves?).  They used to save it for people that they knew really needed the extra gas, either because of difficult family circumstances, or because they were trying to make a living that required a certain amount of gas usage.  
I've always considered it heroic on both sides -- one side scrapping to get a little extra so they could help care for a very sick relative; and the other side being super careful so that they could have a little extra to help out a neighbor (and make a little cash, which, frankly they really needed, coming off the depression).  
This kind of arbitrage was very common under the WWII rationing system, and in any system that has rationing.  My great-uncle had a ton of kids, so used to get a ton of meat rations -- due to efficiencies of scale within his own family, he really didn't need that much meat, but really needed money for other stuff (like shoes for the kids).  He would sell them to his brother, who had only 2 kids and got very few meat rations, but had a pretty decent job.  Both were happy with the situation.
This is a good example where you need to understand history before judging someone.

I'm guessing OP's story is more clear-cut, though.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics