Picture for Today

Taking Hogs to market.

You can see the corn shocks in the field so it must of been early fall when this picture was taking. Notice the first car doesn't have any lenses in its headlights!

I like these pictures.

No lenses or were they blacked out? I don't have personal experience with it,but it seems to me I remember hearing something about blacking out headlight lenses during the war for some reason?

I think I have that same truck, usually haul hay and firewood though. (do raise a few hogs)

dmiller, that's a nice old truck. I'm glad to see it's still being used.

I'm told that Dad had a rig like the 2nd unit in the first picture - a Model T with a home-made trailer behind it. One day he sent the 2 hired men to the stockyards with a load of hogs that he had counted a couple times when they loaded them.

When the check came from the stockyards, he was short for 1 hog. Stockyards said that their count was right, so Dad figured that one pig got out when the hired men drove around a curve. He drove by the place and saw one pig the same color as his in the pen with a bunch of pigs of a different color.

Dad said that he would take the next load of hogs to market, but the hired men insisted that they would be careful and not lose one this time. When he got the check from the stockyards, the head count was 1 MORE than he had loaded. The hired men wouldn't say anything, but he figured that they went and retrieved that off-colored hog out of the neighbor's pen! Anyway, it came out even in the end and nobody ever said anything more about that.

RR, I believe that was during WWII, when they blacked out the lights in army trucks "over there". I don't remember seeing any like that here in the States, although could have been. Many WWII military trucks and jeeps had small lights installed that resembled turn signals with small slits for light to shine through. I was told that is what convoys used at night (when they could) If there was any danger from enemy being near, they had to pretty much drive blind because even a small light can be seen from quite some distance at night.

It wuz probably late fall as it looks like some heavy frost on the field and the cars had the side curtains on them,

here is a tail light from a pre-ww2 one and half ton trailer

And a dry fall also, the road seems to be quite dry. Possibly cool too, as I notice the side curtains are closed and the vehicles with windows have them closed. (OR, could it be to keep out the hog smell?)------- Nah, they were used to that!

Sure enjoy your old time pictures, keep them coming!

I was thinking I'd heard they did that near the coasts here in the US to keep bombers from locking in in case of a night time air raid that never came.

I believe these vehicles were used during the early days of the Great Depression. Times were tough everywhere, and farmers really got hit hard economically. If you had a broken headlight you let it stay that way; any spare money was for medicine, rent, etc.

People didn't drive much at night anyway, usually just to go visit with the neighbors and you could see well enuf by moonlight.

Those people didn't haul their hogs in crates on the running boards for fun....they could not afford a pickup truck. Notice one trailer looks like an old buggy...you made do with what you had.

Today most of us have little idea what it was like to be so poor and desparate, just trying to make it thru each day. I'm 76 and my dad never got over that experience and used and re-used things all his life. I just hate the way we have to throw things away because of the difficulty of fixing plastic junk.
LA in WI

I was a little boy during WWII. I lived in a small town in Iowa. Word was passed around the town that on a certain night there was going to be a "lights out" drill. There would be a short blast of the fire siren, then my dad was one of the men who went out and walked every street checking to see that everyone had every light turned off. If you had even a small light on, they would knock on the door and tell you to get it turned off. After a certain time lights would come back on...maybe it was another short siren as I don't recall that.

The reason for all this was so the German bombers couldn't see our town from the air on night raids, like the Allies were doing to German cities. I find it slightly amusing because the German Luftwaffe never did have long range bombers that could make it to the East coast (maybe one way), let alone way out to the Midwest. And a little town of 135 people likely didn't have a munitions factory or military field near it.

But people were so patriotic during WWII they would do anything to make themselves feel good helping out in "the war effort".

Besides, war was brought home to that town with news on the radio about someone's son missing in action, meaning most likely that son was never coming home. Then a gold star would appear in that family's house window.

Scary times...even in Iowa.

LA in WI

I enjoy your pics. Keep em comin. Those hogs must have been pretty tame to go up that chute without jumping over the side, though it is a nice looking chute. Jim

That sounds logical. I can't remember everything, I was just a kid then, but what I did hear left a big impression on me.

Yeah, I think that was common practice all over. I know here in NC we had "air raid drills" a siren would sound and all lights would be turned off, or in our case we turned down the lamps and blew them out! We lived in the country, I'm not sure if they had sirens strategically located or not, I know we could hear the ones in town about seven miles away. I guess they had some way to turn off all the stop lights in town too, never thought of that.

We lived on the north coast of Washington state in 1943-44. We drove south every two weeks to our home,all of the drive along the coast was blackout.
My six year old emagination saw many Japanese subs.
Jim

Neat photos, John B.

Loading chute and big truck is how my dad did it.

A pig in crate tied to each side of the car... now that was someone thinking outside the box.

Great pictures! I remember my ad hauling a pig to market on the side of our 28 Chev that way. That would have been in the late 1930's.

Atlantic coast was a major killing ground for sub warfare against Allied shipping. Until coastal blackouts, subs would easily target ships in silhouette. Huge number of ships sunk just offshore.
Note: See wikipedia.org.-search "Torpedo Alley, North Carolina"