Vacation Days

All over the U.S., families are asking the annual question: "Where do we go this summer?" War has made the vacation problem a great riddle, with no easy answers. The New Rich have plenty of vacation money; the New Poor still have some vacation money left. The problem is where and how to go, under wartime living conditions.

A Habit to Break. U.S. citizens annually travel one and a half billion air miles, 15 billion intercity-bus miles, 25 billion rail miles, 240 billion motor miles --and the habit is hard to break, war or no war. With more money in pocket than ever before, people were crowding the public carriers, had increased traffic 50% in the first six months of the war.

How to Get Around? Gas rationing was on in 17 Eastern States; was on the way for the whole country. Last week air service to 25 cities was eliminated completely. Stopped are all sight-seeing rubberneck tours. Effective June 15 are new war measures for U.S. railroads: a stripping-down of luxury services--Pullmans, parlor, observation, club or lounge cars.

The goal: one seat to a passenger.

In brief, vacationers can travel if they can get accommodations.

Where to Go? Vacationers will find little to do on either coast. The troubled shore waters of the Atlantic are often coated with oil. Bodies wash ashore on beaches often enough to shock swimmers.

Some Pacific Coast beaches are strung with barbed wire, studded with anti-aircraft batteries, coast artillery, searchlight crews. On neither coast are lights allowed in beach houses or on cars driving toward the oceans.

Few Westerners are so unpatriotic as to waste rubber and gas motoring to Yellowstone to feed the bears. Western dude ranches and Eastern roadside inns are whistling in the dark. The long stays, the long trips--to Mexico and Canada, for instance--take more time than most U.S. people have in 1942. Many of the 1,095,000 schoolteachers who did much of the nation's summer traveling have been asked to stay at home and take courses in civilian defense. U.S. businessmen are either too busy or too broke.

Most early vacationers are rediscovering close-at-home possibilities. Seattle fishermen who went to vaunted hidden streams in the Grand Coulee country are finding good fish in nearby streams. Ohio and Mississippi river dwellers have returned to the old steamboat cruises. Many a resort would be a quiet place this year, would perhaps return to the more languid pre-gasoline pleasures of other times.

Fun at Home. But many a U.S. family, for the first time in years, will stay home this summer. Long-suffering U.S. mothers --who annually coped with the packing and unpacking as the family moved to shore or mountain, who cooked over campfires, swatted mosquitoes in screenless cabins, pitched tents or staked down trailers--have a new set of problems this year. How to amuse the family in its own back yard? Families are underfoot again as they have not been since the Model T disrupted American home life.

All over the country people are working and playing more with their neighbors.

Civilian-defense activities lead to joint Victory gardens, to backyard barbecues.

Golfers are setting up croquet wickets on their lawns, pitching horseshoes, setting up archery targets, swinging in oldfashioned, knitted tree hammocks.

Men are setting up carpenter shops in basements. Their servantless wives, learning to feed their families, have pushed sales of Fannie Farmer's Cook Book, the kitchen bible, beyond any previous year. In U.S. parlors families are again mulling over chess, cribbage, dominoes and anagrams. The nation is borrowing 15% more books from lending libraries.

It looked as if the war might re-establish home life in the U.S.

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