His wife (my mom’s sister) had passed a few years before.

My cousin starting looking through the shoe boxes in the closets. Every receipt for 50 years was in these. In order by date too. He even had his family’s ration book from during WWII.

and I remember my paternal grandmother telling me about managing the business of the family, the farm etc. during those times.

while clearing out closets and drawers, I found boxes of old check registers from their joint accounts. My favorite part of the task was finding validation for a story my Aunt had loved to tell.

Many of the memos on the registers had "N. Y. D. B." According to my Aunt, when my Dad asked what the check was for, my Mom would answer "None of your d**n business."

Guess it worked for them. Never heard them fight about money.

My father was in the Navy (Pacific - Iwo Jima) and I remember my mom taking us on the bus to Newark, N,J. to the O.P.A. (Office of Price Administration.) to get an increase in stamps.

my grandmother explaining to me about having to figure out needs ahead of time versus what you thought you could get in increases etc.

I’d never heard of that before.

stabilization. - similar to what was tried during the Ford administration. It was probably part of the Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.) One of the first tasks was to categorize jobs. A barber that used to cut my hair was part of a group of barbers that went to Washington to explain their profession..... seriously..... The classification they came up with was, "artisan."

Artisans were not allowed to charge more than .25 for a haircut and so forth. Mr. Masi was in his 90s when he was still working one day a week. - 1960's. His claim to fame was that he had cut Buffalo Bill Cody's hair when Bill's Wild West show was in Newark (NJ).

He would cut a patron's hair and then step back. Approach again and take one or two more snips of the scissors. This would be followed by his exclaiming, "Trifling makes perfection and perfection is no trifle."

Mr. Masi came from Italy and was a tailor. Unfortunately, Italian tailors were not employable. At that time, there were large numbers of Italian immigrants and this caused the usual fear and hostility like we are seeing with Latino immigrants today. A friend told him, since he knew how to use scissors, just become a barber. At the turn of the last century, there was no licensing requirement to be a barber.

I'm glad I read it.
I have a similar future in-laws story, but I won't derail your thread.

nights at a gas station (Enco) while in school.

Gas was 19cents a gallon and that was with steak knives and triple Green Stamps (remember those).

Oh, and I pumped the gas (first typo was pimped) washed all the windows and headlights, checked the oil, water and battery levels and adjusted the tire pressure.

Strange days.

Edit to say: The war was Vietnam

of green stamp books all filled up and giant rubber bands around the stacks of them. Cigarette coupons also. Best friend in high school worked at a full service. No store like today. Just a soda machine and a couple of choices of candy bars. The whole inside of the place was maybe 7 foot by 25 foot and part of that 25 was for bathrooms at each end that you entered from the outside with a key. The "office" was more like a broom closet.

One gas island with two pumps. They sold recycled motor oil too. That station was one of the small chains and they gave away water glasses.

But my wife's family definitely knew what it meant to start anew from nothing. Everything they had except the four walls of the house they lived in was gone, including the ability to feed themselves. Her mom's family was on the verge of starving, but her dad's family were farmers, and they were able to grow some food and help the family of his new girlfriend (later his wife) survive. He couldn't help much, since he had a leg blown off by an artillery shell at age 18 in the war, but his family could, and he took some courses and went to work for a local bank helping out recovering farmers with loans. Their gratitude was shown at his funeral when four hundred locals came to pay their respects, and show their gratitude for his help when it really counted. My wife's mom found his honest nature more important than his being minus a leg--luckily for me!!

My family, by then all concentrated in the New York area, never experienced that kind of desperation during the war or after it, although my mom's dad was at rock bottom during the Great Depression, earning nickels and dimes by accompanying other people's children to school along with his own daughters. He never lost his wit, which got him a job with a Madison Avenue advertising agency, but that was much later in life. He was the who paraphrased LBJ, wanting to start a "War on Puberty to combat the Copulation Explosion."