My grandmother had lots of food she had canned from the garden, but she was a hundred miles away in Wilberton.  So we would trade our food coupons to someone in Pryor for a tire coupon (Nobody ever had four good tires at the same time).  Every month or two, we would trade someone for gasoline coupons and go to my grandmother's house for the weekend.  Granddad had a little grocery store where people would come in and trade coupons for whatever they needed.  He would be able to fill up our gas tank because someone had traded him a gas coupon for some other kind of coupon.   Coupons were better than money.  Money couldn't buy a tire.

Tires were different than the ones we have now.  They had two parts.  The outside, and an inner tube.  You had to blow up the inner tube.  And on a one hundred mile trip, the tube blew out at least three or four times.  You never left town without a patch kit and an air pump.  I can still close my eyes and see my dad squatting beside the car with a jack and a patch kit, sweat running down his face, trying to get us to my grandmother's house.  Blowing a tire was a common human experience.

When the tubes were totally ruined, we would cut them up into monstrous rubber bands and granddad would make us guns out of wood and clothes pins and the fun would begin.  The rubber band was stretched as far as it  would go between a notch at the end of the gun and a pin on the handle.  You haven't ever really been stung if you haven't played war with a rubber-gun.

When we would start home, we would load up with canned food from grandmother's garden.  It was a perfect childhood.  But for the adults, the responsibility must have been very hard.  It is only when I look back that I realize how little we all had and how much WWII touched every single life.  But nobody felt poor.  We had enough.

Phillipians 4:19  "But my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus."  How true.  We never had anything, but we never needed anything.  I don't remember anybody complaining.  Everyone felt like they were part of the war effort.  They called the men overseas, "Our boys."