Dan Bruce (1960)
Tom, apparently there were lots of used uniforms and blankets returned for repair or to be thrown away, even as early as 1944. As I mentioned, my mother got quite a few to repair and those beyond repair were used for various purposes. During the war, toys for Christmas were in short supply, so she took cotton from an old mattress and made me a whole menagerie of stuffed animals (some olive green, some white, some khaki, plus a cloth ark in which to store them). A neighbor who was a buyer from Rich's Department Store saw the collection and asked Mom to make them for the store. There were probably hundreds of Atlanta kids who found one under their tree on Christmas morning back then, and no doubt none of them realized that their toy had possibly seen combat in Europe or the Pacific. I like to think that one of Mom's stuffed animals is in an attic, today some old man's cherished memory from a childhood lived in perilous times long ago.
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