Dart’s letter today matches the brevity of Dot’s most recent one, except his was accompanied by a gift, of sorts. It references the house drawings he was enclosing. How I wish those drawings had survived until now. Maybe they ended up in the big scrapbook Dot was creating about their relationship.

It’s been raining all day where he is, so no boat was sent to the post office to collect the Haggard’s mail. Taps is sounding, so he’ll try to go to bed on time, for a change.

With no letter from Dot today, I thought I’d use this space to fill in what I’ve learned about the O.P.A, whom Dot mentioned in a recent letter as responsible for an inventory that she had to work late to conduct.

Mom couldn’t remember who or what the O.P.A was, but the Internet never forgets! The acronym stands for Organization of Price Administration. It was responsible for setting prices to prevent wartime inflation. It was also the organization that issued ration points, and later, red and blue tokens used to make change for ration cards. No wonder Republicans hated the FDR administration. They would have considered it pretty heavy-handed to take over price controls for whole industries. Still, I wonder if such an effort helped avoid the extreme inflation that often occurs during war years and helped smooth the way for rapid economic growth in postwar years. The biggest question that remains for me is, if it was intended to control inflation during the war, why was it established in August, 1941 – three months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor?

Below you can view a propaganda poster used by the O.P.A.