PEA RIDGE — The flowery handwriting is still legible on the yellowed coupon book. Various colored stamps remain inside.
The booklet, entitled War Ration Book Two, United States of America, Office of Price Administration, is a reminder of the hard times American citizens endured during the second World War.
Billy Ray Jones was just 1. The ration stamps entitled his parents to purchase a certain number of items for him. His parents, William L. ‘Casey’ Jones and Eva Madge Jones, also had coupon books in their names.
Recently, while cleaning out a box of his mother’s belongings, Billy Ray found a stack of the World War II coupon ration books.
Jones, 69, found it interesting that many stamps were still in the books.
“I guess they didn’t have the money,” Jones said, as to why all the coupons weren’t used. On the back of one book was printed: Never buy rationed goods without ration stamps. Never pay more than the legal price. And, “When you have used your ration, salvage the TIN CANS and WASTE FATS. They are needed to make munitions for our fighting men. Cooperate with your local Salvage Committee.”
Inside the yellowed booklets are the stamps - blue stamps with a symbol for wheat, green stamps with the flame in the hand of the Statue of Liberty, red stamps with a cornucopia and black stamps marked spare.
Jones, who now lives next door to the house in which he grew up, recalls the early years growing up northeast of Pea Ridge
“I was born in 1941. I was a twin, but my twin brother died at 17 hours,” he said. He had no other siblings.
Jones said his mother had negative-type blood and that was the cause of his brother’s (Bobby Fay) death. The twins were born at home in April. By December, the family moved to the land where he now lives. The family lived on land that is now part of the Pea Ridge National Military Park before moving to the land on Gann Ridge Road.
“My father had gone to town for something. He bought me a high chair,” Jones said, recalling the story he’d heard fromhis parents. “He had a quarter in his pocket and went into the real estate office. He heard about a piece of land for sale, but the owner wanted $800 for it and $200 down.
“We couldn’t come up with the $200,” Jones said, adding that his mother came up with the idea to pay $100 down and raise the overall price. “The realtor called the owner and they agreed. Mydad raised hogs and made the payments.”
Now, he lives about a mile northeast of Twelve Corners Church - a church for which his maternal great-great-grandparents donated land for the church, cemetery and school, he said.
When Jones was 17, his father died.
Jones graduated from Pea Ridge High School on a Friday in 1959, put in an application for work the following Monday and began work at Wendt-Sonis (now Kennametal) in Rogers thefollowing Wednesday.
“They said if I’d had a phone, I could have gone to work on Tuesday,” he said, recalling that he was notified by postcard that he was hired. “That was about the only plant around here.”
Jones said his mother never did drive, but she worked for the Pea Ridge schools for 18 years.
“She went to work in 1958. I was driving then, I’d bring her to work and pick her up,” he said. “I brought her to work every morning.”
Jones recalled his first car was a 1946 Ford coupe - a one-seater.
He took his driving test in a 1949 pickup truck of his father’s. He still owns that truck and has since remodeled it.
“We gave $1,900 for it.
I’ve still got it. I still drive it,” Jones said of the ’49 truck.
“My father worked forthe WPA (the government works program). My mother didn’t go to work until I was 14 years old.
She always did the house work,” he said.
Jones said the first year he attended school in Pea Ridge, the children rode to school in an “open air pickup truck - Luther Martin’s truck. We didn’t have buses. They put steps on the back to get in. They got a bus before the year was out,” he said. “Back then, parents didn’t take the kids to school.
“I had Faye Price the first year and Mrs. Foreman the second year,” he said, adding that children took their own lunch to school.
Now retired, Jones says life is different for children today than it was for them in the 1940s.
“We had one pair of shoes a year,” he said, but added: “We always had something to eat.”
News, Pages 1 on 01/19/2011